Globalization and the University: Realities in an Unequal World

In the past two decades, globalization has come to be seen as a central force for both society and higher education.1 Some have argued that globalization, broadly defined as largely inevitable global economic and technological factors affecting every nation, will liberate higher education and foster needed change.Technological innovations such as the Internet, the forces of the market, and others will permit everyone to compete on the basis of equality. Knowledge interdependence, it is argued, will help everyone. Others claim that globalization strengthens worldwide inequality and fosters the McDonaldization of the university. All the contemporary pressures on higher education, from massification to the growth of the private sector, are characterized as resulting from globalization. There is a grain of truth in each of these hypotheses—and a good deal of misinterpretation as well. This chapter will seek to “unpack” the realities of globalization and the related concept of internationalization in higher education and to highlight some of the impact on the university. Academe around the world is affected differently by global trends. The countries of the European Union, for example, are adjusting to new common degree structures and other kinds of harmonization that are part of the Bologna process and related initiatives. Countries that use English benefit from the increasingly widespread use of that language for science and scholarship. Of special interest here is how globalization is affecting higher education in developing countries, which will experience the bulk of higher education expansion in the next two decades (Task Force on Higher Education and Society, 2000).