Will Brehm  1:27
Hugo Horta, welcome to FreshEd.

Hugo Horta  1:31
Thank you very much for the invitation. I’m looking forward to this discussion.

Will Brehm  1:37
You recently coedited a journal issue in higher education policy. And you showcase different country-level studies,  the evolution of higher education research communities in East Asia. As an entry point into this topic and into our conversation today, what was the impetus for putting this special issue together?

Hugo Horta  1:59
Well, I have been participating for a long time in Europe, in the higher education community there. And, some years ago, I came to Asia for a conference, and in that conference, I realized that the community here was much more emergent than it was in Europe. You know, in those conversations in the conferences and so on, I started talking with colleagues, and I decided to work or starting this idea of a project at that time with a colleague, which now is also at Hong Kong U,  about: well, let’s make a study to try to understand what’s going on in Asia, in terms of the higher education research. There are plenty of studies already about the evolution of higher education research, mainly in the United States, some in Europe, and more and more studies were being developed there, mostly looking at how different or how similar the US and the European higher education research was. Canadian higher education research was also part of it as a community that is somewhere in the middle of these two communities, but I really couldn’t find anything substantial on what was going on in Asia. And I was thinking at that time, wow higher education in Asia is developing at such a speedy pace, things are happening here. It’s dynamic. We have countries that are massifying their higher education systems. And I was quite surprised that I wasn’t seeing anything about the higher education research community. Already at that time, I was part of the editorial team of Higher Education. And I remember that I browsed through it, and I found a couple of articles published about Asia, about what was going on in specific countries, but nothing really telling me, “Okay, what is the characterization of this community?” “What is going on in terms of knowledge dynamics in the higher education research community?” So I decided, with this colleague from Hong Kong, to do a preliminary study.

Later, in other conferences, when we were presenting, a Japanese colleague contacted us and said, “well, this is actually something that is missing, and we should do something about it.” So we ended up organizing a panel in a conference also in our panel, “Comparative Education”, where we invited some colleagues from different countries to try to, at the first stage, look and characterize what was going on in their countries. And through that, we made a collection of articles that are still a very initial look, or initial vision, into what is the current status of higher education research in East Asia. And also, what was their development. Now, why East Asia? Because in that preliminary study with my colleague, Jisun Jung, we noticed that more than 50% of the international publications in higher education research in Asia come from East Asia. So we thought, okay, it’s better if we start looking to these countries, because they seem to be taking the lead, rather than looking at countries where it’s very basically in-existent. This was one of the reasons. The other reason was because basically, we had colleagues that were quite enthusiastic about it and told us, “look, if you’re going to do this, we really need to look at not only international publications, but we have to look at the national communities and national publications. We have to understand this from a development perspective, and to what extent it’s linked or not. Or if it’s linked, in what way, to the way the higher education systems as a whole are evolving.” And since we have higher education systems evolving in many different ways, and in different stages of maturity, we thought this would be a very good idea.

Will Brehm  7:03
Well, let’s jump into the special issue here. You show-case countries in East Asia, specifically China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. And you talk about how there are commonalities among this group of countries in terms of higher education research. What are some of those commonalities that you find?

Hugo Horta  7:28
Right. A clear commonality, in a very similar way to what happened in Europe, is that a lot of the higher education research starts up as sort of a study group that relates to the government, or a kind of a research institute that relates to governmental policies in a way that supports those policies, or try to understand to what extent these policies make sense, or what happened to the implementation of these policies. This is very clear, particularly in countries such as China and Japan and South Korea to a very large extent, where you still have a very close proximity between what the research community does and what the government policies are. These happen the same way in Europe. For example, CHEPS in the Netherlands, which is a fairly known and reputable center. It started as an advisory, sort of, research institute for the Dutch government in Portugal. CIPES , which also is a quite reputable center in Europe in the higher education research community in Europe, also started the same way. Then gradually, they start to move away from this link with the government, and start to have their own standing.

Now, another thing that is interesting is that in some countries, the higher education community wasn’t really able to develop as an independent community. So basically, it was developed within educational communities. For example, you have, in South Korea, a lot of the higher education research community is part of the education administration community. At this moment, in all of the Asian countries, there’s not a single country where you can say, “well, the higher education community really stands out on its own.” For example, in Taiwan, the community was able to be created, but then did not work. It was dissolved. So it’s not so easy. It’s also a problem of sustainability. This is observed in all of the countries. Now one might say, China, for example, might be different in the sense that Philip Altbach has a book, which is basically a repository of all the research centers in higher education. And China has more than 300. But the thing is, what is understood as a research center in higher education varies so much that it encompasses teams of two people, two teams that in fact do institutional research, which is not really higher education; it’s different. Two teams that are basically supporting the teaching office in some universities. So calling them centers is always a bit doubtful. I don’t think, except in the case of Japan that has a very unique center for higher education here at the University of Hiroshima, I don’t see in Asia an organized research center in higher education. And even here, due to the financial constraints and the reforms done since the 2000s, in Japan, in my opinion, had to downgrade a lot, their activities and their standing as a research center, in part due to funding issues.

