Remaking higher education for the post‐COVID‐19 era: Critical reflections on marketization, internationalization and graduate employment

Abstract

This Special Issue was conceived and developed following a series of international conferences held in Asia, with a particular focus on critically reflecting upon higher education development in the region from broader social and political economy perspectives. Some of the papers in this Special Issue were selected from presentations in the East Asia Social Policy (EASP) Research Network Conference successfully held in Taiwan in 2018, while others were chosen from international events held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong presenting critical reviews and reflections on internationalization, marketization and graduate employment of higher education in Asia. This introductory article puts the discussions of the selected papers in this issue in context, with critical reflections on the key issues being examined in these papers. The Special Issue is published when the world is still confronting the unprecedented global health crisis resulted from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article discusses the higher education development trends in Asia through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system and examines how these development trends are affected by the COVID‐19 crisis.

Online aviation learning experience during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Hong Kong and Mainland China

“…The blended learning offered the opportunities for academic collaboration via an online mode. Despite the debate persisting on whether the pandemic would cause the end of the internationalization of higher education, the pandemic evidently had a profound impact on the international students' mobility in global higher education (Mok & Marginson, 2021; Mok & Montgomery, 2021). Student mobility significantly decreased due to travel restrictions, campus closures and students and families' consideration of health and safety (Mok & Marginson, 2021).…”

A conditional time-varying multivariate latent growth curve model for the relationships between academics’ servant leadership behavior, affective commitment, and job performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…The higher education sector contributes to the contemporary society’s development (Cricelli et al 2018 ) as well as to a country’s economic development through providing quality education (Baykan et al 2018 ), in the short and in the long run (Qazi et al 2014 ). The ongoing pandemic, however, changed a lot of practices in all sectors (Mihalache and Mihalache 2022 ), and higher education is no exception (Mok and Montgomery 2021 ). New and updated policies were implemented worldwide to maximize the academic communities’ safety and to ensure that the process of quality teaching and learning was not adversely affected by the pandemic (Ghasemy and Elwood 2022 ).…”

International student mobility: Pacific Islander experiences of higher education in Australia

“…The sudden onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020 impacted significantly on international student mobility, largely due to travel restrictions which prevented students' movement, and campus closures around the world. Educational institutions had to switch from face‐to‐face learning to online learning within a short period of time, with many students and staff members struggling to adapt to their new virtual classroom environments (Mok and Montgomery, 2021). The tertiary education sector has been hit particularly hard in Australia, due to its reliance on revenue from international students (Marginson, 2020; Welch, 2020).…”