Globalization's Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World ed. by J. A. Douglass, C. J. King, and I. Feller (review)

Globalization's Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World provides rich, thematic discussions of the state of higher education systems in various countries. The book offers an informative analysis and comparison of global trends in higher education that include massification, quality assurance and accountability, organization and governance, and internationalization. The scope of the book is impressive with some 21 chapters and 20 contributing authors. The book, divided into five sections, illuminates three common themes in global higher education policy-making: convergence, competition, and congruity.

The first section, "A Look at the Global Higher Education Landscape," provides a broad perspective of the two main drivers of change in global higher education: internationalization and globalization. Broad trends of convergence and competition come to the fore in this section as globalization and internationalization push contemporary higher education systems toward a more standardized global higher education regime. The emergence of international rankings as a form of internationally accepted measurement of the competitiveness of institutions of higher education and the prominent role that international rankings have taken in global higher education policy as providers and consumers of higher education pay more attention to university rakings all underscore the narratives of competition, convergence, and congruity. Region-specific initiatives such as the Bologna Process and country-specific reforms in higher education such as those in China and Japan are aimed at both improving competitiveness to meet international standards and at enhancing attractiveness to consumers of higher education.

The second section, "Fees and Finance: The Conscious and Unconscious Restructuring of Markets," focuses primarily on higher education's responses to market trends. Over the past several years, global higher education has witnessed an interesting paradox whereby public funding and public policy occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, governments are increasingly divesting from higher education, prompting public institutions of higher education to develop strategies for raising new revenues. The traditional response has been for public institutions of higher education to shift more of the burden of the cost of higher education to students and families through fees and tuition hikes. But there are no easy solutions as fees and tuition hikes create new populations within systems of higher education: students from low- and middle-income backgrounds who are priced out. On the other hand, however, an emerging, implicit global race for the human capital has prompted governments to focus on expanding access to higher education. This massification is driven by the notion that participation in higher education is the gateway to increasing productivity as people acquire the requisite skills to perform optimally in the contemporary knowledge-based economy.

The third section, "Access, Quality, and Accountability: A Postmodern Race to Expand Educational Attainment and Research Excellence," provides the reader with a rich discussion on issues of quality, access, and accountability in the higher education systems of the United States, Sweden, Germany, India, and China. The systems of higher education of China and India, while emerging as critical regional hubs in the global higher education market, are struggling with serious internal challenges including the lack of robust mechanisms to assure quality and accountability. But instead of taking a more systematic approach toward confronting some of these internal issues that pose real challenges to the competitiveness of their higher education systems, India and China seem to have adopted a more outward-looking stance by implementing reforms to compete with more established systems of higher education such as that of the United States.

The fourth section, "Science and Technology: New Growth Theory Meets the University," provides readers with an insightful discussion on the role of higher education in driving economic development. The authors provide illuminating examples of conceptual links between higher education and the economy. In the United States, industry-university-government collaborations, particularly in technological innovation, spurred...