Speakers and Scientific Committee

Daniel Levy is Distinguished Professor, State University of New York, and the founder and director of PROPHE (Program for Research on Private Higher Education), a global scholarly network. Levy's authored books with the university presses of California, Chicago, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Pittsburgh, and 2024 Oxford for A World of Private Higher Education. Included among his consultancies is authoring of the Asian Development Bank’s policy paper on Higher Education. Levy has published over one-hundred articles on higher education policy, non-profit sectors, and Latin American politics. He has received long-term and lifetime awards from the leading scholarly association of higher education studies and comparative education studies, respectively.

This presentation makes a sweeping appraisal of the dynamic growth of private higher education (PHE). That growth has brought PHE to account for a third of the world’s total higher education enrollment. Yet the appraisal simultaneously argues for a provocative conceptual perspective on this growth, a perspective born of the speaker’s half century of study and writing about private growth: The PHE growth reflects principally Pluralist-Market dynamics even as the principal normative beliefs about how higher education systems should be configured remain State-Steering.

First, we will establish the extent and geographical (regional and country) configurations of PHE growth. Whereas Asia and Latin American have been the largest two PHE regions, Vietnam is a case of a conspicuously small PHE sector.

Second, we will identify the key reasons for the PHE growth as well as the major “types” and “forms” of PHE that they tend to produce. For Vietnam, the major types are non-elite but far more unusually and intriguingly, the major form is for-profit.

Third, we will establish what the State-Steering and Pluralist-Market models distinctly postulate about the size and shape of higher education sectors. What would each predict empirically and through what normative principles they view private-public configurations.

Fourth, we will elaborate on how strongly PHE growth and actual functioning tracks Pluralist-Market principles while straying from State-Steering Principles. It is much more the former than the latter that squares with the global reality of extensive and often vibrant PHE.

Fifth, we will explore how this global interpretation fits Asia and its main sub-regions, including Southeast Asia.

Sixth, we will explore how all the above seems relevant to the Vietnamese case, but here, deviating from the presentation’s five preceding sections--and in deference to the audience’s expertise, the presentation will also formulate several key questions for discussion.

Dr. Akiyoshi Yonezawa is Professor of the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences / the Global Strategy Office and Special Advisor to the President of Tohoku University, Japan. With a background in sociology, his research focuses on comparative higher education policy, with particular emphasis on world-class universities, internationalization, and public-private relations, diversity and inclusion in higher education. He is an active contributor to international research publications as an editorial board member of Higher Education Quarterly and an advisory board member of Higher Education, International Higher Education, and Policy Reviews in Higher Education.

Since the 1980s, the internationalization of higher education has been a central theme in the Asia-Pacific region. Under the age of globalization, many Asian countries, including Vietnam, have experienced significant development in the areas of international academic and student mobility, international branch campuses and programs, the internationalization of curricula, English-medium instruction, and international student exchanges, as well as the wide diffusion of online and digital learning. Recent changes in the balance of economic power, as well as geopolitical changes deeply linked to knowledge co-creation and security, are now changing the internationalization landscape of higher education in Asia.

This keynote discusses the historical development and current state of internationalization in Asian higher education. The internationalization of higher education in Asia is closely related to the development of private higher education, the blurring of the lines between public and private institutions, and academic and student mobility in search of employment, migration, skill development, quality education, and research opportunities. In East Asia especially, rapid demographic decline, increasing capacity of domestic higher education provisions, and stratified international labor mobility ranging from highly skilled to unskilled workers make the landscape of internationalization more complex and multifaceted.

From our own perspective, how can we determine the future direction of the internationalization of higher education?

A simplified argument for promoting quality internationalization, called "mainstream," or criticisms such as those based on postcolonialism or inclusiveness, do not necessarily fit the actual context of Asian higher education. ASEAN member countries have developed regional frameworks, while East Asian countries are based on respective national frameworks. An interactive discussion with participants could help design the future.

Catherine Earl is a social anthropologist, policy analyst, and community educator. She is an experienced qualitative researcher who has conducted ethnographic and sensory fieldwork in and around Ho Chi Minh City since 2000. Her research focuses on the rise of Vietnam’s middle classes, mobilities, urbanization and public space, transformations of work and welfare, population ageing, gender equality, and social inclusion in contemporary Vietnam and Australia. She currently leads action research projects on sustainable development and social transformation in Ho Chi Minh City, while also advancing creativity and higher education in ASEAN.

This presentation takes a critical perspective to look beyond the conventional treatment of graduate employability that typically centers narrowly on skills gaps or employer satisfaction surveys. The argument questions the persistence of previous understandings of work and welfare as modern, industrialized, and postcolonial. By reframing the discussion through posthumanism and decoloniality, I propose a reconceptualization of education and employment for our more-than-human world on our damaged planet. Rather than discussing education, graduation, and career, I suggest abandoning these limited categories and thinking with open-ended, iterative, and overlapping metaphors. Doing so, I argue, enables a richer discussion of the real-world dynamics that university graduates face today.

Graduate employability is no longer characterized by quickly securing a salaried professional position relevant to the discipline of university study. Instead, university students should engage with the real world of work throughout their degrees and should be coached in career development and progression from the get-go. However, universities seem to have little awareness of the changing nature of the workforce and growing appeal of entrepreneurship and the gig economy for the flexibility, innovation, risk-taking, work-life balance, and other benefits perceived by young people as desirable, satisfying, and even a requirement. This and three other societal transformations illustrate disconnections of graduate employability.

Digitization, including a global pivot towards AI-enabled opportunities, offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to personalize their education and employment dreams on the one hand and on the other for economies to innovate rapidly to address societal challenges. In both cases, entanglements of anthropocentrism and technological optimism potentially cloud risks, ethical concerns, and the emergence of new threats and problems. Furthermore, particular societal transformations in Vietnam, like cultural globalization, rapid population ageing, gender equality, urbanization, social mobility, social differentiation, and the rise of middle classes, not only contextualize but also complicate graduate employability. Last, the entangled influences of internationalization and privatization in transforming Vietnam’s higher education landscape have contributed to reshaping graduate employability and human creativity.

Reframing our world as more-than-human acknowledges the profound change in how humans engage with technology and the environment in daily life and what this can mean for reconsidering graduate employability. More broadly, this involves a deeper reconsideration of the role of the university as it transforms from an elite institution of society to become an impact ecosystem for public good, social justice, and planetary health.