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.
It is estimated that approximately 3 million students are enrolled as international students, and it is possible to project that this number may reach more than 7 million by 2025. As global demand exceeds the supply, competition is building for the best of these students. Some countries (or regions) clearly envisage the opportunity this represents and have been strongly stimulating student mobility. There is a race for "brains", be it for professors at the end of their careers looking for new professional opportunities and/or the opportunity to return to their native countries, or for researchers at the beginning of their careers, looking for a place that might offer them a better future, or even for students, who seek more appealing alternatives. How will Brazil fare in this competition for talent?
"This article offers an analysis of conservative critiques of education with
particular attention given to how policy problems are framed to build public
consensus. It investigates how conservatives claim political legitimacy and
describe education and social problems in ways that promote a conservative
agenda. Using a case study of the Australian Howard Government's education
policy, the article draws on Lakoff's work and particularly his 'moral
accounting schemes' to identify the politics that are not always apparent in
debates, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in popular and policy
understandings of schools and universities and which help shape policy solutions
to the problems those educational institutions are said to face."