Will Brehm  11:53
So these similarities mainly are about the difficulty in the constraints that the higher education research field in each of these countries is experiencing. Let’s turn to differences. Maybe there’s a lot more that we could talk about in each of these countries. And let’s start with, perhaps the largest country in the grouping, China. What’s going on in China in terms of higher education research?

Hugo Horta  12:22
China, as I mentioned, reported a surprisingly high number of research centers. As I also mentioned, the word “center” there, and in many other countries that are in the repository, do not really mean that they are organized centers. In China, higher education research mostly, I’m not saying all of it, but mostly, in my opinion, it’s basically institutional research. Now, what is the difference between a higher education research center and institutional research? Basically, institutional research, well, it’s called research, but basically what they do is almost a sort of consulting work for the management of the universities, or for the government. So basically, they are commissioned to do some research work, something like,”okay,what is the status of our university in comparison with that other university and that university B, C, D, F, in those other countries or in this country?” And basically an analysis is done, saying, “well, we are faring quite well regarding the number of students or the diversity of our student population, but our university is not so good in terms of attracting funding, or in terms of the scholarships that we offer.” This is called “institutional research”. It’s basically research to support the management of an institution, can be a university, can be anything else, or the government.

Now, a higher education research center does more than this. It basically studies the issues, and it’s not really interested if one university is doing better than other or what is the standing of one country in relation to the other. It looks more in depth to how certain policies were implemented, and what was the impact of those policies, or it’s trying to understand, in the classroom, what is the best pedagogy to facilitate, or to improve the student experience while they are in higher education? So the type of subjects, it’s completely different on the one hand. On the other hand, a higher education research center, you know, its agenda comes from a more academic perspective, an academic interest. The issue of the graduates from higher education that are unable to get a job, or that are underemployed, this is not necessarily funded by anyone, but comes out of the societal interest. And you’re doing it because you know about that subject, you know it’s important, and part of your duty as an academic is to contribute to society by looking at these things and try to understand what are the dynamics behind it, and what can be done. So offering some policy insights or at least contributing to policy making, but in a more abstract, in a more overlooking way, rather than being highly applied and saying, “okay, this is the issue and we recommend that you do this, this, this, this to cope with the situation, which is what institutional research might do.

So, taking this into account, China has a lot of these centers, a lot of the research work is basically commissioned by the government, at various levels of government. So a lot of the output then are reports. And when you look at the articles that are produced in China, they have a very report feeling. It feels like they are a report and not necessarily a research article because, you know, the source of information, and the purpose of the research was commissioned. And the output was a report. So basically, the papers or the articles that are produced end up being a sort of a summary of the whole report. And you see these for some other countries as well. But this is happening very strongly in China. But then to what extent what comes out in these reports is impartial or not, is another question. I can’t say this from my own experience, but what some colleagues of mine tell me is that you see a lot of propaganda. So in fact, the higher education research ends up not being really research, but in a way, it’s basic propaganda. So it raises some concerns about, what is the research that is being produced at the moment? However, it serves a purpose. It serves basically the same purpose that it serves in other countries when the higher education research community started, so we can’t say that the example of China is tremendously different in terms of the evolution that happened in other countries. But probably the link between the higher education research community and the governmental level or the managerial level at universities, is much stronger than it is in other countries.

Will Brehm  18:27
And let’s turn to another country, let’s turn to Hong Kong, which is a special administrative region of China, but has a wholly different context. And that’s primarily because of British colonialism. So what’s going on in Hong Kong?

