2.13: Global Academic Excellence Initiatives

Hello. And welcome to the World of Higher Education Podcast.

Higher Education varies a lot from one country to another, not just in its sophistication and level of support, but more fundamentally in terms of its aims and missions. One of the extraordinary things about the period from about 1995 to 2015 was that much of the world actually did start to converge on a common mission for higher education - and that was the creation and diffusion of new knowledge. And in the much more optimistic mood of that period, countries raced against one another to invest more in high-level university research. The arrival of global rankings in this period was both a symptom and a cause of these big national investments - and the results of these exercises made many countries paranoid and (for once) self-critical about their own performance.

This led to the widespread creation of what are known as "Academic Excellence Initiatives" or AEIs. These were programs set up by national governments with the goal of getting at least a few top universities to focus on becoming more globally competitive. How competitiveness was defined, what aspects of institutional work were prioritised and details of funding and duration varied from place to place: in China it was tens of billions over 25 years, whereas in other countries it was a just fraction of that.
But did these AEIs actually change anything? That's the subject of a new book called "Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective", which consists of a series of nine national case studies edited by Maria Yudkevich, Jamil Salmi and today's guest, Philip Altbach. Phil is Professor Emeritus at Boston College, the former Founding Director of that university's internationally-renowned Centre for International Higher Education, author of countless books and articles on HE and one of the people I most look up to in the higher ed biz.

Today, Phil talks to us about the evolution of these programs over time, their successes and failures, and what the future is for nations wanting to promote research excellence. I was struck by Phil's assertion that in the long run the most enduring effect of these programs is not so much in research outcomes, but in their development of differentiation between institutions. Part of that I suspect comes from a stratification effect, but I think Phil is on to something with the idea of making universities less homogenous and encouraging certain types of specialization. It’s not the standard story about these programs, by any means, but it’s a theory well worth pondering.

But enough from me: over to Phil.

Alex Usher (AU): Let's start at the beginning. The excellence program that caught the world's attention were the ones that were created in China in the 1990s. That were called the 211 and 985 projects. What were the key aspects of these programs and what were the outcomes?

Phil Altbach (PA): The outcomes were mixed, and the motivation was, as they have said frequently, to build world class universities as quickly as possible to join international science, which China absolutely was not prior to those initiatives. They were indeed the first, and they are absolutely the largest academic excellence initiatives in the history of the world. We haven't done a careful number, but I would say that the Chinese spend probably 100 billion US dollar equivalent on those programs and of the nine case studies in our book. The Chinese expenditure is more than double the whole expenditure of everybody else. It's huge.

AU: That's a hundred billion over 20 years?

PA: Over 20 years. Yes. Even if you narrow it down, on a time basis, it's still a very large amount of money. That's probably an underestimate because that's the central governments investments and the richer provinces like Shanghai and Beijing. Have invested their own money. Were they successful? The answer to me is yes and no. Largely, yes. Because they've added seven or so universities to the top hundred in a relatively short period of time. On the other hand, they invested a lot of money in a lot of universities and many of them did not achieve what they were supposed to achieve. They are not world class institutions today. But the short answer to your important question is yes, they were successful. They were the first, they were the biggest, they had the broadest goals, and so on.

AU: The idea spread pretty quickly. Obviously, any university in the world would love a program that just dumps a hundred billion dollars on the sector. You can see why people wanted to copy that model. But the first countries that copied it were Asian countries, it seems to me were It took a while to get to Europe. You have Korea, you have Japan. What did those countries keep from the Chinese model in their programs and what did they change?

PA: Again, that’s a very good question. I don't know that they took much at all from the Chinese model except the idea that they thought it was important for them to build world class research capacity and world class graduate education to provide top level scientists to their own institutions and to their own societies and to make sure they had a research capacity for emerging industries and that sort of thing. One thing we learned from the book, from our nine cases, is the reasons and motivations in each country differed quite a lot, actually. The Germans and the French, especially the Germans, had a broad interest in broadly in improving their research university sectors. The Russians as well. But a number of the other countries had narrower points of view, the Japanese and the Koreans both were very much interested in internationalizing countries, which were largely kind of insular in terms of their higher education systems. The short answer to your question is. Nobody really copied the Chinese. I think they looked at China doing this and thought, “hey, it's important for us to do something to quickly improve our higher education capacity at the top as well.” One thing to keep in mind is all of these AEIs are focused on the research-intensive university sector, and that's a very small part of a total higher education system. It's estimated there are about 25,000 universities in the world, maybe there are 1200 or 1500 serious research-intensive institutions, and the AEIs were focused exclusively on that sector.

AU: We've gone through the 1990s now, we get to the early 2000s and one thing that really shakes the higher education system right around the world is the emergence of a set of global rankings. Everybody could see themselves in relation to one another. There were a lot of people who were surprised and disappointed in France, they called it the “le choc de Shanghai.” To what extent was that process of transparency about research output force national government's hands in terms of academic excellence initiatives?

