Higher Education in Southeast Asia and Beyond #Issue 06

EDUCATION HUBS IN SOUTHEAST AND WEST ASIA: (UN)INTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMING HIGHER EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
In some countries, such debates relating higher
education to economic competitiveness are
conducted with particular vigour, especially
because the skills mentioned above are believed
to require what one could call Western-style
higher education and research involving
some time and conditions
to develop. A specific
category here are countries
labelling (or having labelled)
themselves as education
hubs — countries which are
often also known as hubs in
other areas. These countries
are particularly keen on
partnering up with foreign
knowledge partners to
import and apply the desired
styles of education, mostly
to address gaps in their own
systems. For instance, you
might have heard of Hong
Kong, Singapore, or the UAE
(Abu Dhabi and Dubai in
particular) as hubs in the
context of business, finance,
or air travel already. This
is because the meaning
of a “hub” boils down to
a central node with a certain pull factor in a
global or regional network, often of a specific
kind such as the financial industry. These
hubs and their pull factor(s) are then the
area-specific central destinations in which
exchange is being facilitated at a higher rate
in comparison to other, peripheral locations.
The idea of an education hub, which concerns
all three countries, is then to replicate such an
effect within the area of higher education and
research — becoming a central location for
teaching, learning, and research. The creation
of an education hub as the pursuit of becoming
“When realising a
hub project on a
national or regional
scale, the magnitude
of this project — if
deliberately intended
or not — most likely
embeds higher
education in a larger
geostrategic project."
a global centre for higher education and
research, however, signals some implications
for higher education policy and also for higher
education provision more directly.
When realising a hub project on a national
or regional scale, the
magnitude of this project —
if deliberately intended or
not — most likely embeds
higher education in a larger
geostrategic project. For
instance, viewing policy in
Singapore from an analytical
perspective, Goh Chok
Tong’s “Thinking Schools,
Learning Nation”, or also
Tony Tan’s “Boston of the
East” speeches in 1997
can be regarded as the
starting point of one larger,
ongoing project of this
magnitude, later connected
to the Global Schoolhouse
and SkillsFuture initiatives.
Today, however, the term
“hub” is not so deliberately
used in the foregoing contexts
anymore. In the UAE, the
starting point of a project attempting to achieve a
comparable improvement in the higher education
and research sectors such as has happened in
Singapore, or another East Asian hub, Hong
Kong, may be seen in Vision 2021. Vision 2021
as a larger project attempts to strengthen the
UAE’s position as a global hub for business
by the year 2021 — to a great extent by
establishing strong higher education and
research sectors, and by advancing industrial
and service sectors through absorbing potential
graduates and making use of research.
Though the embedding of higher education in
HESB | SEPTEMBER 2019 | ISSUE #06 | PAGE 23