Changing Patterns in the Governance of Higher Education in Asia

Abstract

When seeking to identify and analyze changes in governance patterns in Asia, it is mindful to have an appreciation of the enormity of change which has taken place within the higher education sector of the region. In what has become an important typology of higher education change developed decades ago, Martin Trow argued that with higher education driven by a continuing need to provide access to larger sections of national populations, change would proceed along a continuum from its historically familiar position of engaging 15% or less of a national population (the elite stage) to a period of massification, ranging up to 50% of a population as the need and desirability of higher education qualifications spread throughout society, and onto an even more inclusive stage of universalization in which the whole of an eligible national population would have access to higher education if desired (Trow 2005). Trow’s categorization and de facto prediction of the course of higher education throughout the world has, perhaps, been realized more quickly and generally throughout Asia than anywhere else in the world.