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Higher Education Expansion in Asia and the Pacific

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Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions

The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a worldwide expansion of higher education hurled forward by the discourse of globalization and knowledge economics. This is especially true in the Asia-Pacific region which has become a major driver of the global economy and where higher education is expected to produce talent to sustain the region’s rising leadership (Shin et al. 2015).

The Asia-Pacific region is far from monolithic with its vast diversity of languages, religions, economies, and political systems. We can classify Asia-Pacific higher education systems into three groups. First are those universal access systems with over 60 % enrolment, including South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Second are those mass access systems that have reached 30 % enrolment, including China, Singapore, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, and Thailand. Others systems like Vietnam, Macao, and Indonesia are approaching 30 % enrolments but are classified with the low-enrolment elite systems of...

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Correspondence to Gerard A. Postiglione .

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Postiglione, G.A. (2016). Higher Education Expansion in Asia and the Pacific. In: Shin, J., Teixeira, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_56-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_56-1

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