Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region: Reflecting the Emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution 3031160649, 9783031160646

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
References
Chapter 1: Reassessing the Nature and Dynamics of Student Mobility Within Asia Pacific Higher Education
Introduction
Some Predominant Push/Pull Factors
Quality
Demographics and Capacity
Targeted Government-Initiated Pull Factors
Part II: Confounding Factors
Nationalism Versus Globalization and the “New” Information Revolution
The Return of Exclusionary Nationalism
AI and Work 4.0
So What? Where Does This Take Us?
Conclusion
References
Part I: The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Chapter 2: The Changing Roles of University Education in the Age of Innovation: Implications from China and Japan
Introduction
Background
Policy Frameworks in Response to the 4th IR in China and Japan
China
Japan
Responses of Higher Education Toward New Demands in the Context of the 4th IR: Cases of China and Japan
China
Japan
Global Scenarios of University Education: Implications from the Two Case Countries
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: The Impact and Implications of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in Asia Pacific Region
Introduction
The 4th Industrial Revolution Policy in Asia Pacific
Student Mobility Examined at Three Levels
Multilateral Mobility
National Mobility
Student Mobility as an Institutional Practice
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Education Economics of Student Mobility in Asia-Pacific and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Introduction
Literature Review: Impacts Brought About by the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Increase of Global Knowledge Stock and its Obsolescence
Enhancing Global Connectivity Without Physical Movement
Increasing Inequality
Economic Model of Studying Abroad
Costs and Utilities
Implications
Impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in Asia-Pacific
Possible Changes in Demands for Studying Abroad
Chances and Risks for Higher Education Institutions in Asia-Pacific
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Linking Higher Education to Patterns of Job Mobility and Emergent Technological Change
Introduction
New Types of Practical Learning Opportunities Within the Changing Environment
Pedagogy and Teaching Methods Influenced by 4IR
Varied Aspects of Organizational Behavior of Universities
Internationalization and Cross-border Education
Adaptive Design of Curriculum for 4IR and Lifelong Learning
Private Sector Engagement with HE Processes as Affected by the Dynamics of 4.0
Conclusion
References
Part II: Direct Impacts of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Higher Education as a Social Enterprise
Chapter 6: Reassessing the Overall Trends of the Push and Pull Factors in Student Mobility Under the Work 4.0 Framework
Introduction
Transformations in Student Mobility Trends
Push and Pull Factors in Student Mobility
Analysis of Push and Pull Factors in Student Mobility Toward Work 4.0 Era
Scenarios for Student Mobility Under the Work 4.0
References
Chapter 7: Changing Dynamics Occurring Within Asia Pacific Student Mobility
Introduction
Organizational Behavior of Universities and International Student Mobility
Trends of Organizational Structures of International Student Mobility in Asia
English as a Medium of Instruction
Dual and Joint Degree Programs
Consortia and University Networks
The Competitive-Cooperative Agenda
Implications for Work 4.0
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Higher Education Trends in Transforming the Teaching Experience
Trends in Higher Education Pedagogies Related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Definition of Pedagogy
Pedagogical Trends Related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Trend #1: Changes in the Purpose of Teaching
Trend #2: Changes in Teaching Settings and Methods
Trend #3 Changes in the Teaching of Content
Trend #4 Changes in Assessment and Feedback
Trend #5 Changes in the Role of Teachers
New Modalities of Distance Education
Massive Open Online Courses
Mobile Learning
Trends in Non-formal Education Related to the Fourth Industry Revolution
Trends in Collaborative Teaching Initiatives
Interdisciplinary Teaching Trends
Role New Devices/Technology Play Out of AI-Influenced Work 4.0 Dynamics
The Role of AI in Teaching and Learning
Personalized Learning and Tutoring Support
Voice-Assistant Technology
The Automation of Non-teaching Tasks
The Role of AI in Research and Innovation
The Role of AI in Social Services and Development
Role of Professional Development Centers in Transforming the Teacher Experience
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: The Global Market for Digital Educational Content and its Impact on Institutional Strategy, Program Design and Teaching Practice
Introduction
The Demand Side: Digital Transformation of Higher Education
Evolution of Educational Technology
Evolution of Educational Content
Discoverability and the Evolution of Educational Platforms
The Supply Side: Commercial Viability of Digital Content
Student-Licensed Content
University-Licensed Content
Free Content
Implications for Institutions, Program Design and Teaching Practice
References
Part III: Transformative Impacts of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region
Chapter 10: Changing Certification Modalities: The Tokyo Convention and Its Impacts
Cross-Border Mobility and Foreign Credential Evaluation
Drivers of FCE: ENIC-NARIC Network and FCE Service Providers
FCE in Asia: The Case of Japan
Tokyo Convention and Its Impact
Basic Principles and “Substantial Differences”
Recognition of Qualifications Obtained Through Non-traditional Modes, Partial Studies and Qualifications Held by Refugees
Implications of the Tokyo Convention: A New Modality of Credential Evaluation
Digitization of Credentials: The Groningen Declaration
Conclusion: Opportunities and Challenges in Asia and the Pacific
References
Chapter 11: Conclusion
Five Propositions
References
Index

Citation preview

INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION

Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region Reflecting the Emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution Edited by Shingo Ashizawa Deane E. Neubauer

International and Development Education Series Editors

W. James Jacob Collaborative Brain Trust American Fork, UT, USA Deane E. Neubauer East-West Center Honolulu, HI, USA

The International and Development Education Series focuses on the complementary areas of comparative, international, and development education. Books emphasize a number of topics ranging from key higher education issues, trends, and reforms to examinations of national education systems, social theories, and development education initiatives. Local, national, regional, and global volumes (single authored and edited collections) constitute the breadth of the series and offer potential contributors a great deal of latitude based on interests and cutting-edge research. The series is supported by a strong network of international scholars and development professionals who serve on the International and Development Education Advisory Board and participate in the selection and review process for manuscript development. SERIES EDITORS W. James Jacob, FamilySearch International Deane E. Neubauer, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and East-West Center INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Clementina Acedo, Webster University, Switzerland Philip G. Altbach, Boston University, USA N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Cornell University, USA Carlos E. Blanco, Universidad Central de Venezuela Sheng Yao Cheng, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan Evelyn Coxon, University of Auckland, New Zealand Edith Gnanadass, University of Memphis, USA Wendy Griswold, University of Memphis, USA Ruth Hayhoe, University of Toronto, Canada Yuto Kitamura, University of Tokyo, Japan Jing Liu, Tohoku University, Japan Wanhua Ma, Peking University, China Ka Ho Mok, Lingnan University, China Christine Musselin, Sciences Po, France Yusuf K. Nsubuga, Ministry of Education and Sports, Uganda Namgi Park, Gwangju National University of Education, Republic of Korea Val D. Rust, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Suparno, State University of Malang, Indonesia Xi Wang, University of Pittsburgh, USA John C. Weidman, University of Pittsburgh, USA Weiyan Xiong, Lingnan University, China Sung-Sang Yoo, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea Husam Zaman, UNESCO/Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education, Saudi Arabia Collaborative Brain Trust 45 W South Temple, #307, Salt Lake City, UT 84010, USA Asian Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership East-West Center1601 EastWest Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA

Shingo Ashizawa  •  Deane E. Neubauer Editors

Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region Reflecting the Emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution

Editors Shingo Ashizawa Kansai University of International Studies Kobe, Hyogo, Japan

Deane E. Neubauer University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, HI, USA

ISSN 2731-6424     ISSN 2731-6432 (electronic) International and Development Education ISBN 978-3-031-16064-6    ISBN 978-3-031-16065-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16065-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: MirageC/moment/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Reassessing  the Nature and Dynamics of Student Mobility Within Asia Pacific Higher Education  1 Deane E. Neubauer and Shingo Ashizawa Part I The Fourth Industrial Revolution  21 2 The  Changing Roles of University Education in the Age of Innovation: Implications from China and Japan 23 Lili Shi and Akiyoshi Yonezawa 3 The  Impact and Implications of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in Asia Pacific Region 49 Nopraenue S. Dhirathiti 4 Education  Economics of Student Mobility in Asia-Pacific and the Fourth Industrial Revolution 73 Takashi Sekiyama 5 Linking  Higher Education to Patterns of Job Mobility and Emergent Technological Change 89 Prompilai Buasuwan and Meechai Orsuwan

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Contents

Part II Direct Impacts of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Higher Education as a Social Enterprise 107 6 Reassessing  the Overall Trends of the Push and Pull Factors in Student Mobility Under the Work 4.0 Framework109 Shingo Hanada 7 Changing  Dynamics Occurring Within Asia Pacific Student Mobility129 Sarah R. Asada 8 Higher  Education Trends in Transforming the Teaching Experience147 W. James Jacob and Xi Wang 9 The  Global Market for Digital Educational Content and its Impact on Institutional Strategy, Program Design and Teaching Practice169 Christopher Ziguras Part III Transformative Impacts of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region 191 10 Changing  Certification Modalities: The Tokyo Convention and Its Impacts193 Shingo Ashizawa 11 Conclusion215 Deane E. Neubauer and Shingo Ashizawa Index223