PA: It had a huge impact. Remember, it was the Chinese who invented the global ranking system with the Shanghai rankings. Which in my view, are still the most the most accurate ones in terms of measuring research productivity and capacity. Countries around the world including, of course, many that did not have academic excellence initiatives, looked at the rankings and started measuring their own universities against the top ones globally. It had a very big impact in stimulating research university expansion and improvement in general and caused countries to think about having academic excellence initiatives.

AU: I've always thought it interesting because people hate rankings, but actually rankings brought a lot of money into the sector for a few years there in the 2000s. I didn't hear anyone complaining about that.

PA: Yes, absolutely right. Of course, they brought a lot of money into parts of the sector, so they helped the top institutions very much, but I'm not sure that they had a particularly positive impact on the whole sector itself.

AU: One of the things that struck me while reading through the nine case studies was that there were a lot of these programs, and I would say Japan and most of the European ones, that really focused on competition first. Then second, strengthening the hands of rectors or university presidents to force their institutions to act as strategic decision makers. These are interrelated. It seemed to me that the act of competing forced universities to make priorities, and it was the central authority of the university, the rector, got to make that choice. Why was this so important in these academic excellence initiatives? how did those come to be central to the thinking about the about the initiatives?

PA: As Jamil Salmi pointed out in his earlier work on how to build world class universities and research universities, you need top talent, you need money, and you need underlying governance. Most of the AEIs saw governance mainly as providing central authority within the institution to make decisions and to innovate and to allocate and resources and to appoint and support top leadership to take rectors and vice chancellors out of an electoral system and put them into a system mainly controlled by boards of trustees and governors. That proved to be very important and of course is tied very much to competition within the university for resources, more centralized planning, and competition among institutions. Because in many of the AEI countries, universities had to compete to join the academic excellence initiatives to start with. This was the case in France, and in Germany, and in Russia, and in some others. So, they had to do a lot of planning and submission of documentation to be part of the AEI to start with. And all of this is creating a kind of, as you point out, a competitive academic system, which didn't exist in most countries at the time.

AU: Yet, that wasn't a key feature of the Chinese system, right? The Chinese, at least the 985 and 211, those were simply picked centrally. There's not that kind of proposal-based competition. In the new double world class program, which started 2016-2017, that there was some element of choice and competition there, at least in terms of which fields the institutions had to focus on. There was a little bit of competition there and choice. The Chinese just dumped money on universities and said “go.” Why was that acceptable in China and why was it not acceptable elsewhere?

PA: If you have a largely opaque society with decisions being made at all levels and in all areas, which are not clear in terms of how they're made or who is getting resources or not, it's much easier to do. You quite rightly say that's how the first couple were done. Now, of course, decisions were made to which universities and which provinces would get the money and how those decisions were made in both the 985 and 211 programs, which were the biggest ones, and the earliest ones is not clear.

AU: Phil, in the closing chapter and in the start of this podcast you make the point that success in these programs is a function of time and money. That’s a point that Jamil Salmi made over a year ago when he was talking about world class universities, that those were two of the key ingredients. Big programs that last a long time can move the needle, but short programs that are smaller funding have a lot more difficulty doing that. Obviously, China is the outlier. Have any other countries in the case studies, have they moved the needle at all on university research output? Can they be truly said to have worked? Absent the scale we saw in China of billions of dollars and heading now into a third decade.

PA: That's a difficult question to answer. I think all of them were successful to some extent. Most of them were much smaller and more limited in focus. The Danish one, which was quite limited in its funding and goals, people say it was quite successful in the areas that it was interested in, focusing research in particular areas on governance reform. A number of them were useful in terms of governance. The Russian one, and I had the pleasure of being on the Russian Government's Excellence Commission this was way before the Ukraine war and I might point out also that most of the gains made by the Russian AEI have been destroyed by the Ukraine war, internationalization was an important part of their goal. They did a good job with that. That's at an end. This is not the topic of today's. podcast with you but in my view Russian science and higher education has moved back to the days of the Cold War, where the Russians now with some collaboration with China, are in their own little academic bubble and not part of global science anymore. That was one of the main, maybe the main, purpose of the Russian AEI.

AU: I remember when the after-action report on the German excellence initiative came out, they basically said, “we can't point to any results, but we need to keep it anyway.” I guess because they thought that withdrawing the money would be too disruptive. Is that too negative and outlook? Were there countries where take France for instance, where it's been the excellence initiative has been mixed up with a whole bunch of other policies around geography and concentration. If you don't have time and you don't have a lot of money, what are the keys then for a successful excellence initiative?

PA: I think in both France and Germany, there were significant success in terms of governance changes and that's positive and will have long term impact on the system. They introduced some kind of competition within the system, and it may be better to say differentiation within those systems. In both France and Germany, especially in France, and in Russia too, the separation between the non-university research sector, the Humboldt Foundations and other such academy of science institutions, were brought more in line with and in collaboration with the universities, which everybody thinks is a highly positive direction for them. I think that's an important goal. In a number of the countries, internationalization was very much stressed and reasonably successful in terms of focusing a university attention on them. I would say, especially in Germany, recognizing that unlike what von Humboldt preached in the 19th century, that all universities are not created equal, and that there are some which Are more research intensive than others. That's an important part of any differentiated academic system. I don't think that would have happened without their excellence initiative. One should point out, as you implied, that in terms of the rankings both in France and in Germany their universities didn't improve. I don't think at all in their ranking’s situation.

