In this article, we examine the process of trade liberalisation of educational services in the framework of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Specifically, we analyse the factors that influence the undertaking of commitments on educational liberalisation by the member countries of the WTO. The…

The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development signals an unparalleled opportunity to link education with sustainability. But in the age of corporate globalization, will education bow to the external pressures that have always sought to subordinate it to vested interests, or will it reach beyond these narrow confines to the…

This paper looks at the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as an important part of the international trade law system and explores if and how it affects the steering capacity of a nation state regarding higher education. It offers a new conceptual framework to look on the impact of GATS on higher education within its increasingly…

India demonstrates many features characteristic of private higher education in much of the world. Among these features are proportional size, with roughly 30 percent of total enrollment, and fast growth. Also rather typical is finance, which comes almost exclusively from non-government sources, principally tuition, while public higher education is…

This paper explores the potential opportunities that OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers in providing wider access to tertiary education, based on the ideal of "the right to education." It first discusses the wider implications of OCW, and its underlying philosophy, before using a case study of a tertiary preparation program (TPP) at the…

One of the salient concerns in contemporary higher education internationally is access, which is rapidly expanding. Another salient trend is the rapid expansion of private higher education. These two salient tendencies have not been treated in scholarship as heavily intertwined. Much of the reason is that many people associate "private"…

This paper examines different institutional characteristics of Thai private higher education in historical-organizational perspective. The analysis applies different conceptual categories of private emergence--Catholic, elite, demand-absorbing--drawn from international literature starting with Levy (1986) to the Thai case. The societal context of…

The term "corporate university", which has come into wide use in the last decade, is applied to three kinds of organizations: (1) "established," "mainstream", "non-profit universities" adapting to economic and technological pressures by adopting managerial practices of modern for-profit corporations; (2) "newly established", "highly innovative…

This article takes the case of international education and Australian state schools to argue that the economic, political and cultural changes associated with globalisation do not automatically give rise to globally oriented and supra-territorial forms of subjectivity. The tendency of educational institutions such as schools to privilege narrowly…

Arguing that globalization has been conceived of largely in economic terms this article examines the possibility of a global curriculum in the light of Touraine's assertion that the major global problem is not economic but social: can we live together? I argue that a global curriculum conceived in social terms is possible and that it will involve:…

This article uses Nikolas Rose's theory of governmentality to examine ways in which intellectual property is imbricated in a broad spectrum of globalised and globalising discourses. Using the 2004 Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement as a case in point, it shows how discourses of culture, trade, foreign policy, and security intersect and…