Notes on Contributors

Sarah R. Asada  is an associate professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Kyoritsu Women’s University, Japan, and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research spans the internationalization of higher education, with a focus on international academic mobility and international relations. Her book, 50 Years of US Study Abroad Students: Japan as a Gateway to Asia and Beyond (2020), is the recipient of the 2020 Best Book Award from the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Study Abroad and International Student Mobility SIG. Shingo Ashizawa  is a professor and vice president at Kansai University of International Studies in Kobe, Japan. His research involves foreign credential evaluation, micro-credential and the comparative study of the National Qualifications Framework. He also leads several joint research projects funded by Japanese government agencies and the Toyota Foundation. Prompilai  Buasuwan is an associate professor in the Program of Educational Administration at the College of Education, Kasetsart University, Thailand. Her research interests focus on development and international education, innovation and educational leadership and educational policy analysis and evaluation. She has done various projects with international organizations, research funding agencies, university networks and consortiums. In 2019, she received the Outstanding Emerald Literati Award from Emerald Publishing on Rethinking Thai Higher Education for Thailand 4.0. vii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nopraenue S. Dhirathiti  is the Vice President for International Relations and Corporate Communication at the Office of the President and also Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration in the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Mahidol University, Thailand. Her current research interest is in coproduction in public policy focusing on lifelong learning for elderly people as well as other areas of public policy. The work experience she has is much related to the harmonization and internationalization of higher education. She worked at Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization Regional Center Specializing in Higher Education Development (SEAMEO RIHED), the ASEAN University Network (AUN) Secretariat before joining Mahidol. Shingo  Hanada  is an associate professor in the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies at Toyo University, Japan. His research interests include international education exchange. W.  James  Jacob is Asia Pacific Multi-Country General Manager at FamilySearch International. FamilySearch is the largest genealogical organization in the world. Prior to this, he held several senior higher education leadership positions, including the Vice President of Innovation and International at Collaborative Brain Trust and as a leadership faculty member and Director of the Institute for International Studies in Education at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a results-oriented senior manager and researcher specializing in strategic planning, quality assurance, professional development, community engagement and change management. He is the co-editor of the International and Development Education book series with Palgrave Macmillan and has written extensively on comparative, international and development education topics with an emphasis on higher education leadership. Jacob holds Master’s Degrees in Organizational Behavior (Marriott School of Management) and International Area Studies (Kennedy Center for International Studies) from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles. Deane E. Neubauer  is a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. He also currently serves as the associate director of the Asia Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership (APHERP), headquartered at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, which conducts a wide range of policy-focused research with a special focus on higher education.

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Meechai  Orsuwan is an assistant professor at the College of Education, Kasetsart University, Thailand. His research interests focus on the economics of education, educational policy and higher education. He has previously performed teaching and consulting work related to the learning experience of at-risk and vulnerable students in the US, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Takashi  Sekiyama is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at Kyoto University, Japan. His research includes global environmental politics and international movement of human resources. Lili Shi  is a lecturer at the School for Continuing Education, Shanghai International Studies University, China. Her research focuses mainly on comparative higher education with particular interest in university-­ industry collaborations and lifelong education. She is currently leading a research project supported by the Humanities and Social Science Youth Fund of Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China. Xi  Wang  is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Wang has also served as Program Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh Institute for International Studies in Education for the last five years. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Curriculum Studies. Wang’s research interests include comparative, international, and development education, educational technology, MOOCs, teacher professional development, and educational reform. Her dissertation topic is the use of MOOCs in teachers’ professional development, through which she aims to explore teachers’ characteristics and reasons to pursue professional development through MOOCs and learn about their effectiveness in meeting professional development goals. Akiyoshi Yonezawa  is a professor and Vice-Director at the International Strategy Office, Tohoku University, Japan. With a background in sociology, he mainly conducts research on comparative higher education policy—especially focusing on world-class universities, internationalization and public-private relationships in higher education. He established his expertise in higher education policy and management through working experience at Nagoya University, OECD and the University of Tokyo among others. He is an editorial board member of Higher Education Quarterly and an advisory board member for Higher Education and International Higher Education. He is a board member at Japan

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Notes on Contributors

Association of Higher Education Research, Japan Comparative Education Society and Japan Society for Educational Sociology. His recent co-edited book Researching Higher Education in Asia (2018) was granted the “Best Book Award 2019” from the Comparative and International Education Society (SIG Higher Education). Christopher Ziguras  is Professor of Global Studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the globalization of education, particularly the ways in which regulatory agencies, markets, education providers and other actors shape the cross-border provision of higher education. He is a past president of the International Education Association of Australia and currently is involved with the Australian Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Study Centre, the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and the University of Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

The Global Convention and Regional Conventions on the Recognition of Academic Qualifications in Higher Education by UNESCO The operation and funding of FCE agencies by country The concept of review for substantial differences in FCE. (Source: The EAR Manual, Chapter 10, European Area of Recognition (EAR) Project, Nuffic (2012))

196 200 204

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List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 10.1

Trends in International Education Market Shares (2000, 2010, 2016) percentage of all foreign tertiary students enrolled, by destination112 Study abroad destinations of international students from East Asia and the Pacific 114 Top five countries of origin and sending countries as of January 2020115 Pull factors comparison before/after 1990s 120 Statements in Tokyo Convention (non-traditional modes, recognition of partial studies and prior studies) 205

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Introduction

This volume was conceived and developed over a two-year period beginning in October 2018 at the annual meeting of the University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific Organization in Osaka, Japan. At that time the most pressing challenge facing the representatives constituting this multi-­ national organization that concerned the mobility of high education students throughout the Pacific was the overall structural change beginning to emerge in the participating nations being driven by the dynamics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Work 4.0. Within this frame of reference contributors set about examining both the nature of these changing structural dynamics and their likely differential impacts across the region. Contributor chapters were just being initially assessed in January 2020 when the world was beset by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As we can see by the variety of individual interpretations of those events and the brief, but turbulent subsequent history of differential reactions throughout the world to the pandemic, both its nature and how it may and “should” play out throughout the world are subjects open to significant continued contestation and interpretation. At one level, it is clear from the cumulative, daily reports of the epidemic’s course throughout the world

The publication process was coordinated and supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), which is a part of JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) funding. The project name is “The Role of University Networks in Student Mobility in Asia and the Pacific—Aiming to Broaden the Impact of UMAP (University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific).” xv

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Introduction

that how it is received and dealt with has been and will continue to be a matter of difference as each country will, for better or ill, fashion a response suitable for its prevailing climate of political, social and economic forces. At another level, it is also clear that genuine pandemics tend to be on the level of “once in a century” events as exemplified by the most common “recent” predecessor, the 1919 flu epidemic (Spinney 2017). Thus, at this point in time we find ourselves across the world engaged in the vortex of these two powerful forces: the disruptive engagements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and those of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of these “forces” is proceeding, as it were, by its own interior “logics” and as such will affect and remake societies throughout the world. In addition, however, they will “engage” each other synergistically in ways that will be undoubtedly novel and to some degree unexpected and unpredictable, a dimension already much in evidence as education at all levels has been “reinventing itself” to deal with both the possibilities and the difficulties of non-face-to-face education. Even as we are “into” the still early months of the current pandemic, it is clear that its consequences will be “life” and “history” changing. As this is being written, for example, Great Britain has indicated that its economy may shrink by 35% in the coming year, the largest negative impact since World War II. Another projection is that it could suffer the largest relative setback since the onset of the seventeenth century. Similar projections are being made throughout the world as it becomes clear that this pandemic is presenting through the world in successive “waves,” each of which triggers new responses. Even as it is only a matter of somewhat ill-informed projections to attempt assessments of how overall social functions will be performed at various stages of the pandemic in the coming months and years, it is clear that higher education as a whole is undergoing substantial changes and will continue to do so as the pandemic proceeds and moves to further stages. In the chapters that follow we will point to these emergent responses to the pandemic in the several countries on which we focus. These pandemic-related events, of course, are taking place within the setting that has been advanced in the past half dozen years or so concerning the varied impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, powered by rapidly advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI), the original focus of the meetings that gave rise to this volume. With very little effort one can bring forward representatives of a rapidly growing literature that seeks to preview and outline the range of disruptive consequences likely to flow from the dynamics embedded within it. For example, in a widely cited recent

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work Daniel Susskind has suggested that within a reasonably near future, 40% of existing jobs will “disappear” to be replaced by versions of automated processes (Susskind 2020). In an earlier “alert” provided by Alec Ross (2016), he underscored the task of his volume: This book explores the industries that will drive the next 20 years of change to our economies and societies … the key industries of the future—robotics, advanced life sciences, the code-ification of money, cybersecurity and big data—as well as the geopolitical, cultural, and generational contexts out of which they are emerging. (p. 12)

Since then, the literature on AI and its possible social consequences has continued to rapidly expand, and indeed it was the intersection between this expanding literature and the consequential impacts on higher education that provided the stimulus for this volume. In the initial organizing paper, contributors were encouraged to make use of their own experiences and those of the higher education institutions with which they were familiar to begin an informed inquiry into the possible eventual consequences of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for such institutions. It is our view that the impacts of the pandemic warrant a significant review of this task. By way of example, the initial papers developed for this volume focused on the impacts of AI having wide and many varied consequences that ranged, for example, from a movement away from the commitment to physical classroom presence, one for which there would be a substantial commitment within a multi-national higher education mobility endeavor such as University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP), to one in which various “virtual” modalities might be engaged on either a partial or a complete basis to create a substantial and realistic learning experience for students across borders. A year ago, this seemed like a process that might grow and be adopted incrementally within the accustomed routines of higher education institutions for which changes in routines and procedures tended to come slowly and with considerable caution. Within the dynamics of the pandemic, as we have learned, higher education institutions throughout the world were forced either to cancel current in-place face-to-face instruction or to transform them quickly and completely to distance modalities and, irrespective of the expressed view of both instructors and students alike that doing so has been a not entirely satisfying experience.

