Neoliberalism in Thai and Indonesian Universities: Using Photo-Elicitation Methods to Picture Space for Possibility

The state and my happiness: Youth mental health, citizenship education and discursive contestations in contemporary Indonesia

“…Besides commencing Indonesia's democratic reformation, the fall of Soeharto during the monetary crisis in 1997-1998 also marked the expanding of neoliberal reforms in Indonesia, including those affecting the education sectors (Burford & Wijaya Mulya, 2019). As a part of the International Monetary Fund's rescue package, Indonesia complied with free-market-oriented recommendations, including the loosening of rules for foreign investments, corporatisation of public governance and privatisation of state enterprises.…”

“Marrying the Monster”: World Bank Loans and English Language Projects in Sri Lankan Universities

“…Even in the rare instances where a strategy such as imposing user fees (or tuition fees by students) in higher education is supported by authors, authors are still critical of the overall policy orientation (e.g., Banya & Elu, 2001). The Bank's involvement in Asian higher education institutions has been studied more sporadically, perhaps because its loans for education in the Asian region has been more recent (Burford & Mulya, 2019;Collins & Rhoads, 2010;Regmi, 2016). However, studies critical of its involvement in national education policies have emerged from Nepal and Bangladesh (Regmi, 2019;Rumnaz Imam, 2005).…”

“…Regmi (2016) identifies privatization as one of the "three key tenets of neoliberalism" that guides the Bank's education policies, the other two being marketization and decentralization (p. 43). Requirements that borrowing countries change economic regulations according to Bank dictates (see Burford & Mulya, 2019) are now achieved through "prior actions", i.e., changes to national policies and governance systems which have to be in place in order to receive loans (Regmi, 2016;Rutkowski, 2007). In both Nepal and Bangladesh, reforms urged by the Bank were enabled by changes to national laws on higher education (Kabir, 2020;Regmi, 2019).…”

“…A major problem discussed across a large and widespread body of the literature is the Bank's promotion of changes that have resulted in a deterioration of public higher education services (Burford & Mulya, 2019;Collins & Rhoads, 2010;Heyneman, 2003;Torres & Schugurensky, 2002). The Bank advises substantive reductions in state expenditure on higher education, a phenomenon that has impacted universities across Africa (Banya & Elu, 2001), Latin America (Torres & Schugurensky, 2002), and now, South and South East Asia (Burford & Mulya, 2019;Kabir, 2020;Regmi, 2019). This reflects its ideology of education as a market good rather than a social good.…”

“…Torres and Schugurensky (2002) note, of Latin American universities, that a "combination of privatization and government control constitutes the trademark of university restructuring" in the era after Bank funding (p. 445). This is also true of universities in Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, and Bangladesh since the 1990s, when they started receiving Bank loans (Burford & Mulya, 2019;Kabir, 2020;Regmi, 2019). Such steps have been detrimental to countries with weaker economies and larger communities of low-income groups unable to afford privatized higher education.…”