IKMAS Seminar Series No.11/ 2016

Abstract

As emerging knowledge/ innovation hubs in Asia, Malaysia and China have reformed their respective higher education sectors since the 1990s to achieve growth in size and improvements in quality, indicating shared aspirations for greater equality, competitiveness and excellence in higher education. Based on the universal factors proposed by The Futures Project to indicate the key forces that greatly affect higher education in developing countries as well as country-specific conditions, three themes are drawn to describe the major changes of higher education in these two countries in the last two decades. These are growth, autonomy and international integration. These themes are interconnected, with the first two being push factors compared to the last theme. And within each of the themes, two inter-related sub-themes were further identified: for “growth”, they are “expansion and diversification”; for “autonomy”, they are “privatisation and decentralisation” and for “international integration”, “globalisation and internationalisation”. Under these themes and sub-themes, similar patterns are presented to show the similarities between Malaysian and Chinese higher education systems, while differences between them are also explored in order to reveal their individual or unique character in some aspects.
Key words: higher education; Malaysia; China; changes; reforms

Biodata of Chen Li

CHEN LI is an Associate Professor of education at the Faculty of Teacher Education, Ningbo University (Ningbo, China). Prior to his arrival at NBU, he served one year as a lecturer at the Institute of Higher Education, Xiamen University (Xiamen, China). Dr. Li obtained his M.A. in higher education and Ph.D. in comparative education from Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China). His research interest lies in changes in higher education in Southeast Asia. He has authored a book The Development of Higher Education in Vietnam (Zhejiang University Press, 2011) and contributed a chapter to Educational Borrowing and Transplanted Systems of Higher Education in Developing Countries (Zhejiang University Press, 2009). He is also the author and co-author of several peer-reviewed journal articles on education. Dr. Chen Li is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, the National University of Malaysia.