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Introduction

An even more critical issue that has become increasingly apparent as the pandemic has progressed is the extensive financial crisis that is engulfing all of higher education. Sorting out this dimension of impact is a matter of the first order, as it will, no doubt, create the context for how all of higher education within the region will function in the near and more distant future. Neubauer and Ashizawa lead the discussion of these issues with an introductory chapter (Chap. 1) in which they provide an overall reassessment of student mobility with Asia Pacific Higher Education, developing a description and analysis (as will some other contributors as well) of the push and pull factors that have been present in such mobility and offering some initial suggestions of how these are beginning to change both in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and as articulated and impacted in various ways by the dynamics of the pandemic. In doing so they give particular attention to a small but important range of “macro factors” that were in the process of impacting regional higher education dynamics even before the pandemic, including a range of special governmental-­initiated pull factors by regional “players” seeking to draw larger numbers of students toward their higher education systems, a dynamic most prevalent in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan. The chapter also gives focus to a set of macro factors that have arisen to reshape the more familiar push and pull factors that have characterized regional dynamics prior to the most recent 4–7 years, namely the continuing emergent tensions between a resurgent nationalism and an ever-changing and persistent pattern of globalization, which in the broadest terms have created a pervasive context for the emergent information revolution that the volume explores across the specific countries chosen for this examination. In Chap. 2, Lili Shi and Akiyoshi Yonezawa examine the changing roles of university education in the context of these dynamics, focusing on their manifestations in China and Japan. They focus their examination on the varying ways in which university-industry collaborations are taking place within the knowledge industry sector. In their review the emphasis on university-industry linkages has changed from one focused on vocational training toward systems that explore how students and academics are engaged directly in the processes of knowledge creation and innovation, concluding that this engagement itself is becoming a “central value” in these transforming systems of education. Additional attention is given to the role that industries themselves are playing in engaging the education systems of both countries to affect how government and industry can

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engage in creating cultures of educational transition to new industrial realities. In Chap. 3 Nopraenue S. Dhirathiti explores the varied ways in which Work 4.0 is affecting, both directly and indirectly, student mobility across the Asia Pacific region. She organizes this investigation by first seeking to establish the policy framework and rhetoric within which Work 4.0 is occurring and from that to extract the range of influence that the resulting and changing paradigms of learning is having on student mobility. While providing and exploring broad avenues of inquiry for these developments, she focuses directly and specifically on the ways in which various countries, for example, Thailand, China and Taiwan, have sought to confront and direct these forces, through such emerging policy structures as Thailand 4.0, Made in China 2025 and Productivity 4.0. In addressing such issues directly, she explores the “so-called period of VUCADEMIA,” which represents VUCA=volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Her primary argument is that given the myriad of demands that are impacting higher education institutions, including those for “access and accountability, fiscal austerity, and responsiveness to an unpredictable but connected world, all in the context of diminished resources and a pronounced demographic shift to an aging population,” higher education must become nimble and adaptive to meet the range and extension of the challenges posed by Work 4.0. In Chap. 4 Takashi Sekiyama shifts the focus to the fundamental issue of the education economics of student mobility and seeks to assess them in the context of Work 4.0. In doing so, he focuses on two distinct dimensions: a consumption function is represented in the fulfillment of individual intellectual desires and an investment function in the creation of human capital through the education process. He raises the fundamental question of how the Fourth Industrial Revolution may change the cost-­ utility function of studying abroad and seeks to delineate the challenges faced both by students engaged in the process and by the institutions that need to be aware of the constantly changing dynamics of international student exchanges and accommodate them accordingly within both the attractions and the limitations of their historic and transforming capabilities. Complicating all of this, Sekiyama emphasizes, is the need to conduct these complex dynamics within the framework of adapting to the “new realities” imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 5 shifts the focus further to Thailand, where Prompilai Buasuwan and Meechai Orsuwan explore the variety of ways in which

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higher education institutions can offer new types of practical learning opportunities which may provide new pathways into the emerging workforces of the countries in which they occur. These, they make clear, involve varied transformations in both existing pedagogies and teaching modalities, opportunities that are differentially achieved across the varying regions of Thailand. These include transformations influenced by Work 4.0, but are not limited to distance education, non-formal education, joint teaching and AI-assisted learning. Their review emphasizes the continuous nature of these changes stimulated both by outcomes and distributions of changing technologies and by the complex political dynamics that exist within the broader society as well. They view their review as focused on a determination of whether these changes are being “fitted into” the overall changing academic environment or are in fact being displaced by other elements within the broader context of educational change. In Chap. 6, Shingo Hanada invites the reader to “reassess” the full range of push/pull factors at work in the process of student mobility in the Asia Pacific region as they are being transformed by Work 4.0. In engaging the reader in this transformation he reminds us that viewed within its broader historical perspective significant changes have come and gone along the decades of transformation in these processes, dating from the 1960s to the present, a time frame that embraces the complex dynamics of de-colonialization throughout Asia accompanied by the subsequent transformations brought about that multiple institutional organizational efforts have accomplished. In the process the traditional East to West transcontinental mobility patterns between the Asia Pacific region and Europe and North America have been supplanted to a significant degree by a new East to East mobility in which Asia Pacific students are looking toward Asia Pacific higher education institutions as their preferred destination. Within this overall transforming process is an equally complex set of engagements in which students make a determination to move within the Asia Pacific region for their educational experiences rather than remain within their home countries, a complex dynamic given the considerable efforts that are taking place throughout the region to make the higher educational experience more attractive to all, not least in terms of its presumptive benefits for engaging the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Chap. 7, Sarah R. Asada provides a broad perspective on the changing dynamics of Asia Pacific student mobility within the emergent Fourth Industrial Revolution context. She begins by reviewing the overall organizational behavior of universities in regard to international student

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mobility, noting that while the “ad-hoc and fragmented international dimensions of universities are evident throughout history” the internationalization of higher education has been “more strategic, explicit, and comprehensive” from the 1990s on. This shift has included a “crisscross” engagement of such institutions between the “at-home” and “abroad” dimensions of internationalization. The resulting “environment” of international higher education defines the reality that Asia has become the center of the global landscape for student mobility, a process that has been spurred by the advent of the knowledge society and the formalization of governmental and societal responses to it throughout the region. One result of this process has been the perception of the comparative advantage(s) one society may possess over another, creating a powerful set of incentives that can and do propel student mobility. Within this framework she provides an extensive review of the trends of organizational structures that frame student mobility and the policies that actuate it. In Chap. 8, W. James Jacob and Xi Wang turn our attention to how the dynamics of Work 4.0 are transforming the teaching experience as a result of these emergent technologies. They explore what they see as the constantly developing range of new and revised pedagogy and teaching methods that are emerging from the varied dimensions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These include, but by their estimate “in no way” are limited by, “new modalities of distance learning, non-formal education, collaborative teaching, interdisciplinary curricula and so on.” They give particular attention to the role being placed by novel devices and technologies emerging out of the AI-Work 4.0 dynamics. They emphasize the ways that higher education institutions are increasingly organized and operating and look toward the further transformations that may result from these emergent technologies. In Chap. 9 Christopher Ziguras reaches into the vast and unfolding universe of digital content across its many and proliferating platforms and queries the relatively slow pace of higher education institutions in adopting them on a scale that one would presume commensurate with the rate of innovation that has characterized them. In so doing, he both contributes very usefully to our collective understanding of the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon and alerts us to the potency of the change dynamics that underlie the technologies that have been a ready product of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and given stimulation of variation and usage by the COVID-19 pandemic including those of his own university.

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Introduction

Chapter 10 by Shingo Ashizawa ties the considerable global efforts to ensure the mobility of students internationally to the more recent impacts of the pandemic in the broader context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution through a detailed examination of how the recently adopted Tokyo Convention seeks to bring Japan into a closer linkage with other nations throughout the world. For much of the past several decades, Japan lagged behind other nations in terms of the means by which it facilitated the entry of international students into its higher education system. The Tokyo Convention seeks to remove many of these historical barriers to international movement, even as the overall dynamics of student mobility in general are placed on a new course by these unique structural disruptors. The final chapter (Chap. 11) by the editors seeks to extract from the considerable diversity of these chapters a set of propositions that summarize some of the many factors currently impinging on and framing student mobility in the Asia Pacific.

References Ross, Alec (2016) The Industries of the Future. New York: Simon and Schuster. Spinney, Laura (2017). Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. New York: Hachette Book Group. Suskind, Daniel (2020). A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond to it.

