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With strong intention to enhance the global competitiveness of their higher education systems, the governments of Singapore and Malaysia have made attempts to develop their societies into regional hubs of education; hence transnational education has become increasingly popular in these societies. In order to attract more students from overseas to study in their countries (or create more educational opportunities for their citizens), these governments have invited foreign universities to set up their campuses to provide more higher education programs. In the last decade, the proliferation of higher education providers and the transnationalization of education have raised the concerns regarding the search for new governance and regulatory frameworks in governing the rapidly expanding transnational education organizations in these Asian societies. Higher education governance has become more complex in Singapore and Malaysia amid the quest for being regional hubs of education as nation states have to deal with multinational corporations when they are becoming increasingly active in running transnational education programs. This article sets out against this context of growing trend of transnationalization in education to compare and contrast the models and approaches that Singapore and Malaysia have adopted to govern and manage the diversity of players in offering transnational education programs.

Using the case of education, we consider how global cultural and economic forces affect national education spending policies. Our analysis includes both an historical analysis of the construction and transformation of ideas about education at the global level and a statistical assessment of the implementation of conflicting approaches to state education funding within countries. In the historical analysis, we show how the idea of free education, although institutionalized in international law, was subject to powerful challenges from international financial institutions, which advocated user fees for public services, including education. Ultimately, the principle of free education prevailed despite the financial clout behind the opposing view. Using data from poor- and middle-income countries from 1983 to 2004, we also show that the presence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) advocating child rights was linked to an increase in the levels of state funding for education. This suggests that embeddedness in global discourses, as evidenced by country-specific linkages to INGOs, is critical in making governments more accountable for supporting institutionalized ideas concerning education.

"Linking key policy themes of interest in the published literature on development studies and comparative education, the article initially explores the potential benefits and risks of partnering transnationally for contextually informed research and sustainable development from the perspective of Southern and Northern higher education institutions. Higher education partnerships recently supported by the development-assistance agencies of Canada and the United States are compared and critically assessed according to the internationally relevant themes of external and internal funding, the involvement of additional partners and funders, and project duration. Comparative analysis of datasets compiled from AUCC- and HED-managed sources that encompass 74 CIDA-supported and 186 USAID-supported university partnerships active during 2007-2009 shows that CIDA awards tend to be substantially larger in amount and longer in duration than most USAID awards and that participating universities have contributed impressive cost-share resources. The concluding section draws out wider implications of study findings for North-South higher education partnerships with sustainable-development objectives and for the literature on the possibilities and limitations they embody."

If managerialism points to the ideological foundations and bureaucratisation of contemporary education, marketisation signals its commodification, image and exchange. This paper brings to bear the prevailing influence of marketisation on education. It begins with a brief description of the European context and development of learning outcomes, and outlines the (economic) rationale for their existence. It then sets out to explore the logic of learning outcomes, asking: what is lost in the process of education being exchanged as a commodity? We argue that marketisation, through its constituent concepts of commodification, image and exchange, seduces as an education 'spectacle' and ultimately shapes individuals' value positions. In essence, marketisation, grounded in contemporary neoliberal economics, privileges quantitative, at the expense of genuinely qualitative, educational substance. Further, we argue that learning outcomes are a simulacrum: like other signifiers of commodities, they appear meaningful (although they do exhibit meaning) but are ultimately incapable of delivering what they promise: transferable skills, at most, but not education. Ethical consequences are stark and signal the loss of the intrinsic value of education - a loss that begins with its own commodification.

"Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and cost-effectiveness of education in low-income contexts. This article explores the emergence of ePPP as a 'programmatic idea' and, in particular, the semiotic strategies by means of which this idea has been located in the global education agenda and promoted internationally among practice communities by a network of policy entrepreneurs. The analysis is supported by extensive fieldwork and by a new approach to the analysis of the framing and mobilization of new policy ideas, which incorporates literature on agenda setting, policy entrepreneurs, and policy frame analysis. The approach reveals the complex way in which policy ideas, political actors, institutions, and material factors interact to strategically put forward new policy alternatives in developing contexts."

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.

