Abstract
Over the last 30 years, transnationalisation of higher education has become a major issue within constantly internationalising tertiary education sectors worldwide. Contradicting global dynamics, German transnational higher education activities are less driven by market deliberations, but show evidence of strong national public actors and their self-interests. Therefore, German TNE projects are largely implemented for strategic purposes on the nation state level, with links to political and socio-economic fields of public action, going beyond the research and education sector itself. Hence, transnational education affiliated with German universities often functions as a policy-instrument for nation state level decision makers to solve multiple policy problems (Salamon 2001). By applying the Actor-Centred Institutionalism (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Scharpf 1997, 2006) as a heuristic frame, we study the field of German transnational education, analysing coordination mechanisms between the most important actors. We focus on their fields of self-interest and modes of interaction while establishing German higher education abroad.
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Notes
- 1.
This includes TNE activities of universities from Australia, the UK and the USA, despite the common assumption among scholars of the transnational studies that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ refers to the UK in a specific ethno-national context, while Anglophone relates to countries with English spoken as the majority language.
- 2.
- 3.
Branch campuses are the best known type of TNE provision, “which is essentially a satellite operation of a parent HEI in the sending country” (Knight and McNamara 2017, p. 2), while franchise programmes can be understood as “export programmes from sending countries” (ibid., p. 10), which are being “offered through […] stand alone foreign providers” (ibid., p. 14). Self-study distance education caters directly to host country students, without local academic support (ibid., p. 16).
- 4.
While TNE originates from Germany’s higher education sector, it was used to remedy challenges in the fields of intercultural understanding, labor shortage or climate change, to name just a few.
- 5.
- 6.
Individuals, active outside of formal organisational structures, are also known as policy entrepreneurs. They are not central to our analysis, as they appear only in isolated cases and are often not transparent enough in their activities to be included in a policy analysis. For a discussion of the concept of policy entrepreneurs in academic settings, see (Siegel and Wright 2015).
- 7.
We mention the German Technical Faculty in Donetsk, as it is currently one of the few German TNE-projects that had to be closed down. It should be mentioned that the shutdown was due to the armed conflict between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists in and around Donezk.
- 8.
For a more detailed description of the conceptual division of Germany’s Foreign Policy, see Grolig and Schlageter 2007, p. 549. The authors emphasise that the term Foreign Cultural Policy is a central, however rather young, concept within German foreign policy discourse, appearing for the first time in 1913. The perhaps best-known policy instruments within the Foreign Cultural Policy framework are the German Goethe Institutes, German Foreign Schools, as well as the media-programs of Deutsche Welle.
- 9.
https://de.tongji.edu.cn/berblick/Chronik.htm, last retrieved April 2019.
- 10.
https://www.daad.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/de/62620-0-jahre-chinesisch-deutsches-hochschulkolleg, last retrieved April 2019.
- 11.
- 12.
See footnote 11.
- 13.
- 14.
https://www.bmbf.de/upload_filestore/pub/Afrika_Strategie_dt.pdf, last retrieved April 2019.
- 15.
- 16.
Moreover, and despite global developments, the public attempt to transnationalise higher education follows in the German case strategic purposes that go beyond any profit or scientific reputation orientation. This is surprising, as the German government first started to put some serious, however only short-lived, effort into steering and regulating German TNE into a more profit-oriented direction by meeting the demands of international (higher) education markets in 2001. It then deviated from the pattern of TNB projects founded since 1990, and started to emulate the TNE model originating in Australia, the UK and the USA, which was seen as leading in the field of cross-border education. Profit and demand orientation seemed attractive in embracing reforms of market orientation in the public higher education sector. From this perspective, TNE was understood merely as an investment which was expected to produce profits.
- 17.
https://www.daad.de/der-daad/organisationsstruktur/en/, last retrieved June 2019.
- 18.
https://www.giz.de/en/aboutgiz/profile.html, last retrieved September 2018.
- 19.
Only a small number of German Laender was involved in supporting TNE-projects, like Hesse in the case of the Vietnamese-German University (for more information see Fromm 2017). Interview partners hinted at high costs and the relatively complex coordination tasks as a reason for the hesitation of the German Laender to be more active in the support of German TNE-projects (ibid.).
- 20.
- 21.
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/DE/Aussenpolitik/KulturDialog/05_Wissenschaft/UebersichtAWP_node.html, last retrieved August 2018.
- 22.
https://www.bmbf.de/de/internationalisierungsstrategie-269.html, last retrieved September 2018.
- 23.
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/aamt/auswdienst/abteilungen/-/232022, last retrieved April 2019.
- 24.
Most recently, however, the Foreign Office showed renewed activities which could be interpreted as re-gaining interest in the field of German TNE. Since data for new activities are as yet too scant, we will only hint at this development without more detailed elaboration.
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Fromm, N., Raev, A. (2020). The Emergence of Transnationalisation of Higher Education of German Universities. In: Nickl, B., Popenici, S., Blackler, D. (eds) Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_3
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