Hugo Horta  18:42
Hong Kong is always the outlier. Hong Kong, for example, doesn’t really have what we can call a local focus, in the sense that researchers publish in national journals. In Hong Kong, everybody publishes in international journals, although some part of the higher education research community publish in international journals about Hong Kong. A lot of the research that is done in Hong Kong is not necessarily about Hong Kong. It’s much more geared towards issues that have an international interest. Also, the sort of issues are also quite different. Let me add this about China, because it’s important. China is very much policy oriented, still. So a lot of the research focuses on policies. So what was the result of a policy? What are the conditions for an eventual policy on, let’s say, scholarships can be, and so on, and so forth. Not so much on the teaching and learning component. Now in Hong Kong, the teaching and learning component is much, much stronger. Why? It relates to the challenges that Hong Kong faces. Hong Kong has a quite internationalized higher education system. It lives in this tension between the integration with mainland China, and at the same time, keeping the door open to the world. So it’s a special place. It attracts students from all over the place. It still attracts faculty from all over the place. So it has a huge diversity. And to cope with it, a lot of the focus is on the teaching and learning components of higher education research. Mainly, a lot of the focus is on the student experience at university, so what is the best ways for the students to learn how to cope with student diversity in class, and provide them with the best possible experience? One of the reasons also why in Hong Kong, the publications tend to be basically international, comes also from the fact that the evaluation of the universities really underlines international publications. So that is a major incentive for the faculty, no matter from wherever they are, to publish in international journals. So when you see the number of articles published in international literature from Hong Kong, in relation to some of the other countries, it’s overwhelming. I think, if I’m not mistaken on this, Hong Kong publishes two times more internationally in higher education research than Japan, which is the second highest publishing country in higher education research in Asia. So it’s pretty strong. Its international component at all levels is pretty much strong. And it’s related to the cosmopolitan feature of the higher education system there.

Will Brehm  22:21
And switching to another part of China, perhaps, Taiwan, what’s going on in Taiwan?

Hugo Horta  22:31
Yeah, Taiwan has an interesting story in the sense that Taiwan was one of the countries where the community attempted to create an independent self-standing community. It evolved substantially in terms of its detachment from governmental service only. But the problem is, they still face quite a lot of obstacles. One of it relates in this case, as in other cases, but I think it’s fairly evident in the Taiwanese case, the resistance of the universities to provide incentives funding for these communities to establish themselves in the university. And this is a problem that actually is similar to what happens in Europe. It’s very difficult. For example, someone to be hired as an higher education researcher. I mean, academic positions do not open for higher education researchers. They open, for example, in education, and then for some reason, you do higher education research and you are hired. The issue with this – and this is very clear, I think, in my opinion, in the paper in the special issue by Shuang-Ye Chen, and Li-Fang Hu, is that, you know, if universities don’t hire like this, they’re never able to create a critical mass. So basically, what you have is a lot of fragmentation with people in different universities suffering from the inherent pressures from the universities ,from their departments to do certain things. And, if you don’t have these institutional support for some of your scholars to be able to focus on higher education research in this case, then it’s much more difficult for you to really build up on whatever you’ve done so far, and create a community. This is an issue that happens in Asia more right now than in Europe, maybe because in Asia, especially in East Asia, the development is still in a much more initial stage.

So basically, when you do an analysis of publications, for example, in Asia, you start at country level, and you see, “okay, the numbers are not too big”, then you start looking, “Okay, let’s look at the institutional level.” And the numbers are not too impressive. And, when you try to understand through social network analysis and whatnot, to what extent these institutions or countries really have integrated communities, you end up finding out that higher education research exists in all of these countries based on the individual will of some academics. And it’s these few academics that are spread out – I wouldn’t say even in the same country, but spread out in the region – that really make out the community. But we were talking about a very small number of people. I mean, I’m not sure about the number exactly, but they’re around like 10 to 15, no more, that publish constantly about higher education, that interact with their colleagues in other countries, and which really make out the community. The other ones end up only contributing sporadically to the field. And this is very problematic in the sense that if you don’t have a routine, if you don’t have a system of constant contribution to the field, of building an identity, of building trust, of building a body of knowledge, it’s very difficult to then come up to the management of universities and say, “look, this is what we created. I think this can be a strategic area for the university. And we can contribute not only for this university, but we can contribute for the country and for the region.” So far, that hasn’t happened in East Asia.

And Taiwan represents a very good example of these difficulties of a community that tried, that has a lot of enthusiasm, that was very much focused on several issues that came up, with the massification of higher education in Taiwan being one of the most important ones. The quality, quality assurance, but that then you face these obstacles, and right now faces even greater obstacles as there are a declining number of students entering higher education due to the aging of the population. So for higher education research, as a community, the challenge in some of these countries, particularly the countries where universal higher education was achieved. Basically, meaning that a substantial part of the population already has a tertiary education degree, and that a substantial number of the entry population is attending higher education, the challenge will be even greater. The challenge in terms of growth in comparison, for example, with China, which is still massifying the system very quickly, the challenge there, it’s easier. But then again, this requires time. So it’s a race against the clock.

