Conclusion: The Multiplying “Texts” of Graduate Education

Abstract

The chapters contained in this volume suggest a complex and continually emerging “text” for graduate education in the Asia Pacific region. As the whole of global education becomes increasingly focused around, and to some extent determined by, the manner in which (increasingly global) economic forces come to be expressed in societies, these forces are in turn transmitted through the varying arenas of graduate education. In one way, this yields to the whole of the enterprise of graduate education an economic reductionism that highlights both the seemingly constantly rising economic costs of such education (to institutions, governments, and students) and creates a presumptive calculus of benefits that are to be derived from the overall process. The results are often conflating. To select just one example, in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, graduate education is increasingly viewed as a desired and perhaps necessary extension of undergraduate education required to “intellectually power” work underwritten by the society as a whole, largely because of its eventual contributions to innovation in both public and private sectors and for societal economic development. This emphasis can lead to “the diploma disease” that Buasuwan and Jones discuss in Chap. 11, as well as (and ironically) the complaint that Bundit Fungtammasan points to in Chap. 10, wherein higher education in general is viewed as deficient in the provisioning of graduates with skill sets of direct and immediate use to those within the economy seeking to employ such graduates. Looking at other parts of the graduate education equation, one can identify additional forces being articulated through higher education (HE) graduate programs, such as that which Yusop focuses on in Malaysia where a critical need appears to emphasize the nurturing of future civic-mindedness within a generation of emerging professionals.