Project 8

Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study

This project was a continuation of CGHE Project 1.1, ‘Local and global public good contributions of higher education: a comparative study in six national systems.’ Using interviews with higher education personnel and government officials, supported by discourse analysis, the project compared and contrasted the concepts, understandings and practices of the role of higher education in creating public and common good(s), in ten countries – Japan, China, South Korea, Finland, France, Poland, UK, Chile, Canada and the United States.

About this project

This project is led by Simon Marginson and the postdoc researcher is Lili Yang. It includes researchers from Japan, China and based in UK, with collaboration also from researchers in Poland and Chile. The project continues to completion a core project of CGHE that began in 2016.

The role of higher education everywhere is nested in particular localities, and national-cultural settings so that all of the outcomes of higher education are subject to variation. This is especially true of the collective effects included under the heading of public or common goods. The ultimate purposes of the project are to (1) systematically review approaches to the problem in the ten countries, and draw attention to similarities and differences; (2) to identify the potential for generic approaches to this issue useful in all countries, that might constitute the basis for worldwide analytical and measurement based work in the future, while also identifying the factors that shape variations form national context to national context; (3) to progress the identification and measurement of global common goods in higher education and science. Part of the project lies in comparing meanings of key terms between languages, another part lies in exploring issues of measurement.

As the Transition Centre begins, CGHE has completed empirical work in seven of the ten countries, has supplementary work to do to complete research in two more, and has yet to carry out the case study work in the US and interviews in international agencies. The Transition Centre period will focus on completion of data collection, data analysis, comparisons, academic publishing and information for policy makers and practitioners in higher education.

Team

Professor Simon Marginson

University of Oxford and University of Bristol

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 Vincent Carpentier

University College London

Vincent Carpentier is a Professor of Higher Education and Society at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. He was responsible for CGHE Project 7, ‘A historical lens on higher education staffing: UK and France’. Key outcomes from this project included papers such as Three Stories of Institutional Differentiation: Resource, Mission and Social Inequalities in Higher Education (Policy Reviews in Higher Education 2021) and Academic Workforce in France and the UK in Historical Perspectives (Comparative Education 2023- with Emmanuelle Picard), recently reported in the Conversation (2023) . He was also a Co-Investigator on Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’ examining the French context presented in the paper Public Good in French Universities: Principles and practices of the “Republican” Model of Higher education (Compare 2022- with Aline Courtois).

Professor Futao Huang

Hiroshima University (Japan)

Futao Huang is a Co-Investigator on CGHE Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’.

Professor Nian Cai Liu

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Nian Cai Liu is a Co-Investigator on CGHE Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’.

Kiyomi Horiuchi

Hiroshima University

Kiyomi Horiuchi is a Research Associate on CGHE Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’.

Lili Yang

University of Hong Kong

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).

Dr Lin Tian

Hunan University, China

Lin Tian is a Research Associate on CGHE Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’.

Carolina Guzman Valenzuela

Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile

Krystian Szadkowski

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

Publications

CGHE working papers

Higher education and public good: Perceptions of practitioners and policy professionals in England (CGHE working paper 100, Simon Marginson and Lili Yang, August 2023)
Public good of higher education in Japan: The changing perceptions of three actors in the post-war era (CGHE working paper 56, Kiyomi Horiuchi and Futao Huang, November 2020)
The role of higher education in generating ‘public’ and ‘common’ goods: A comparison of Sinic and Anglo-American political cultures (CGHE working paper 52, Simon Marginson and Lili Yang, January 2020)
The new geo-politics of higher education (Japanese translation) (CGHE working paper 34, translated by Aki Yonezawa with assistance from Tom Brotherhood, Simon Marginson, February 2019)
World higher education under conditions of national/global disequlibria (CGHE working paper 42, Simon Marginson, October 2018)
Local and global public good contributions of higher education in China (CGHE working paper 37, Nian Cai and Liu Lin Tian, June 2018)
The new geo-politics of higher education (CGHE working paper 34, Simon Marginson, April 2018)
The public role of higher learning in Imperial China (CGHE working paper 28, Lili Yang, October 2017)
The role of the state in university science: Russia and China compared (CGHE working paper 9, Simon Marginson, December 2016)
Global trends and their impact on Latin America: the role of the state and the private sector in the provision of higher education (CGHE working paper 4, Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela, June 2016)
Public/private in higher education: a synthesis of economic and political approaches (CGHE working paper 1, Simon Marginson, June 2016)

