Emerging higher education systems in Southeast Asia need to be wary of focusing too much on creating a handful of ‘world-class’ universities to boost international research collaboration, according to a British Council report.

The study, which looks at policy among countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), is being released to coincide with the British Councils annual Going Global Conference, held this year in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from May 2-4.

According to the report, The Shape of Global Higher Education Policy: Understanding the Asean Region, it is “evident” that there is a “commitment throughout the region to building research collaboration with those outside and within Asean”. Although some Asean nations such as Singapore are better positioned to exploit cross-border working, the study says that all the countries seem to believe in the need to have at least one world-class university to foster international collaboration. However, the implications of this need to be considered carefully as this “may inevitably come at the expense of the development of international research collaborations across the whole of the higher education system”, it warns.

The observations on the strength of research collaboration in Southeast Asia are backed up by a new analysis of data from Times Higher Educations World University Rankings 2018 carried out for the conference. It shows that even after attempting to allow for the extremely high-performing Singapore universities in the ranking by using median instead of mean scores, Asean institutions as a bloc tend to outperform other countries in Asia on international research collaboration.

The 26 Asean ranked universities, which are sited in countries as diverse as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, achieve a median score for international co-authorship of 50, way ahead of China (median score 11), India (8) and even nations with a similar number of ranked institutions such as South Korea (21). Even looking at some individual countries in the Asean network compared with other Asian nations shows that research collaboration is one of their comparative strengths, when considering only ranked universities.

But whether there is a risk that concentrating too much on ‘world-class’ universities could harm a developing higher education system overall, is a key question that has been explored by international higher education scholars. Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the UCL Institute of Education and director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, says focusing government funding on such institutions can be “suboptimal” in the long-term.

“It is possible to balance development effectively so that the whole system improves”, he says, adding that governments should “pay special attention to ensuring a strong ‘middle sector’ which conducts research and is just below the top bracket”.

Caroline Wagner, Milton and Roslyn Wolf chair of international affairs at Ohio State University, argues that “while it is important to have appropriate scale built into institutions to conduct strong research, it is also necessary to have regional and local nodes to diffuse knowledge”. “World-class universities tend to focus on connecting at the international level”, she says. “This enhances competitiveness, and can also bolster quality. But unless there is capacity to link knowledge to local users, such knowledge just stays in the ‘cloud’ and doesn’t enrich national well-being”.

(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)