Higher education privatisation, internationalisation and marketisation: Singaporean versus Malaysian models of Asian education hub policy

Education hubs and private higher education expansion in small island developing states contexts: The case of Mauritius

“…Education hubs are viewed as an important cogwheel in a network society of information flows primarily between urban (or cosmopolitan) and professional centres. Richards (2018) argues that the inherent tension experienced by education hubs remains the need to reconcile short-term efficiency and long-term resilience. The experience of South East Asian hubs like Singapore, where the provision of highquality infrastructure and an adequately credentialed international staff served to establish reputation, has been cited as an example of a 'broker' approach where the hope was for the country to act as an intermediary for western providers of high-quality higher education in the region.…”

“…Irrespective of the model, integrating national capacity development plans into the education hub policy requires a framework that harmonises the micro requirements of infrastructure, affordability and quality with the imperatives of privatisation, internationalisation and marketisation. These vary greatly depending on the obstacles and restraints experienced in each context, as well as on the modes of knowledge, learning and leadership, academic integrity, culture of openness and inclusivity in place (Richards 2018).…”

“…Whilst there exist in the literature global and general explanations as to how education hubs may hover somewhere between a real innovation with transformative economic and political potential and a rhetoric or fad (Knight 2011), there is no documentation of case studies of institutions within the same national context. These are not only valuable because their narratives uncover the ground realities but also conceptually significant as they illuminate how sustainability issues are related to different modes of knowledge, leadership, learning and capacity building (Richards 2018). These narratives need to be made explicit in the continued conversation with policymakers to transform a 'vision of possibilities' into a 'threshold' of change (Richards 2018).…”

“…These are not only valuable because their narratives uncover the ground realities but also conceptually significant as they illuminate how sustainability issues are related to different modes of knowledge, leadership, learning and capacity building (Richards 2018). These narratives need to be made explicit in the continued conversation with policymakers to transform a 'vision of possibilities' into a 'threshold' of change (Richards 2018).…”

Human lifecycle development and the experiential learning foundations of an integrated lifelong education framework

“…In this way also, as we have explored in various ways for some time now (e.g. Richards, 2013, 2015, 2018), a new emerging plethora of variations and alternatives to the stable ‘one size fits all’ tendency of modern education have also been in the process of effectively collapsing or at least transforming that model. In recent decades, formal notions of education also as a public good have been disappearing as forces of commercialisation and commodification transform schools, colleges and universities, as workplace training and continuing professional development options are corporatised, as public as well as private universities internationalise as part of national policy (also serving as de facto immigration policies for some governments whilst others lament a brain drain), as flexible models of schooling as well as higher education emerge, as the social media options of the internet also include mass online learning options (such as MOOCs), as non-formal options for continuing education proliferate in terms of personal interest as well as professional development options, and as both third and fourth age (e.g.…”