CHAPTER 1

Reassessing the Nature and Dynamics of Student Mobility Within Asia Pacific Higher Education Deane E. Neubauer and Shingo Ashizawa

Introduction In one way or another the process of the cross-border movement (mobility) of students has engaged combinations of what have been commonly viewed as “push” and “pull” factors, which in turn tend to operate as reciprocals of each other. Over the past several decades throughout Asia these factors have established a form of structural dynamic that has come to be accepted as the predominant process of student mobility within the Asia Pacific region and with others beyond. Beyond these dynamics, within which government and regional policies have been framed and operated,

D. E. Neubauer (*) University of Hawaii, Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Ashizawa Kansai University of International Studies, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Ashizawa, D. E. Neubauer (eds.), Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16065-3_1

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three “extra-regional” forces have begun to emerge: namely (1) the rise of varieties of nationalism within what was until recently accepted as a dominant structure of globalization; (2) the onset of what has come to be termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Work 4.0) and (3) within these progressions, the emergence of what is being seen as the twenty-first-­ century university. Each of these, we assert, will come to affect in various ways both the concept of push/pull factors in Asia Pacific student migration such that within the quite near future prevailing notions of what these are and how they operate will require modification. This chapter provides a brief introduction of each of these change dynamics and offers a few insights into how their individual and collective impacts may affect higher education within the Asia Pacific Region with illustrative instances focused on Japan as an extant case in point.

Some Predominant Push/Pull Factors Quality Quality within higher education environments has historically been one of the most difficult “things” to measure and the literature is replete with various approaches. Over the past two decades, this very difficulty in specification has led to a number of “reductionist” approaches that seek to establish and legitimate quantitative approaches, the most obvious perhaps being the ranking phenomenon, to which the higher education community has become increasingly subject and committed. (For a useful analysis and critique see Marginson and Van der Wende 2007.) Where quality is perceived to be lacking in relative terms, its absence serves as a push factor, and the converse: where it is perceived to exist (especially when conceptualized in measurable terms such as rankings and to a lesser degree accreditation), it serves as a pull factor. As a fundamental dynamic that has come to underlie all of Asia Pacific higher education, it could be argued to be the most determinative of factors, especially to the extent that an effort to achieve and sustain rankings comes to be a basic strategy for government financial investment (World Economic Forum 2015), a view that is increasingly widely accepted. The overall governmental goal, of course, is where an absence of relative quality exists as a push factor, to utilize targeted governmental investment to convert it to a pull factor, and thereby gain both social capital and income from attracting non-domestic students. Over the past several

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decades we have witnessed a situation in which various regional “higher education capacity banks,” most notably Australia and New Zealand, have been able to utilize their relative advantage as higher education systems with a strong historical investment base (with resulting higher quality) to “floor” their higher educational systems with external financial flows Choudaha and Hu 2016). This dynamic appears also in the explicit strategy of some nations to establish themselves as education “hubs.” Both of these instances, it needs to be pointed out, are undergoing modification to account for the massive interruption of student flows due to the Pandemic, most notably with Asian students not traveling to many of their former destinations of choice: most particularly the movement of students from China and India to Australia, North America and European destinations. (In particular see: Altbach and de Wit 2020.) Demographics and Capacity Demographics across the Asia Pacific Region have been a dynamic change vector over the past five or so decades as multiple societies have experienced demographic booms followed by declining birth rates and significantly aging populations (e.g. Japan, Korea and more recently China and Thailand). In a pattern largely replicable throughout the region, these dynamics have resulted in situations in which countries have initially experienced a shortage of higher education capacity that has often triggered a rapid expansion of higher education systems, to be followed by a period of “overshoot,” reflected in excess capacity. In this lower birthrate stage, systems tend both to contract and in turn to shift their mobility strategies from a push mode—sending out in the effort to obtain “brain gain” that can be employed in national development—to a pull mode. In this modality a significant proportion of what comes to be viewed as “excess” capacity seeks to be targeted toward inbound students, a pattern that has become increasingly common in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. In another version of these system dynamics, nations that had met their initial demographic challenges have sought to develop new and/or additional pull vectors with targeted expansions in graduate education (UNESCO 2014). As suggested above, these dynamics are basically inseparable from the overall nature of quality factors and the array of associated dynamics. As such, the role of Quality Assurance entities works in parallel with other governmental efforts to develop a holistic approach to this goal and to supply a “currency” for the process. Over time the process seeks to develop

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modalities of “denominated exchange” for the process, including but not limited to common definitions and recognition of certification (a process in which international quality agencies play a major role) and ultimately notions of mutual recognition. In 2018 as detailed in Chap. 10, Japan and Korea completed this process in an agreement known as the Tokyo Convention joining Australia, New Zealand and China in ratifying the treaty. In announcing the agreement, Libing Wang, head of UNESCO’s Section for Educational Innovation and Skills Development emphasized its role in “promoting fair and transparent practices in cross-border mobility and recognition across, formal and non-formal leading countries in Asia and the Pacific” (PIE News 2018). The act of more formally linking Australia to student migration within the broader Pacific is seen as a major benefit of the agreement. Targeted Government-Initiated Pull Factors Over the past two decades, major governments in the region, most notably China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan have sought to pursue explicit courses of targeted higher education expansion that would combine the capacity of their better universities to pursue programs within the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines, and by so doing identify such universities as both highly desirable sources of value for incoming students while simultaneously responding to the constant need within their economies to develop globally competitive manufacturing and services. When such programs have functioned properly, the results have been apparent within the ability of firms to be globally competitive especially in terms of large-scale exports of both goods and services, and have proved significant in many instances of providing substantial net income for the higher education sector. Other efforts have included the decision on the part of several regional countries to explicitly establish themselves as regional education hubs— most notably Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia—and to signal the particular quality of their “top” universities through membership in organizations that celebrate both excellence and knowledge exchange. These have included the Asia Universities Alliance,1 The ASEAN University Network and University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP). One useful thread of investigation, pursued in this volume, is examining various approaches to international cooperation that explore multiple approaches to student exchange and mobility and the various factors that

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recommend one model over another. These investigations provide the opportunity to constructively critique the pluses and minuses of current methods of cooperation on student mobility. A further thread of the following chapters is the review of how particular innovations within Japan may be adopted to give participation in its higher education system a value-added component that would clearly differentiate it from other regional systems. This is, in effect, what the education hubs mentioned above have sought to do in reaching out to institutions beyond their own national reach for participation. And, while these developments are not new, it is useful to see them as part of a relentless dynamic within higher education as shifts in what has been characterized as its changing ecology create constantly new environments for such innovation.2 A challenge for all higher education entities seeking to operate within this realm is confronting innovation and adaptation by bureaucratic activities at both governmental and higher education levels, and it is useful to seek differentiation among attempts at improving mobility flows by assessing how they are affected by differentiated regulatory regimes. Overall, national investment in global higher education has been significantly on the increase, with various governments, China perhaps foremost among them, making significant investments in “ramping up” their pull factors both to attract students and to provide the expertise that higher education provides the overall economy. One recent study frames global student mobility in regional terms underscoring the role in particular that China is performing and will continue to play in the region: Countries with the fastest growing economies, populations and growing middle classes in Asia, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, will dominate economic growth in the region. The Asian middle class is expected to increase from 600 million in 2010 to more than three billion by 2030, representing 66% of the total middle-class population … International student mobility by extension, will be impacted by this new economic reality … it [is] safe to predict that regional mobility will grow in importance over global mobility. (Dennis 2018)

As the next section makes clear, push and pull factors are highly dynamic and to some extent unpredictable and they become subject to other elements of social and technological change. In part their nexus lies within the structures created for both public and private education within nations, in part with the as-yet unpredictable role of emergent institutions such as

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authentically global universities (e.g. Laureate University),3 and overall are subject to both intended and unintended impacts of governmental policy and the dynamics of the political economy: domestic, regional and global, as well as eventual structural changes impelled by responses to the Pandemic. When compared to such efforts as those of China, Singapore, Malaysia, and to a lesser degree Hong Kong, in which broad and explicit efforts are taken within the framework of government policy and supported by government resources, Japan’s current approach to attracting such students may be viewed as largely conventional and it may be useful to explore some of the ways that Japan might actively develop in-migration programs that could perhaps serve to attract greater numbers of existing students or target new student categories.

