CGHE Webinar 174

Higher education and the hopes of the world: The next three years of CGHE research

Date: Thursday, 3 December 2020 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar, registration required

Speaker(s):

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

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Since late 2015, the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher education has been conducting research and open scholarly discussion on global, national and local higher education, linking researchers in nine countries. CGHE, which began as a publicly funded initiative of the Economic and Social Research Council in UK in another era, before the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Covid-19 pandemic, has grown its research, publishing and commentary for the changing needs of the time. It now conducts global webinars on higher education topics that regularly draw participants from 30-40 countries and more.

In November this year, CGHE began its second stage of ESRC funded support (2020-2023) which will focus on connecting its research outcomes to policy and practice, and also involves two new projects, one focusing on the place of research in higher education, and the other mapping the global higher education space, with emphasis on Africa, Central Asia and the Caucuses, and Europe. The webinar will review the past work of CGHE and its forward plans for the next three years and invite webinar participants to help us identify the burning questions about higher education that need evidence-based answers. This webinar is about the role and nature of research on higher education, and what a research centre with distributed worldwide capacity can do; but it is also about the core functions of higher education and critical research, which at their best are humanity at its best and a chief hope of the world.

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

Professor Claire Callender

Claire Callender was Professor of Higher Education Studies at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society and a Deputy Director of CGHE. Claire led on CGHE Project 5, ‘Student loan debt and graduate decision-making’ which explored the impact of income-contingent student loan debt on English graduates’ lives using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It showed how loan debt can have negative effects on graduates’ lives. Claire was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s Honours 2017 for services to higher education. Claire died on 15th April 2025. She is much missed.

Dr Janja Komljenovic

Janja Komljenovic is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, where her research focuses on the political economy of higher education; and the digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of universities.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk

Professor Ka Ho Mok

Professor Ka Ho Mok, Joshua is currently Provost and Vice President (Academic & Research) of the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong (HSUHK). Before joining HSUHK, he was the Vice President and Chair Professor of Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Since the inception of CGHE, Professor has worked closely with colleagues of the centre for promoting higher education research with focus on Asian education and development studies. He is also a Deputy Director of CGHE. Before joining Lingnan, he was the Vice President (Research and Development) and Chair Professor of Comparative Policy of The Education University of Hong Kong, and the Associate Dean and Professor of Social Policy, Faculty of Social Sciences of The University of Hong Kong. Prior to this, Professor Mok was appointed as the Founding Chair Professor in East Asian Studies and established the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Ka Ho Mok led CGHE Project 10, ‘UK international graduates in mass media and public perceptions: A comparative study of the UK, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan’.