"In this article I seek to reconsider the social and economic purposes of higher education. It begins with the premise that there appears to be a general trend towards governments positioning higher education primarily in terms of the economic role that it can fulfil. Such a trend, however, has attracted considerable criticism. In this article I argue that the problem for higher education is not it having an economic role, but the narrowness of the way in which that role is often conceptualised. Drawing on critical theory I explore the interrelation of economic and social factors within higher education and the wider society in which it is situated. This article argues for a redefinition of the purposes of higher education to ensure that both universities and workplaces are sites of human creativity and that the profound and exciting work within institutions of higher education benefits all members of society."

The race to establish regional education hubs is a recent development in cross-border higher education. This article briefly examines the rationales and strategies used by three countries in the Middle East and three in South East Asia which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs. The different approaches and purposes among the six countries highlight the need for a typology of education hubs. Three types are proposed: the student hub, the training and skilled workforce hub, and the knowledge/innovation hub. The final section of the paper takes a closer look at Malaysia's cross-border education initiatives and its actions to establish itself as a competitive education hub in a region where Singapore and Hong Kong have similar intentions. Whether Malaysia has the ability to make a quantum leap from being a student hub to becoming a knowledge/innovation hub remains to be seen and appears to be an optimistic outlook.

"The purpose of this paper is to explore the dominant positions in the debates on globalization in American social studies education. Specifically, the paper illustrates that, first, globalization is conceived of as more of an unprecedented new age and less of a historical development. Second, it is conceived of as more of a natural process and less as an ideological project. All in all, this paper argues that globalization should be approached as a historic and discursive condition in the field of social studies education. To do so, educators should include more skeptical perspectives and critical voices about globalization. Also, they need to approach the vocabulary used to frame globalization discursively, rather than as an objective fact. The paper contends that the different positions taken in the debates on globalization are part and parcel of the social imaginary of globalization. The paper has ramifications not only for American social studies education but also for related subjects such as civics and citizenship education elsewhere."

"This article presents an empirical study of transnational higher education in China at the institutional level. The units of analysis are the Chinese partner universities of transnational higher education programs. Through comparison of research universities and teaching universities, the study finds that transnational higher education programs are developed and perceived differently by these two categories of universities. For teaching universities, transnational higher education is mainly used to expand enrollment. It is the most active internationalization activity on campus. For research universities, especially top research universities, transnational higher education's major function is to provide academic opportunities for those aspiring for advanced professional degrees. It is only one of the many internationalization activities on campus. Teaching universities tend to use transnational higher education more to generate revenue and reduce cost."

"This article adopts the critical theory approach to reflect and analyse the impacts of globalization on the internationalization process of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that globalization forces many of the higher education institutions in the region to follow global practices and ideologies of the Anglo-American paradigm without developing their own unique systems and honouring the rich cultures of their own countries. While higher education institutions are indulging in internationalization in terms of marketization and economic pragmatism, they have to ask themselves, 'What is missing in the process of internationalization?' This article argues that internationalization of higher education contributes to building more than economically competitive and politically powerful states. It represents a commitment to the development of an internationalized curriculum where the pursuit of global citizenship, human harmony and a climate of global peace is of paramount importance."

The geography of trade in services is becoming increasingly important for a developing country such as Malaysia. But, present discussion on trade in education services, in particular, higher education and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in Malaysia is rather limited and takes a short-term perspective. This is especially so with respect to the analysis of the impact of the GATS negotiations on the Malaysian higher education system. This article discusses Malaysia's current negotiating position insofar as trade in higher education services is concerned. Malaysia's prospects of gaining from trade in higher education services are analyzed.

Educational outcomes related to sustainability often include affective attributes such as values, attitudes and behaviours. Educators in higher education who attempt to research, monitor, assess or evaluate learning of affective attributes can face a bewildering array of methodologies and approaches and a research literature that spans several fields of enquiry. This article provides an overview of affective learning in the broad area of education for sustainable development, guidance for university teachers and researchers contemplating measuring affective attributes and a frame-work of affective attribute measurement based on the Krathwohl et al. (1964) taxonomy.