Part II: Confounding Factors Nationalism Versus Globalization and the “New” Information Revolution At this point it is useful, in addition to attempting to gauge the impacts of the Pandemic on higher education and student mobility, to address two “macro” factors that numerous commentators view as of sufficient magnitude to operate as “game changers” for many of the current processes and structures that can be identified as essential to Asia Pacific higher education and certainly to the processes of student mobility addressed above, and which can be expected to alter the dynamics that have developed as a result of policies organized around the accepted notions of push/pull factors. The Return of Exclusionary Nationalism Over the past several years numerous commentators have focused on the growth of what are commonly perceived as “nativist” or “nationalist” movements, especially as embodied in the growth of a politics focused on the dynamics of migration, and have opined that this may represent an “end” to, or at the very least a fundamental turning point in, the contemporary process of globalization (see, e.g., Witt (2016) and Mauldin (2016)). Early views embodying this argument (e.g. in 2015–2016) were focused on the slowdown of global trade that had been the hallmark of

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this period of contemporary globalization and the suspicion that an economic downturn and perhaps a full-scale recession were in the offing (e.g. European Central Bank 2016). As background for such views, the rise of anti-immigrant nationalism in Europe and Great Britain’s decision to exit the European Union—a decision taken within that context—were also seen as signals that the macro forces that had framed global politics and economics over the past several decades were in a process of transformation. Standing in the wings, as it were, of these events, and certainly not predictable in mid-2016, was Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election and the advent of a new brand of American politics that would come to be formed around explicit anti-immigration and anti-free trade policies. The early months of the Trump administration provided significant evidence of these policies in its effort to ban entrance to the U.S. of citizens from designated (primarily Muslim) countries (including many students already enrolled in U.S. higher education who had left the country for one reason or another and were denied re-entry on their attempted return),4 and to exit from major pending and on-going trade relationships, notably the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement (Office of the United States Trade Representative 2017) and the call to exit or at the very least substantially modify NAFTA. These events were, of course, followed by several celebrated acts wherein the U.S. has come to levy substantial tariffs on the goods of numerous countries (most notably China) evoking what was viewed as an “all-out” trade war, one that was escalated in early September 2018.5 Frequent views from the Trump Administration have continued to frame such activities as a desire for a “tariff-free” world, an aspiration frequently condemned by the economics community as an action promoted by an understanding of global economics based on false premises, but one which as a national strategy has the effect of determining in significant measures how large countries embodying equally large trade forces can come to affect and transform each other’s economies (Rampton 2018).6 Were one to accept this narrative of the “end” or perhaps the “diminution” of contemporary globalization, it would signal at the very least an invitation to the articulation of new scenarios that seek to frame novel alternative futures for various parts of the world—certainly Asia—based on such a proposition. And, to some degree such “tentative futures” are already being offered, framed especially around various interpretations of China’s role in its promotion of the One Belt One Road policy, which many commentators outside China have interpreted as its effort to

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fundamentally economically and politically re-position itself within what has been accepted as a probable course for what some have termed Globalization 2.0. As Michael Holtz succinctly put it in reporting on the Roundtable Summit Phase One session of the Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing in May 2017: The Belt and Road Initiative gives China the opportunity to create a political and economic network based on its own rules, with the ambitious goal of establishing what Chinese state-run media have dubbed “globalization 2.0.” Mr. Xi used the forum this week to present himself as one of its leaders—and, in stark contrast to US President Trump, as an advocate for free trade. (Holtz 2017)

From yet another point of view, however, perceiving the U.S. course of anti-globalization as a determinative force within Asia’s regional development may be overlooking some of the most essential features of contemporary globalization. For example, Neubauer (2017) has suggested that even if it might be demonstrated that the pre-2016 drivers of contemporary globalization had somehow lost their formative or sustaining force within the process, this certainly does not necessarily mean that such a condition would presage a return to some previous reality within which “national virtues” or in their less palatable view of “ethnic purity” would result. From this point of view one can argue that the world is “way past” that stage, and whatever we might posit as a subsequent stage of globalization needs to be conducted within a sensible realization of the extent to which contemporary globalization has already and perhaps irreducibly changed the world, as least to the degree that this continues to be viewed through the lens of large-scale capital. To underscore this point, it is useful to consult some of the best empirical data on the varied dimensions and scope of contemporary globalization to establish a perspective. In this regard the KOF Index of Globalization has been created and maintained over the past several decades by the Swiss Economic Institute, which measures the three main dimensions of globalization—economic, social and political—over a sample of 207 countries (KOF 2020). This data source includes measures for actual economic flows and economic restrictions and includes data on information flows, data on person contacts and data on cultural proximity, including an Index of Globalization for Asia. The burden of this argument is to suggest that efforts to speculate on whatever Globalization 2.0 may turn out to be needs to be assessed within the

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extraordinarily “dense” empirical environment created by the past three decades of Globalization 1.0 especially with regard to the continuing aggregation of large-scale capital globally.7 As affecting the mobility of students within Asia, these considerations urge us to speculate on how the dynamics of push and pull factors identified above could be or will be impacted by the shifts in globalization underway in the transition from 1.0 to 2.0. In this regard, perhaps the most obvious is to examine the changes that are likely to occur in the status of the U.S. as a major vector for migration, and to a lesser degree that of selected European countries as well. As suggested above, the immediate impact of the “Trump ban” was to directly impact both existing students from such countries as well as prospective applicants.8 Perhaps the more important impact was to stifle the application intentions of then-pending students to U.S.  HEIs, and most specifically to what are commonly regarded as “second tier” institutions, notably those whose “attracting potential” is less than that of first-tier institutions. As implied above, the impact of the Pandemic on all of global higher education and that of the U.S. in particular is, as of this writing, uncertain, but early assessments of its impact on higher education structures overall suggest that the implications for so-called second-tier institutions may be especially grave. While the whole of the higher education endeavor will be undergoing change, of particular moment will be the loss of revenue, which will impact smaller and second-tier private institutions most severely (Kelchen 2020). In a bleak assessment of the Pandemic-affected status of American higher education, Warton School Professor Joni Finney in early 2020 declared: “The existing financial model of education is broken” (Finney 2020). While enrollment data for the current Fall 2018 semester has yet to be compiled, reports from the International Institute of Education for the academic year spanning 2016/2017 indicated the basic dynamic. The advent of the Trump presidency placed it in the midst of that academic year, such that the initial data were unaffected by its policies. Thus, 2016–2017 indicated that for the second consecutive year U.S. higher education hosted more than a million international students reaching a total of 1.08 million, which was also the eleventh consecutive year of increased numbers. However, indicating perhaps both the results of the positive effects of increased recruitment by Asian universities and the change in political climate, the number of new students in the fall of 2016 declined by about 10,000 to a total of 291,000—a 3% decrease (IIE 2017), marking the first decline in such numbers over the previous 12-year

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period. Subsequent surveying of this phenomenon by IIE indicated a “continued flattening” of the number of overall enrolled students. As through 2020 the Pandemic had already impacted enrollments for the academic year 2020, the Trump Administration attempted yet another targeted restriction on international students on July 6, indicating that the administration would deport students who were matriculating at colleges and universities solely by online courses, at that time a rapidly growing practice across the country for all students. When some of the most prestigious universities, most particularly Harvard and MIT immediately filed a lawsuit challenging this “arbitrary and capricious” decision, the administration backed down from this action, but its very nature is indicative of the extent to which this form of focused nationalism can impact the very concept and nature of international higher education, which has come to be taken for granted as a primary characteristic of the globalist climate that had come to be an accepted element of higher education throughout most of the world (Wilson 2020). The simple but important question posed by these events and data is whether the advent of an explicitly nationalist government in the Trump style in the U.S. will turn out to be a “structural change” factor in the way that Globalization 2.0 emerges, especially in Asia. Should this be the case, it will come to serve as a “push away” factor for students at all higher education levels and have the effect of developing as a dynamic pull factor within Asian higher education. Having made this point, one must also point out that in a manner distinctly uncharacteristic of any other post-war governments of the U.S., the Trump presidency poses fundamentally new questions about how the “education” enterprise, as it were, will continue forward in the U.S. especially in a Post-Pandemic modality. For example, Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, has made the championing of private schools for K-12 education a major part of her education agenda. Should the Trump presidency be continued by subsequent electoral victories either at the legislative level or affecting a second term, an overall education agenda with a fulcrum of antipathy toward classes of foreign students and support for public higher education could strengthen what is being presented here as a U.S. push-back factor in education migration, one that can only continue to significantly affect its role in Asian higher education mobility.

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AI and Work 4.0 In introducing the subject of the coming revolution in Artificial Intelligence and its broad economic and social effects, which he and others have termed The Fourth Industrial Revolution,9 Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, proposed a vision of its unprecedented impacts: We have yet to grasp fully the speed and breadth of this new revolution. Consider the unlimited possibilities of having billions of people connected by mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and knowledge access. Or think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technology across the physical, digital and biological worlds. (Schwab 2016, p. 7)10

As scholars and others seek to anticipate the kinds of social impacts that such fundamental changes in the information basis of society will bring, those affecting education are high on the list. For example, in 2018, the meeting of East-West Center Alumni in Seoul Il SaKong focused on some of the fundamental implications for education and in particular the higher education sector. [F]requent job changes would require genuine life-long learning and training. In this situation won’t the current four-year university system soon be obsolete? How about the present rigidly organized system of major fields, separating humanities and social science from natural sciences and engineering? The inevitability of high job mobility would require both labor market flexibility and new social safety nets for workers. The existing industry-based labor market policy needs to be reoriented toward “protecting workers, not jobs. (SaKong 2018)

Pointing to the “singular impact of the obvious” as it were, various scholars have begun to speculate on the future of the university within this “cone of innovation” that is being viewed as already underway in enacting social changes that virtually all view as irreversible, a process that has only become accelerated and given new breadth by the continued dynamics of

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the Pandemic. In a companion piece to the World Economic Forum on ASEAN at approximately the same time, Farnam Jahanian, President of Carnegie Mellon University, referenced a recent McKinsey study of a dozen technologies that are likely to drive economic change in the near future, having an estimated economic impact by 2025 of between $14 and $33 trillion a year, an amount that he estimated would make up to one-­ third of global GDP. These include the mobile internet, the automation of knowledge work, the Internet of Things, Cloud technology, advanced robotics, autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, next-generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, and renewable energy (Jahanian 2018). As president of a major U.S. university, Jahanian is, of course, keenly concerned with the implications of Work 4.0 on all of higher education: As we embrace this tech-driven economy, universities must change too, at a pace unfamiliar to higher education. While we retain our core mission of educating the next generation and cultivating new forms of knowledge, universities must also embrace our ever-expanding role in driving innovation and catalyzing economic development. Our institutions must meet the challenges of the digital revolution head on, and plan an increasingly important role in our innovation ecosystems and economies in four key ways.

