Showing papers by "Philip G. Altbach published in 1986"

The Foreign Student Dilemma

Abstract: Universities are international institutions. Knowledge has no boundaries and universities have traditionally welcomed individuals from many nations to study and teach. Indeed, the origins of the universities were international. The early European universities used an international language, Latin, and from the first had an international student body. Academic institutions continue to be international-and one of the aspects of internationalism, foreign students, has become an issue of importance and considerable controversy in the modern world. Foreign students constitute an important element of the world higher education equation. It has been estimated that there are more than one million students studying outside the borders of their home countries, with 325,000 studying in the United States, 114,000 in France, and 62,942 in the Soviet Union, the top three “receiving” nations. The bulk of the world’s foreign students come from the developing countries of the Third World and they study in the industrialized nations of the “North.” The impact of foreign students is significant. It has been estimated that more than $2.5 billion is devoted to the education of foreign students in the United States and over 10 percent of total university enrollment in France is foreign. In the United States, graduate study has been especially affected by foreign students, with half of graduate enrollments in fields like engineering and computer science made up of foreign students. Debates concerning appropriate policies regarding foreign study, the economic impact of foreign students, curriculum, ideological ramifications, and other aspects are increasingly common in many countries.’ This article places the multifacted policy, curricular, and economic questions relating to foreign students in a broad comparative context.’ It is my conviction that the foreign student issue has been neglected, that it has broad ramifications for higher education, and that it is in many ways symptomatic of international relationships in higher education relationships that are based on deep-seated inequalities and that are affected not only by educational factors but by economic and political considerations that transcend higher education. Not only are foreign students a significant educational variable, but they reflect basic issues in higher education. Those involved

Comparative Education: Challenge and Response

Abstract: Comparative education is characterized today by a wide diversity of views, lively debates, and varying theoretical perspectives. Since Comparative Education Review and Comparative Education published their retrospective "state of the art" issues in 1977, the field has changed. In this essay, we will discuss some of these changes and the debates and research trends that have arisen since that time. Our interest is in the challenges posed to the field and the field's response. It is our view that since 1977 many of the approaches that underlay the field, articulated so perceptively in the British and American appraisals in Comparative Education and the Comparative Education Review, have come under criticism. Some have questioned the national comparisons that have traditionally characterized research and have argued cogently for world systems and regional analyses. Others have challenged the field to move beyond quantitative studies of school outcomes to qualitative research on educational processes. The theoretical assumptions that had guided the field, especially in the United States and particularly structural functionalism, have also emerged as subjects of intense debate. Some scholars have begun to explore alternative perspectives such as conflict theory, legitimation theory, and Marxism. Simultaneously, scholars challenged the field to consider subjects of inquiry that it had hitherto ignored. Among these are women's education, the concrete study of social and political institutions, and the question of how knowledge is disseminated, produced, and used. In the past decade, scholars in comparative education have also turned to reconsidering old questions, especially the role of education in bringing about modernization and social change. The pages that follow first consider the new challenges posited to the field since 1977 and then look at the field's response. Our discussion is based on an analysis of research that has appeared in the major journals in the field, such as Comparative Education Review, the International Review of Education, Compare, and Comparative Education, as well as in some of the major books published on the field in the United States and Great Britain, including those in the series issued by Pergamon and Praeger. Our discussion

The Review at Thirty

Abstract: The Comparative Education Review enters its thirtieth year of publication in 1986. This is a remarkable accomplishment for a field in North America that, as a recognized specialty in universities, hardly antedates this journal. In a real sense, comparative education has come of age. Debates concerning the future of the field continue, funding patterns fluctuate, and orientations and ideologies change, but there is no doubt that comparative education has influenced educational research and, to some extent, the social sciences. This is not the place to chronicle the development of the field, but it is appropriate to reflect on some of the accomplishments -and some of the problems-of this journal and the field of study that it reflects on the occasion of the journal's beginning its thirtieth year.'

Reflections on the Jet Set

Abstract: British and American novelists have long been writing about professors. Saul Bellow, Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov and many others have looked at homo academicus, usually with a rather jaundiced eye. In the 1970s, Alison Lurie, who teaches English at Cornell, wrote a series of novels about professors, including one (The War Between the Tates) that was made into a rather unsuccessful motion picture. In general, academics have not come off well in these novels. They are portrayed as bumblers, spending most of their time thinking nonacademic thoughts or, heaven forbid, jumping into bed with students, colleagues, or the spouses of colleagues. Administrators, when they appear in fiction, are similarly dopey and are frequently philistines as well as bunglers. One wonders why so many novelists have so many bad things to say about the professoriate. Why are there more novels about professors than about plumbers, auto mechanics, or corporate executives (although it may well be that advertising executives and corporate officers are catching up)? At present, the best fiction about academics comes from the pen of British novelist (and professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham in England), David Lodge. His books are amusing, extraordinarily well written, and catch the nuances of academic life, even if they are portrayed in caricature. Lodge's newest novel, Small Worlds, deals with the stratosphere of international academic conferences. An unlikely topic for a novel, Lodge peoples his