Education is commonly regarded as a state responsibility. Non-state provision is, however, increasingly prevalent in many developing countries in response to the inaccessibility and poor quality of state provision. Its unplanned growth has led to proposals for developing 'public-private partnerships'. However, as a number of the papers in this collection indicate, such partnerships are insufficiently developed in national planning, with potentially adverse consequences for equity. More often, non-state providers are attempting to develop relationships with the state, both to strengthen their own service delivery as well as to put pressure on government to improve the quality of its own provision.

"This paper examines discussions of Generation Y within higher education discourse, arguing the sector's use of the term to describe students is misguided for three reasons. First, portraying students as belonging to Generation Y homogenises people undertaking higher education as young, middle-class and technologically literate. Second, speaking of Generation Y students allows constructivism to be reinvented as a 'new' learning and teaching philosophy. Third, the Generation Y university student has become a central figure in concerns about technology's role in learning and teaching. While the notion of the 'Generation Y student' creates the illusion that higher education institutions understand their constituents, ultimately, it is of little value in explaining young adults' educational experiences."

In this special issue we are also particularly concerned with the take up of neoliberal forms of globalization in schooling and higher education in cities, in both the Global North and South. There is a troubling inadequacy inherent in denoting the Global South and Global North, related most clearly to the invocation of a uni-directional, mostly paternal and exploitative set of relationships; whether these be of capital, of resources, of people, and so forth. Alternatively, following critical development studies, we might see the North and South in both politico-economic terms, pertaining to development, and in geographical terms (Riggs, 2007). As such an important conceptual framework for dealing with ideas of the North and South is the mutually constitutive nature of notions such as the global and local (Massey, 2005; M.P. Smith, 2001), especially the relationship to neoliberalism and space (Peck & Tickell, 2002). Understanding contemporary challenges to education in a globalized world requires attendance to space and place, and to scale; the global, national, regional, local (Robertson, 2000; Thiem, 2009), and to concepts and phenomena such as transnationalism that complicate understandings of and relations between space and place, global and local (Jackson, Crang, & Dwyer, 2004). The papers in this special issue, while not explicitly taking up spatial theorizing, nonetheless speak to a complicating of the global as producing the local, and correspondingly of the local (usually conflated with place) as always the 'victim' of the global (Massey, 2005). The papers in this special issue provide empirical and conceptual interventions that speak more to complex, relational understandings of neoliberal globalization. A relational understanding posits that: local places are not simply always the victims of the global; nor are they always politically defensible redoubts against the global. Understanding space as the constant open production of the topologies of pow

Although globalisation has been an increasingly important characteristic of United States higher education for over two decades, there has been little historical analysis of the process or its origins. This article argues that beginning in the early 1970s, institutional, national, and international events established a powerful context for the development of college and university goals that focus on globalisation. These goals are substantially different from the goals of improving the democracy and opportunities for full citizenship articulated in the report of the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education and subsequently affirmed in other national reports as late as 1971.

This article reviews and compares the developments in six countries which claim to be an education hub. It explores the meaning of education hub, introduces a working definition, and proposes a typology of three kinds of education hubs as follows: student hub, skilled work force hub, and knowledge/innovation hub. Furthermore, it identifies issues requiring further research and reflection on whether hubs are a fad, a brand or an innovation worthy of serious attention and investment.

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."

Creating desirable academic departments for individuals' well-being and quality scholarship is an important effort as well as a novel idea. The focus of this reflective article is twofold: (a) We present a social capital theory of social justice covenants as a product and process of community building, and (b) we share the multiple lived experiences of three scholars within the context of our department's covenant ideology and practice. We explore how faculty can promote community and civility by not only developing but also enacting an internally generated covenant while operating within a larger institutional context that produces tension. As related to our purposes, we examined the relevant literature on social capital, capacity building, workplace environments, and organizational covenants to frame our discussion of community-driven action in education. We include an extended application of a covenant that guides our departmental faculty's social outlook, interpersonal behavior, scholarly work, and communal activism. Although our focus is on change-oriented, grassroots activity within higher education, the public schooling context is considered.