These, he specified, are fostering entrepreneurship, encouraging collaboration with the private sector, promoting diversity and inclusion and exploring the nexus of technology and society (Jahanian 2018).11 In a caveat on such presumptions and predictions, at the time of this writing in 2020, a flurry of revised predictions has emerged in the U.S. and throughout the world to place such changes in the presumed near future of a post-Pandemic higher education world with a recognition that workforce transformations resulting from the disruption are likely to be quite different from those visualized in immediate-Pre-Pandemic days. From these perspectives the decline in the number and nature of four-year higher education institutions is likely to be succeeded by a rapid expansion of the role of two-year institutions faced with rapidly training a highly transitional workforce (Deming 2020). Other views embracing the likely changes across the whole of higher education globally continue to emerge as countries around the world react in their specific ways to the combined force of the Pandemic arriving soon after the technological movement toward a Fourth Industrial Revolution

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is being effected and distributed throughout the world. In various ways that are, at the time of this writing, just taking shape, significant transformations have characterized university responses. Kay Hack, writing from the U.K. in June of 2020 asserts: The skills required to survive and thrive during and after the pandemic will be based on uniquely human qualities—emotional intelligence, compassion and empathy, and the creativity and metacognitive skills that will allow us to innovate and solve the complex challenges that we face.

She goes on to detail what is likely to be “the case” for a significant number of higher education institutions in the coming years: The interdisciplinary student-centered, project-based learning required can, and is, being delivered online with students showcasing their learning through online assessment—podcasts, blogs, videos, screencasts and websites. Authentic experiential learning pedagogies that foster social interaction and collaboration online will not only motivate and engage students but also develop the competencies for virtual working and develop the habits of mind required for life-long learning. (Hack 2020)

So What? Where Does This Take Us? We are aware in referring to such work that much effort has already gone forward within the Asia Pacific higher education community to focus on the nature, speed and likely impacts of this knowledge revolution both prior to and in the context of the Pandemic, and we are also aware that many of the actions taken by national governments (such as those referred to above) to provide public sector support to assist universities to accelerate their research roles and to seek and maintain pace with other advanced universities throughout the world have already had profound effects on the university systems within which they are located. Our concern in the specific context of this volume, focused on the mobility of students within Asian higher education, is the degree to which the taking of such actions, their structural reach and relative speed will work to redefine the efforts of the past ten years or so to frame and institutionalize the very nature of the push/pull factors operating within Asian higher education. This test, however, will take place within what has been the acknowledged common context of higher education throughout most of the world for decades

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past, namely, that as an institution, the university is one of the most conservative institutions extant and as such reluctant and historically slow to admit to change.12 The most simple hypothesis to advance in this regard would be that within the region those countries to most quickly and effectively manage changes within their HEIs to provide research and instruction consonant with the demands of these rapidly changing global and regional economies will become pull counties, and in the event that they already are such, they will come to dominate mobility traffic. And the converse will also likely be the case—those that do not effectuate such changes will deepen their position as push countries. We believe it follows from some of the material cited immediately above to suggest that to gain this status as a major pull country such HEIs will—as this social transformation gathers speed and momentum—be motivated to move beyond what has been their most successful curricular moves to date, namely primarily devoting resources to growing their STEM field offerings. Reading within the literature on the impending transformations of Work 4.0 suggests not just that (a) rising students will need to be educated in fields useful to such profound social change, but (b) that the frequency of job changes over the next decade will rapidly increase13 and (c) Post-Pandemic economies may be developed in ways that have yet to be fully perceived. With direct reference to Work 4.0, much of the emergent literature suggests that in addition to the frequency of job changes for workers, entire structures of how goods and services are produced, distributed and employed within countries will be transformed, creating new jobs and social roles and transforming and abolishing older ones. Efforts to anticipate how overall macro-changes in society will take place have begun to emerge even as it is acknowledged that “the future,” both in terms of near-term and that further out, is largely unknowable.14 One powerful implication of these early studies is the suggestion that the social consequences of this transformation are powerful and far-reaching, and will proceed with a rapidity unlike any similar set of events and changes within living human experience. The relative importance realized for higher education endeavors in the social sciences and humanities, the very disciplines that have tended to be displaced by the perceived importance and significance of STEM fields, will enter a new phase, and it can be anticipated, will usher in a new period of transformation within higher education.15 Following the logic of the preceding, it will arguably be the case that those countries that can establish quality engagements in the social sciences and

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humanities to undertake the analysis and understanding of transformations of this magnitude are likely to become powerful pull-centers for student (and faculty) mobility. And, one might add, the pace that such changes appear to be taking place will themselves be unprecedented, suggesting that higher education systems that can match such pace with their own transformations are likely to benefit most from these dynamics.

Conclusion The “mobility equation” for Asian Higher Education appears to be at what might be described as a “shift point” wherein the structural factors that have produced the current relative equilibrium of push and pull factors are undergoing a process of transformation brought about by two “macro” structural factors—the rise of nationalism in various parts of the globe (most particularly the U.S. and Europe) and the effects this may have on the global migration of students, and the quickening pace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Work 4.0 and the structural changes that will result from its development and maturation, an equation which (to repeat the essential message) is only underscored in intensity and dimensions by the dynamics of the Pandemic. The future of mobility within the region will very much depend on how particular countries react to these structural changes with moves to accommodate them—and in a very timely manner! Of critical importance is the degree of flexibility that either exists within such systems or can be introduced into them to permit not only rapid and effective responses to these fundamental structural changes but those that can be effectively accommodated within the existing underlying dynamic of push and pull factors.

Notes 1. Malaysia has followed such a strategy with a significant measure of success as its early and explicit goal of becoming an “education hub” was aligned closely with integrated national quality assurance policies and programs. See: Sirat (2018). 2. This approach is explored in Neubauer, “Japan-US Education Exchange: Five Approaches,” presentation to U.S.-Japan Higher Education Panel, Waseda University, April 9, 2012. 3. It is interesting to query whether this structure will prove to be a “one of its kind” experiment, or will emerge as a new model for international

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e­ducation, in which case it would add a novel dimension to both our notions of push and pull factors, and the actual dynamics of student mobility. See: Laureate International Universities (2018). 4. The initial ban, created as Executive Order 13769 was challenged in U.S. courts and blocked by several, which led to an administrative appeal process that resulted in being superseded by Executive Order 13780. Ultimately, this latter ban was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision. For a brief accounting of the range of these various bans, see: Wikipedia (2018). 5. The complex background to such policies is spelled out in detail in the first of two books on the Trump Administration by Bob Woodward (2018). See also the subsequent volume issued in 2020. 6. The 2020 volume on Trump and his presidency by Robert Woodward provides significant background and insight into the highly personalized view of “American nationalism” promoted by Trump, which may be summarized simply, but not essentially incorrectly, as “if we don’t win, we lose.” Woodward’s detailing of Trump’s conflict with his senior advisors over the essential value of the NATO alliance to the U.S. is a telling instance of his view of how globalized endeavors “should” be scored within a nationalist context (Woodward 2020). 7. As of the time of writing, the index was not yet reflecting the effects of the current Pandemic, and it is clear that the overall empirical status of globalization will be directly affected by those dynamics as well. 8. The slowdown in applications has most affected smaller, tier-two universities, especially those in the south and mid-western regions of the country. As reported in the New York Times in January of 2018 describing the situation before the onset of the Pandemic: “Just as many universities believed that the financial wreckage left by the 2008 recession was behind them, campuses across the country have been forced to make new rounds of cuts, this time brought on, in large part, by a loss of international students. … Schools in the Midwest have been particularly hard hit—many of them non-flagship public universities that had come to rely heavily on tuition from foreign students, who generally pay more than in-state students. … The downturn follows a decade of explosive growth in foreign student enrollment, which now tops 1 million at United States colleges and education training programs and supplies $39 billion in revenue. International enrollment began to flatten in 2016, partly because of changing conditions abroad and the increasing lure of schools in Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking countries. … And since President Trump was elected, college administrators say, his rhetoric and more restrictive views on immigration have made the United States even less attractive to international students” Saul, NY Times, Jan 2, 2018.