Additional publications

Sivistys and the public good role of universities in Finland
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, Elisa Brewis, 2023
The role of student mobility in a world in which globalism may be in retreat
presentation to Universities UK International, International Higher Education Forum, February 2023.
Higher education and public good in Chile
Higher Education_, Simon Marginson, 2023. READ TRANSCRIPT
Has the public good of higher education been emptied out? The case of England.
Higher Education, Simon Marginson and Lili Yang, 2023
The public good of higher education: a lexical-based comparison of the Chinese and Anglo-American approaches
Studies in Higher Education, Lili Yang, 2023
Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches
Globalisation, Societies and Education, Simon Marginson & Lili Yang, 2022
Tian, L., & Liu, N. C. (2022). World-class universities and global common good. In: S. Marginson & X. Xu (Eds.), Changing higher education in East Asia (pp. 85-104). London: Bloomsbury.
Tian, L., & Liu, N. C. (2021). Inward international students in China and their contributions to global common goods. Higher Education, 81, 197-217.
Japan’s higher education and the public good
Higher Education, Futao Huang, Tsukasa Daizen, Lilan Chen, and Kiyomi Horiuchi, August 2021
Similarities and differences between notions of ‘public’ in the Sinic and liberal Anglo-American traditions, and the implications for higher education
Doctoral thesis, Lili Yang, 2020
Higher education and public good in East and West
CGHE Research Findings 5, Simon Marginson and Lili Yang, June 2020
Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., Barnett, R., Zavala, R. & Morales, K. (2020). The State, Public Universities and Public Goods: Time for a New Settlement—The – Case of Chile. Higher Education Policy. 35 (2), 375–396. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-020-00216-8
C. Callender, W. Locke and & S. Marginson (eds.) (2020). Changing Higher Education for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.
Marginson, S. (2020). The world research system: Expansion, diversification, network and hierarchy. In C. Callender, W. Locke and & S. Marginson (eds.), Changing Higher Education for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.
Marginson, S. and Yang, L. (2020). China meets Anglo-America on the New Silk Road: A comparison of state, society, self and higher education. In M. C. van der Wende, W. Kirby, N. Liu, S. Marginson (eds.), China and Europe on the New Silk Road: Connecting universities across Eurasia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marginson, S. (2020). Public and common goods in higher education: A conceptual approach. In C. Callender, W. Locke and & S. Marginson (eds.), Changing Higher Education for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.
Tian, L. and Liu, N. C. (2020). Higher education in China: Rethinking it as a common good. In C. Callender, W. Locke and & S. Marginson (eds.), Changing Higher Education for a Changing World. London: Bloomsbury.
Carpentier, V., & Courtois, A. (2020). Public good in French universities: principles and practice of the ‘republican’ model. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-18. doi:10.1080/03057925.2020.1722943
The public good and accepting inbound international students in Japan
Higher Education, Kiyomi Horiuchi and Futao Huang, June 2019
Marginson, S. (2019). Global cooperation and national competition in the World-Class University sector. In Y. Wu, Q. Wang and N. Liu (eds.), World-Class Universities: towards a global common good and seeking national and institutional contributions, pp. 13-55. Leiden: Brill.
Xu, X. (2019). China ‘goes out’ in a centre-periphery world: Incentivising international publications in the humanities and social sciences. Higher Education.
Xu, X. (2019). Performing ‘under the baton of administrative power’? Chinese academics’ responses to incentives for international publications. Research Evaluation.
Szadkowski, K. and Krzeski, J. (2019). Political ontologies of the future university: individual, public, common. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 1(3).
Tian, L. and Liu, N. C. (2019). Rethinking higher education in China as a common good. Higher Education, 77 (4), pp. 623-640.
Szadkowski, K. (2018). Higher Education as the Common: A conceptual approach. Higher Education.
Marginson, S. (2018). Higher Education as Self-Formation
Inaugural Professorial Lecture at the UCL Institute of Education, IOE Press
Marginson, S. (2017). Obschestvennye blaga, proizvodimye v vysshikh uchebnykh zavedeniyakh Rossii [The public good created by higher educational institutions in Russia]. Вопросы образования [Educational Studies Moscow], 3, pp. 8-36. DOI: 10.17323/1814-9545-2017-3-9-36
Marginson, S. (2016). Foreword: The partial shift from public to private goods in UK higher education. London Review of Education, 14 (1), pp. 4-10.
Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and the Common Good. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing.
Marginson, S. (2016). Private/public in higher education: a synthesis of economic and political approaches
Studies in Higher Education, April 2016

Translation of work published in English

Marginson, S. (2016). To, co publiczne i prywatnew szkolnictwie wyższym. Synteza podejścia ekonomicznego i politycznego. Nauka i Szkolnictwo Wyższe, 48 (2), pp. 17-42 (2016). [Translation of ‘Private/public in higher education: A synthesis of economic and political approaches’, Studies in Higher Education.] In Polish. Translated by Krystian Szadkowski. Published online here.