cours quatrième année

The course has been designed to enable graduate students to understand, analyze and discuss major policy evolutions and trends in Higher Education across several countries.

Through an interdisciplinary (public policy, political science, sociology, history, area studies and development studies) and comparative approach the semester will be dedicated to the investigation of the origin, design, implementation, and effects of different policy responses to development problems and challenges. In particular the course will examine how the Higher Education choices reflect development goals of states and nations.

In the past decade, the study of Higher Education policies has no longer been limited to Education specialists, but has been progressively incorporated in a larger theoretical debate on the analysis of public policies and their instruments. Understanding Higher Education policies is one of the ways to study State intervention. Given the pace and the scale of their transformations, Asian countries can be regarded as a laboratory for a better comprehension of worldwide evolutions.

Not only students will be able to give an historical perspective to the current policies and to link the evolutions in Higher education to the broader socio-economic development of the country, but they will also acquire knowledge about national higher education systems. Another key learning objective will to better understand current debates about the role of higher education in economic development.

Main topics addressed:
•Global trends and evolutions in Higher Education in North America, Europe and Asia and in the developing world

•Relationship between HE and patterns of economic growth in selected countries.
•Global competitiveness: regional innovation systems and knowledge economy
•Mass-HE: equality of opportunities vs. elitist pursuit of high skills & talents
•Financial Reforms in HE: new players, governance and State intervention
•Big Data, MOOCs, Digital technology, Global circulation of Knowledge and Democracy
•International rankings and soft power shifts

Method of Instruction
Combining lectures with the intervention of one or 2 guest speakers (expert analysts, journalists, entrepreneurs…), current education policy problems and debates will be related to political, economic, social and historical context, with particular concern for issues such as skilled migrations, human resources development, R&D, modernity, democracy. The course will focus on the major cases of the U.S., E.U., China, India, Singapore, Japan and Korea, but students will be encouraged to bring a comparative perspective with other regions of the world.
Through the use of social networks the group will debate throughout the semester and feed the discussion with a variety of sources (video, data, discursive material, images, maps ...). Students will learn a different way of conducting academic research through digital tools.

Method of Evaluation
Grading: the course will combine lectures with student-led discussions, public presentations and debates (occasionally with outside speakers). Each student will have to make an in-class public presentation, be actively part of all the discussions, create and feed the class social network on a topic of his or her choice.

Grades are determined as follows:
• Class attendance and informed participation (35% of the grade);
• In-class public presentation (50% of the grade);
• Social network participation (15% of the grade);
• Class participation includes a requirement to attend the regularly scheduled course sessions. Students are strongly encouraged to raise questions and engage in discussion in the weekly sessions, as well as to follow the evolution of higher education policy debates in the world through the media.

In addition to the readings listed in the week by week list of class topics, students are expected to review supplemental readings for their assignments, including journals and specialized blogs/medias in comparative education, which can be useful for finding research topics and having an idea of the major trends of discussion.

References (journals)
Comparative Education ; Comparative Education Review ; Globalisation, Societies and Education ; Higher Education ; Higher Education Policy ; Higher Education Quarterly ; International Education ; International Higher Education ; Sociology of Education ; The Chronicle of Higher Education ; The Times Higher Education.