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9. Or, as it was termed when introduced in Germany in 2011—The Fourth Industrial Revolution. 10. For some other useful perspectives especially with regard to ethical considerations that may emerge, see: Lin et al. (2014), and Bostrom (2014). 11. For another key source of similar materials, see the website of the Center for 21st Century Universities, at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta Georgia, which explores a wide range of challenges for the twenty-firstcentury university. Accessible at: http://c21u.gatech.edu 12. Indeed, it is common to assert that for most of its modern history the university has been a structure designed to perform three predominant social functions: the creation of knowledge, the conservation of knowledge and the transition of knowledge to which in more recent years has been added the accepted notion that it is also to perform and protect notions and contribution to the public good. 13. This part of the process has already been significantly evident within the United States where for most of the past decade “job shifting” has been the order of the day within the changing economy. The average worker in the U.S. currently holds 10 different jobs before age 40 and the number is expected to grow over the next decade. Some research (e.g. Forrester Research) predicts that the young job seeker of today in the U.S. will hold 12–15 jobs in their lifetime (Marker 2015). (These data are from 2015. More recent data estimates may extend this time as it becomes more conventional to “add in” the transformations of Work 4.0 to such current estimates.) 14. In this regard see the study done by the European Economic and Social Committee, Overview of the national strategies on work 4.0-a coherent analysis of the role of the social partners. April 15, 2018. 15. Just such a transformation is anticipated in a book in preparation by my colleague at the East-West Center, Peter Hershock, who foresees this as a period in which fundamental reassessments of society will be undertaken that produce new and searching engagements in ethics and morality, among others (Hershock 2020). From a related point of view embracing other academic disciplines, such transformations recall much of the work of one of the “fathers of modern social science” who in the 1930s began a series of inquiries that did much to frame the kinds of questions these emergent disciplines would go on to ask. With respect to economics, psychology and political science, perhaps none were more apt than Lasswell’s (1936) book, Politics: Who Gets What, When, Where and How? Questions of this order will be of fundamental importance in the social transformations that accompany Work 4.0.

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References Altbach, P. and de Wit, H. (2020). “Post pandemic outlook for HE is bleakest for poorest” Bostrom, Nick, 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Choudaha, Rahul and Hu, Di, 2016. “Australian Higher Education Leads in Attracting and Retaining International Students,” Forbes, October 27. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahuldi/2016/10/27/ attracting-­i nternational-­s tudents-­g lobal-­c ompetition/#1739c6624996. Accessed: August 29, 2018. Deming, David 2020. “Community Colleges Could Fuel the Recovery,” New York Times. September 20. Dennis, Marguerite J. (2018) “A New Age in International Student Mobility,” University World News. (Issue 00520) 15 September. Available at: http:// www.universityworldnews.com/article. Accessed: September 15, 2018. European Central Bank, 2016. “Economic Bulletin: Determinants of the Slowdown in Global Trade: What Is the New Normal?” Available at: https:// www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/eb201606_focus01.en.pdf?e058496987 5e2bac99d3a62725d98e43. Accessed; September 7, 2018. Finney, Joni E. 2020. “Why the Finance Model for Public Higher Education is Broken and Must be Fixed,” Public Policy Initiative, issue Brief, Volume 2, Number 6. Available at: https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/issue-­brief/ v2n6.php. Accessed: September 18, 2020 Hack, Kay. 2020. “Rethinking Higher Education for a Post Pandemic World,” Advance HE 23 June. Available at: https://www.advance-­he.ac.uk/news-­ and-­views/rethinking-­higher-­education-­post-­pandemic-­world. Accessed: September 22, 2020. Hershock, Peter D. 2020. The Intelligence Revolution and the New Great Game: “A Buddhist Reflection on the Personal and Societal Predicaments of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.” Available at: http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/ FULLTEXT/JR-MAG/mag609116.pdf. Holtz, Michael, 2017. “Trumpeting ‘One Belt, One Road’ China Bids to Lead ‘Globalization 2.0’. Christian Science Monitor, May 16. Available at: h t t p s : / / w w w. c s m o n i t o r. c o m / Wo r l d / A s i a -­P a c i f i c / 2 0 1 7 / 0 5 1 6 / Trumpeting-­O ne-­B elt-­O ne-­R oad-­C hina-­b ids-­t o-­l ead-­G lobalization-­2 .0. Accessed September 6, 2018. IIE 2017. “IIE Releases Open Doors 2017 Data” Available at: https://www.iie. org/Why-­IIE/Announcements/2017-­11-­13-­Open-­Doors-­Data. Accessed: September 7, 2018. Jahanian, Franam 2018. “4 Ways Universities Are Driving Innovation,” World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/

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agenda/2018/01/4-­ways-­universities-­are-­driving-­innovation. Accessed: September 13, 2018. Kelchen, Robert 2020. “Liquidity, Liquidity, Liquidity: Colleges will cut costs and scale back risky growth strategies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 10, 2020. Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-­will-­the-­ pandemic-­change-­higher-­education/. Accessed: September 19, 2020. KOF Swiss Economic Institute, 2020. KOF Globalization Index. Available at; https://kof.ethz.ch/en/forecasts-­a nd-­i ndicators/indicators/kof-­ globalisation-­index.html. Accessed: September 16, 2020. Lasswell, Harold D. 1936, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New  York: Whittlesey House. Laureate International Universities, 2018. Available at: https://www.laureate. net/aboutlaureate. Accessed September 15, 2018. Lin, Stephen, Keith Abney and George Bekey, 2014. Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marginson, Simon and Marijk Van der Wende 2007. “To Rank or To Be Ranked: The Impact of Global Rankings in Higher Education,” Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol 11, Issue 3–4. Available at: https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1028315307303544. Accessed: August 29, 2018. Marker, Scott 2015. “How Many Jobs Will the Average Person Have in His or Her Lifetime?” Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-­many-­jobs-­ average-­person-­have-­his-­her-­lifetime-­scott-­marker. Accessed: September 13, 2018. Mauldin, John 2016. “Globalization 2.0 is Coming To An End,” Forbes, August 11, 2016. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/ 2016/08/11/globalization-­2 -­0 -­i s-­c oming-­t o-­a n-end/#1a0360a63c4c. Accessed: September 6, 2018. Neubauer, Deane E. 2017. “Resurgent Nationalism in Asia Pacific Higher Education: Whose Globalization Is at Stake?” Paper presented to the conference titled: Resurgent Nationalism in Asia Pacific Higher Education: Whose Globalization Is at Stake?, hosted by Lingnan University, Hong Kong, October 19–20, 2017. Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2017. “The United States Officially Withdraws from the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Available at: https:// ustr.gov/about-­us/policy-­offices/press-­office/press-­releases/2017/january/ US-­Withdraws-­From-­TPP. Accessed: September 6, 2018. PIE News 2018. “Tokyo Convention On Qualification Recognition Active.” Available at: https://thepienews.com/news/tokyo-­convention-­on-­ qualification-­recognition-­active/. Accessed: September 15, 2018. Rampton, Roberta 2018. “Trump Ready to Ratchet Up China Trade War with More Tariffs: Report,” Business News, August 30. Available at: https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-­usa-­trade-­china-­tariffs/trump-­ready-­to-­ratchet-­ up-­china-­trade-­war-­with-­more-­tariffs-­report-­idUSKCN1LF2BP. Accessed: September 6, 2018.

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SaKong, Il, 2018. “Korea’s Economic Challenges in the 4th Industrial Revolution,” Paper presented to the East West Center international Alumni Conference, Seoul, Korea, August 23. Saul, Stephanie 2018. “As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting,” January 2. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/ us/international-­enrollment-­drop.html. Accessed: September 8, 2018. Schwab, Klaus 2016. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Cologny/Geneva, Switzerland. Available also at: www.weforum.org. Sirat, Morshidi 2018. “Malaysia’s International Education by 2020 and Beyond: Re-examining Concept, Targets and Outcome.” Available at: https://www. insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/malaysia%E2%80%99s-­ international-­education-­2020-­and-­beyond. Accessed: September 9, 2018. UNESCO, 2014. Higher Education in Asia: Expanding Out, Expanding Up: The Rise of Graduate Education and University Research. Wilson, John K. 2020 “Protecting International Students from the Trump Administration,” Academe Blog, July 8. Available at: https://academeblog. org/2020/07/08/protecting-­i nternational-­s tudents-­f rom-­t he-­t rump-­ administration/. Accessed: September 19, 2020. Wikipedia, 2018. “Executive Order 13769.” Available at: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769. Accessed: September 6, 2018. Witt, Michael, 2016.”The End of Globalisation?”, Economics and Finance, November 22, 2016. Available at: https://knowledge.insead.edu/economics-­ finance/the-­end-­of-­globalisation-­5046. Accessed: September 6, 2018. World Economic Forum, 2015. “Why Are University Rankings So Important?” Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/why-­are-­ university-­rankings-­so-­important/ Accessed January 29, 2020. Woodward, Bob, 2018. Fear: Trump in the White House, New  York: Simon & Schuster. Woodward, Bob, 2020. Rage. New York, Simon & Schuster.

