Cooperation and competition in tango : transnationalization of higher education and the emergence of regulatory regionalism in Asia

Confronted with a growing pressure for internationalization, together with the strong urge for enhancing the global status in the highly competitive knowledge-based economy, many Asian governments have adopted different strategies to make their higher education (HE) more competitive through the quest for becoming a regional education hub and the transnationalization of HE in order to assert their regional/global influences. Unquestionably, the rise of transnational higher education (TNHE) and the quest for regional education hub status among Asian countries has suggested more competition. However, we have also observed more regional cooperation emerging through various kinds of bilateral and multilateral collaborations among Asian states with attempts to strengthen the regional influences in coping with the growing challenges from their counterparts in Europe and North America. One of the major trends of changing university governance is the emergence of regulatory regionalism, which is reflected by the striking features of recent developments in regional governance that transcend territorial spaces of nation states. This chapter sets out against this policy context to examine major policies introduced and strategies employed by governments in selected Asian societies – Singapore and Malaysia – in expanding TNHE programs and actively involving regional collaborations. More specifically, this chapter also reviews major developments of deepening regional cooperation among Asian countries/societies to assert their regional influences in the globalizing world

Transnational higher education : a stock take of current activity

Transnational higher education (TNHE) development is not an entirely new international activity in the education services sector. The nature and scale of the global expansion of contemporary TNHE developments are, however, changing substantially. An understanding of this growth is currently largely lacking because of a dearth of comprehensive statistics. The scale of the latter TNHE developments has been particularly hard to identify and has until now been largely based on guesstimates. This article is an attempt at filling this gap. Through a triangulation methodology of available secondary data, this article is a very first attempt at providing a stock take of the current level of activity in TNHE worldwide.<br /

Managing Offshore Branch Campuses

The aim of this article is to develop a framework that encapsulates the key managerial complexities of running offshore branch campuses. In the transnational higher education (TNHE) literature, several managerial ramifications and impediments have been addressed by scholars and practitioners. However, the strands of the literature are highly scattered and not addressing the issues coherently and consistently. Therefore, in the first section of this article, we review the literature and highlight this fragmentation. In the second section, we borrow and explore a paradigm from the strategic management literature, known as the dichotomy of global integration (I) versus local responsiveness (R). This paradigm leads us to construct a multidimensional framework that proposes a perceptive insight into the field by reframing, reconceptualizing, and synthesizing the managerial complexities from a strategic perspective. It also highlights the hazards of taking polarized strategic stances (global integration or local responsiveness); the analysis suggests a "both-and" approach. We argue that the framework could be used as an analytical tool for TNHE institutions to reflect on their positions and potential change strategies