AU: You pointed out earlier that obviously the schemes affect only a minority of institutions. But at least in some countries, the programs were sold as being likely to have a halo effect, right? I think Germany was one of them that said, “people will see that the winning institutions are doing great things, and they'll change their own policies to match.” Did that happen?

PA: We don't know because our research was limited to the AEIs themselves. My impression is the answer is largely yes. These programs in each of the countries were widely publicized and the institutions that were chosen and participated in the AEIs received a lot of attention in the press and in the higher education community. There was a trickle down. I know that was very much the case in Russia, other non-participants in what they call the 5100 program, look to the 20 some universities that were in it for guidance in governance changes, policy changes, and so on. I think there was a trickle down. As I said in my response to your previous question, I think that the AEIs in general fostered the idea that a differentiated academic system is a good idea. And that all the universities don't need to be research intensive. Teaching focused universities also play a role. In a couple of the AEIs, relatively few teachings excellence and reforms and improvements in the teaching system were part of those systems itself. I might point out too, and you mentioned this, Alex, that in most countries, these initiatives were of limited time and limited money. They didn't have really time to have a big impact, as was the case in China, where these things have been going on for quite a number of even decades and still continue. So, I think, time is an important issue too.

AU: I want to look at two counterfactuals. I want to look at Australia and Iran. So those are two countries which just seen huge increases in their research output over the last couple of decades. But, have never really gone down the excellence route. It's been much more broad-based than in Iran's cases because the government has been putting more money in. In Australia's case it's because they've been skimming money from international students and pouring it straight into research. The point is, the countries which never went down the route of competition, they didn't go through these strategic excellence initiatives, is this evidence that there are less exclusionary paths to national research excellence? Why don't more places take it?

PA: Keep in mind that none of the Anglophone countries had academic excellence initiatives. A number of them, in fact most of them, have very good university systems. Particularly top research universities, the United States being one, you mentioned Australia, the UK, Canada, all have gone in other directions to improve their higher education systems, and particularly their top research universities. They've been at it a longer period of time, in some cases, centuries more. Yes, there are other ways of doing this. The structures of many of these countries made it easier for them when they focused on research and had at least some financial backing for it, it made it easier for them to achieve results. The lack of a non-university research institute system, which the Anglophone countries by and large do not have and reasonable competition within these systems which is true in all of the Anglophone countries and so on. So yes, absolutely, there are other ways of achieving good results without an academic excellence initiative. I have no explanation for Iran and tend to be a bit skeptical about the data from there. But who am I to question it?

AU: The pace of the formation of these excellence initiatives seems to be slowing down. There was a big explosion of them between about 2003-2004, and maybe 2012, I think the last major one was the Russian one that you've referred to. Kazakhstan has one coming now, but it's fairly small. Have we passed peak excellence initiative and what, if anything, comes next as a as a national strategy for encouraging research intensity?

PA: I think the bloom is off for universities in general, higher education systems, and the role of universities in research. I think this is a big mistake because the world is still very much science-based, despite what Donald Trump and Victor Orbán and some other people would like to think. Universities have a big role in that. I think you're quite right of there, there may be no big academic excellence initiatives that I know of that are on the horizon and indeed budgets for higher education are being squeezed most everywhere and the research function in higher education is getting a lot less attention. This is a problem for especially advanced economies. One additional point, I think the challenge of building good universities with some research focus in the Global South is a significant one and it's very important for there to be research universities in these countries, especially, but not exclusively in the big economies in the Global South, Nigeria, for example, where there's really no attention being paid to this. This means not only do their universities not have research capacity on their own, but they don't even can communicate with the top researchers around the world and take advantage of research which is being done in other countries. So, I think there's a very significant challenge there, and I don't see really anybody focusing serious attention on this. You mentioned Iran, and that's probably an example of a country that at least recognizes that having research capacity in their universities is important and has done something about it.

AU: The one thing in Africa that we could talk about would be the World Bank's efforts there and the African centers of excellence. Is that a potentially a model that might move us forward?

PA: I would underline the word potentially, because despite some happy talk, I don't see a lot of important results from it, but it is very important. Ghose efforts are important. Balanced to that, however, is the decline of South Africa's universities, which were and still are the research powerhouse, I use that term advisedly for the continent, and which are suffering from financial and other problems. Yes, the World Bank and others and the African Union's focus on their research universities is important but has yet to show much result. Yes, it's important.

AU: Phil, thank you so much for joining us today.

PA: You're very welcome. My pleasure. Thank you.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future episodes, please drop us a line at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. This is our final podcast for 2023. We'll be back in three weeks on January 11th, 2024, when I'll be talking to Marcelo Rabossi from Universidad Torcuato de Tella in Buenos Aires, about the radical new government of Javier Milei, and what his role portends for higher education in Argentina. Bye for now.