Will Brehm  28:44
And what about Japan, which also has an aging population?

Hugo Horta  28:49
Well, Japan, the higher education community was more internationalized, in my opinion, than it is today. I think because of funding constraints, reforms, and even the social economic challenges that Japan as a country is facing, I think there was a retrenchment and Japan is facing a bit more inwards, currently than outwards. Although, Japan was a country that had its higher education system very influenced by the West since the Meiji era. So basically, still, Japan is the only country that really has a very solid higher education center. It has been an influence to the other neighboring countries in East Asia, without a doubt. It continues to maintain very strong links with Southeast Asia. So, it’s one of the countries – well, if we consider Hong Kong as well –  that maintains the most links with the Asian community as a whole. In this case, I’m not only talking about East Asia, but as a whole. Maybe partly, it’s due to the fact that there was always, after the Second World War, an intention of Japan to contribute to the development of several countries in the region. And maybe some funding from JICA and whatnot contributed to this. But the thing is, Japan maintains a series of international links that are still alive, but they’re diminishing. More concerning in the case of Japan is that the younger generation, I mean, you go to conferences and you don’t see, really, a new generation of higher education researchers in Japan that is participating in the international scene. You see mostly higher education researchers that are in the mid career, or already with a very senior position. I believe this is related to the constraints that the Japanese higher education system is facing at the moment. Also with an aging population, and so on and so forth. Japan, interestingly, like China, also has its higher education research very much focused on policies. It is possible that part of the reason is that, also, a lot of the higher education research work that is done in Japan is also sponsored by the government. This is how I understand it. When you look, for example, when you do an analysis of these countries and the relationship of the evolution of these countries, measured by the enrollment rates and their international publication, what you see is that the ones who correlate the least is Japan and China, because they are much more focused also on their own country. Partly it’s due to the fact that there is this greater proximity between management, government, and the higher education research community. But also, and I think this is important, in terms of population, they’re quite big countries. So they also have a larger national audience than some of the other countries, which need to rely on a more international base to survive and to acquire new knowledge.

Will Brehm  33:05
And let’s turn to the last country, South Korea, which has been making the news of late about the student protests over the proposed changes to the national textbooks. What’s going on in South Korea?

Hugo Horta  33:20
South Korea, well, the national textbook is a quite polemic issue which has been involving, actually, academics not only from the higher education research community, but from other fields in education. But, the issue happens in many other countries, which is the fact that history is written and rewritten in accordance to what the political will is. And it’s these sort of things that is highly problematic. And this is a very good example of why higher education research should exist, so that these sort of things do not happen. Because if we don’t have an impartial, critical look into what is happening in any phenomenon in society, but in this case, in higher education phenomena, what you might have later on is a completely write up of the phenomena to benefit some people or some ideas, when it’s actually not probably the truth. In terms of the higher education research in Korea, a very strong national community, but once again, completely subservient to other communities that are much more established. So South Korea is an example of a country where the higher education research communities under communities such as education administration. It doesn’t exist on its own right. Most of the South Korean research or participation in higher education research at the international level is also done by, on a constant basis, a group of probably three to four scholars. Then you have participations from the community here and there. But a lot of it, it’s not acknowledged. It’s not known in the international scene, because they’re also focusing in the national conferences, in the national associations, and they publish in the national journals. Very similar, and I didn’t mention these about Japan, the case of Korea and Japan in this sense are very similar, very strong national communities of education, where the higher education research community is but one of the fields.

And a lot of the publications happen in national journals. A lot of it, sometimes, in journals from the institutions. So a lot of it also looking very much like in the Chinese case, to reports because a lot of it is also commissioned by the governments, by research institutes, linked to the government, or by the universities. And they simply fit into these national channels, which I’m not criticizing in any way. They’re a very important part of a community. But the problem or the challenge when you try to make these communities to be more international, is that then they are unable to write a research paper following the criteria that usually the international journals are asking for. So the community in Korea has this issue. Once again, like in Taiwan, and like in Japan as well, nobody hires anyone that says, “well, yes.” Not a single university opens a vacancy, saying, “oh, we need someone that researches higher education research.” Basically, they open openings in some other fields, and by luck, or by the fact that they are the best candidates, people who are doing higher education research are hired, and they continue to do higher education research or not.

Will Brehm  37:45
Hugo Horta, thanks for joining FreshEd.

Hugo Horta  37:48
Thank you very much for having me in. Thank you.

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