CGHE Webinar 253

What are the outcomes of higher education? A cross-cultural dialogue between the Anglo-American and Chinese worlds

Date: Thursday, 25 November 2021 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford and University of Bristol
Lili Yang, University of Hong Kong
Ruth Hayhoe, University of Toronto
Xin Xu, University of Oxford
Rui Yang, The University of Hong Kong
CHAIR: Susan Robertson, University of Cambridge

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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What are the outcomes of higher education and how are these understood? These are ongoing questions for governments, scholar-researchers and those who work in the sector or use it. But the answers can vary across contexts. In this webinar Simon Marginson and Lili Yang approach the question by comparing the ‘public good’ outcomes of higher education through both Anglo-American and Chinese lenses. They review the scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in both traditions, including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the critical function, higher education in civil society, and global tianxia and global common good. The two traditions are very different, but there is potential for agreement in most – though not all – areas. The webinar follows a symposium on these issues in a Special Issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education, edited by Susan Robertson, which consisted of one keynote paper by Marginson and Yang and six commentaries. Three of the commentators, Ruth Hayhoe, Xin Xu, and Rui Yang, join the webinar.

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 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

Lili Yang

Lili Yang is an assistant professor at Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a PhD researcher and then a postdoctoral researcher at CGHE. Her research interests include higher education, cross-cultural comparison of higher education, and higher education policy. Her forthcoming book is titled ‘Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches’ (Bloomsbury).

Ruth Hayhoe

Ruth Hayhoe is a professor at the University of Toronto. She served as Cultural Secretary in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989-1991), and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now the Education University of Hong Kong (1997-2002). Recent books include China Through the Lens of Comparative Education (2015), Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation (2016) and Religion and Education (2018).

Xin Xu

Xin Xu is a Research Fellow at CGHE, Department of Education, and a Junior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Rui Yang

Rui Yang is Professor and Associate Dean Research at the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in international education, higher education, and educational policy. His publications span a wide range of subjects on higher education in China, including comparative studies of Western and Eastern education, cross-cultural analysis of educational issues, the globalization of education, and education reforms.

CHAIR: Susan Robertson

Susan L. Robertson is Head of Faculty and Professor of Sociology of Education, at the University of Cambridge. She has a long standing interest in the political economy of the state, state transformation, and the role of the politics of education in this. Susan has made original contributions to the spatialising of the sociology of education, to help understand processes like region building, and the development of global education policy. Her books include Public Private Partnerships in Education, and Global Regionalisms and Higher Education. She is founding editor of Globalisation, Societies and Education.