Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Research Publications

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    Has the public good of higher education been emptied out? The case of England
    Marginson, S ; Yang, L (SPRINGER, 2023-01-01)
    Abstract In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector’s contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England after nearly a decade of full marketisation. The study, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries, consisted of a review of major policy reports, and 24 semi-structured interviews in universities (13) and among higher education policy professionals (11) including regulators, national organisations and experts. England has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than attenuated performative outputs such as graduate salaries, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation, understood as individual access to education as a private good. Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the imposition of a market in the centralised English system. This has coincided with a shift from direct government funding and collaborative stewardship by state and institutions, to student funding and top-down regulation. Nevertheless, most interviewees, including regulators, advocated an open-ended public good role and provided many examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum relation of private and public outcomes, corresponding to the split of private/public costs, was rejected in favour of a positive-sum relation of private and public outcomes.
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    Space and scale in higher education: the glonacal agency heuristic revisited
    Marginson, S (SPRINGER, 2022-12)
    The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism-influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life.
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    'Thinking through the world': a tianxia heuristic for higher education
    Yang, L ; Marginson, S ; Xu, X (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-01-01)
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    What is global higher education?
    Marginson, S (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-07-04)
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    Global science and national comparisons: beyond bibliometrics and scientometrics
    Marginson, S (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-04-03)
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    Higher Education and Public Good in East and West
    Marginson, S ; Yang, L ; van’t Land, H ; Corcoran, A ; Iancu, D-C (Springer Link, 2021)
    The 70th year of the IAU has been marked not only by the Covid-19 pandemic but by the geopolitical tension between the United States and China. After almost four decades of cooperation, which began in shared opposition to Soviet Russia and a shared interest in China’s modernisation, the leaders of each country have become strident critics of the other. The escalating war of words has led to disruptions in trade, communications and visas and now threatens the vast and fruitful cooperation between universities and researchers. Much is at stake. Many US universities are in China, such as Stanford with its state-of-the-art centre at Peking University and NYU with a branch campus in Shanghai. Chinese universities benefit from visits in both directions, from bench-marking using American partner templates and from the return of US-trained doctoral graduates. US-China links in science are focused on crucial areas like biomedicine and epidemiology, planetary science and ecology, engineering, materials, energy, cybernetics.
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    And the sky is grey: The ambivalent outcomes of the California Master Plan for Higher Education
    Marginson, S (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2018)
    In the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, California in the United States famously combined the principles of excellence and access within a steep three-tiered system of Higher Education. It fashioned the world’s strongest system of public research universities, while creating an open access system that brought college to millions of American families for the first time. Since 1960, the Master Plan has been admired and influential across the world. Yet the political and fiscal conditions supporting the Master Plan have now evaporated. California turns away hundreds of thousands of prospective students each year, and the University of California, facing spiralling deficits, finds it more difficult to maintain operating costs and compete with top private universities for leading researchers. The paper discusses the rise and partial fall of the Californian system as embodied in the Master Plan, and identifies general lessons for Higher Education systems.
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    What drives global science? The four competing narratives
    Marginson, S (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-08-03)
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    Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches
    Marginson, S ; Yang, L (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-01-01)