PART I

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

CHAPTER 2

The Changing Roles of University Education in the Age of Innovation: Implications from China and Japan Lili Shi and Akiyoshi Yonezawa

Introduction This chapter explores some new trends of university education linked with the rapidly changing industrial frameworks in the age of innovation. The focus of our analysis lies in the university-industry collaboration that in many cases extends beyond the national frameworks, and this inevitably enhances the mobility of knowledge workers across borders. China and Japan are the two leading economies in Asia and the world that seek further socio-economic development through science, technology and innovation. Both countries propose future visions similar with that of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4th IR). In the case of China,

L. Shi Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China A. Yonezawa (*) Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Ashizawa, D. E. Neubauer (eds.), Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16065-3_2

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the central government has recently issued a series of key documents such as the “13th Five-year Plan for National Science and Technology Innovation” and “Outlines of National Strategies for Innovation-driven Development” to promote the creation of a knowledge society. Society in the new era is expected to be innovation-driven, characterized by a high level of public participation in lifelong learning and a high degree of integration of resources among different sectors, both public and private. In the case of Japan, the government has established the Council of Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI) directly under the Office of Prime Minister, and proposed the future framework called Society 5.0, or the super-smart society. In both countries, higher education (HE), especially the top research universities aiming to be the “world-class”, is expected to take a central role in knowledge creation. In this chapter, we focus more on the education function of leading research universities through their collaboration with the knowledge industry sector. Through the rapid diffusion of the open-innovation process, the university-industry linkage has changed its nature from one of vocational training toward that focused more on the involvement of students and academics directly in knowledge creation and innovation, and this engagement itself is becoming a central value of the advanced level of university education. The development of high skilled talents within the complex emerging political-economic framework of mainly Asian countries as industries has begun to suggest their transformative shape with new jobs emerging and others disappearing. One focus will be to identify distinct social inventions and innovation within both government and private sectors that are focused on this specific aspect of social and economic transition. Through the analysis of two country cases in East Asia, China and Japan, the authors examine the transformation and future direction of university education. In this context, the cross-border mobility of knowledge and talents as well as the intellectual networks beyond the national frameworks are stressed.

Background The unprecedented pace of technological change and innovation in recent years has significantly accelerated the emergence of a new era which was termed “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab, Chairman of World Economic Forum, at the economic summit at Davos 2016. The

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significant evolution in technologies has consequently resulted in dramatic economic and societal changes in history, known as industrial revolutions. The First Industrial Revolution, emerging in the 1780s, harnessed steam power which enabled more systematic and efficient forms of production. About 100 years later, the Second Industrial Revolution, taking advantage of technological breakthroughs in electricity, made massive production possible by using electrical energy. The Third Revolution enabled automated production to a more significant extent, largely attributed to the development of information technology (IT) and electronics. The 4th IR was brought about by the fusion of several technologies that are automating not only production but also knowledge (Gleason 2018). Klaus Schwab described the 4th IR as follows: Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. (Schwab 2016)

The significantly enhanced computing capacity in storing massive amounts of data has led to the development of cyber-physical systems, which in turn form the bases for the 4th IR (Gleason 2018). Global connections by means of unprecedented processing power, storage capacity and access to knowledge have brought about unlimited possibilities and, as Schwab also notes in his paper, “these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing” (Schwab 2016). Unlike the previous three industrial revolutions, the underlying digital logics have undergone fundamental changes in velocity, speed and scope, which emphasize the processes of abstraction, formalization and mathematization that enable and reward autonomous digital network systems (Peters 2017). The impacts that the successive technological innovations which center on autonomous intelligent technologies pose to industries and society are enormous. Production modes have been changed into ones characterized as a broad application of digitalized, networking and intelligent technologies. In an attempt to help the broader society navigate the transition to the future digital and hyperconnected world by major technology trends and the new business models, based on a survey

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to a community of over 800 executives and experts from the information and communications technology sector on their perception of when the tipping points would occur, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software & Society found that more than 80% of the respondents consider that by 2025, 10% of people will be wearing clothes connected to the internet (91.2%), 90% of people will have unlimited and free (advertising-supported) storage (91.0%), 1 trillion sensors will be connected to the internet (89.2%), 10% of reading glasses will be connected to the internet (85.5%), and the first 3D-printed car in production (84.1%), along with the first government to replace its census with big-data sources (82.9%) and the first implantable mobile phone available commercially (81.7%) and so on (WEF 2015). Concerns also arose about the challenges that such accelerating technological advancement would cause to future employment. In the 2015 World Summit on Technological Unemployment held by the World Technology Network (WTN), the idea of “technological unemployment” was clear, “with technology advancing at a geometric pace, robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D-printing, and other innovations with enormous disruptive potential will soon hit the mainstream. Billions of people worldwide are currently employed in industries that will likely be affected—and billions of new entrants to the workforce will need jobs” (WTN 2015). In the same year, the World Economic Forum Report “The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” found that the job families concentrated in routine white-­ collar office functions, such as office and administrative roles, and manufacturing and production would suffer a loss in employment and jobs related to computer and mathematics, architecture and engineering would increase over the period 2015–2020 (WEF 2016). Not only the future employment trends as noted above, but also skills demands would be altered accordingly. As the WEF report “The Future of Jobs” also noted, the top ten skills that will be needed by employers include complex problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, problem management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, judgment and decision making, service orientation, negotiation and cognitive flexibility. It indicated that more than half (52%) of all jobs are expected to require these cognitive abilities as part of their core skill set in 2020. In other words, employees should be more flexibly capable of shifting between various types of tasks and working contexts (Gleason 2018). To do so, potential employees or those already in employment should be

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equipped with new learning strategies for coping with the challenges caused by the new technological changes. In the Pearson “The Global Learner Survey” in 2019, eight key trends that learners across the globe will seek in education have been identified, among which “a DIY mindset is reshaping education, the 40-year career is gone, replaced by life-long learning and diverse career paths, people expecting digital and virtual learning to be the new normal in the next decade, confidence in educational institutions wavering, some young workers think one can do OK in life without a college degree, and learners believe soft skills will give them the advantage over automation” are included. In addition, it was noted that while many still value HE, 68% of people globally agree that a degree or certificate from a vocational college or trade school is more likely to result in a good job with career prospects than a university degree and almost half of those in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Europe do not think that HE prepared them for their career (Pearson 2019). It seems that HE has already confronted great challenges not only from the new demands of existing job markets but also from other forms of education such as vocational education and trade training. Reflecting on the new skill demands of future employment and recent changes occurring in learning patterns, there is no doubt that higher education institutions (HEIs) must seek adjustments in education delivery to prepare students with higher standards of cognitive agility and critical thinking for the more efficient application of unprecedentedly fast-­ changing technologies. To achieve that, HEIs may seek solutions such as making substantial changes in curriculum settings to accommodate more computer science and intelligent technologies, restructuring institutions for new programs and departments and developing educational strategies to foster deep intercultural understandings and even pedagogies (Penprase 2018). Additionally, in a new phase featuring the demand for lifelong learning, a stronger request for joint partnerships involving multi-stake holders is necessary, including government agencies, industries and HEIs. The multi-party partnership is requisite not only in the sense of collaboration for joint creation and application of new knowledge but also in that it can form an ecosystem approach in workforce upskilling and reskilling as suggested in the Pearson report “Opportunity for Higher Education in the Era of the Talent Economy” (Pearson 2019). In fact, not confining such issues to HE, a much broader discussion of the integration of the new technological advancement and overall educational development, and how this integration can be linked to the

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achievement of the 4th goal of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has already taken place and a common understanding has been achieved embodied in the announcement of the Beijing Consensus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Education in August of 2019 (UNESCO 2019). Due to the fact that HE enjoys natural links with the labor market, the 4th IR featuring a magnificent penetration of intelligent technologies in all areas embodies the greatest implications for HE development and as a result the transformation of HE is considered requisite by governments to better cope with the new challenges in the era of 4th IR.

Policy Frameworks in Response to the 4th IR in China and Japan Due to the increasing application of new technologies such as AI and machine learning, the overall employment context is undergoing dramatic changes as discussed in the earlier section. For instance, in “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in A Time of Automation”, a report published by McKinsey Global Institute in 2017, it was estimated that in China, by 2030, 31% of current work activity hours will be automated in the rapid scenario and accordingly up to 13% of the total workforce will need to change occupations. Similar trends would take place in other countries such as India (19% and 6% respectively), the US (44% and 33%) and Japan (52% and 46%), to a more or lesser extent (McKinsey Global Institute 2017). Faced with such severe challenges in the upcoming occupation shift, governments of different countries have put forward national initiatives to adapt their respective HE sectors to the transformations in industries and societies brought about by the 4th IR. In China and Japan, similarly, governments have considered it a priority in their agendas to transform the HE sector and make HE more responsive to answering industrial and societal needs. China Society in the new era is expected to be innovation-driven, which in turn demands a high level of public participation in lifelong learning and a high degree of integration of resources among different sectors, including both public and private. Responding to the fundamental changes brought about by the 4th IR, China has been endeavoring to promote a tighter

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integration of the new technologies with all sectors of society. Manufacturing industries have always been essential for economic development. In order to enhance these in the new era of the 4th IR, the State Council of People’s Republic of China (PRC) released the “China Manufacturing 2025” Initiative in 2015 (State Council 2015a). The main objective for the first stage is to promote overall manufacturing capacities and achieve smart manufacturing by taking advantage of the emerging technologies and make China a manufacturing power by 2025. The focus of this initiative lies in main tasks such as the promotion of the innovative capacity of manufacturing industries and green manufacturing. It also emphasizes the construction of a manufacturing innovation system supported by a solid collaboration among industries, universities, governments and public research institutes. The Chinese central government has taken an integrated approach to enhance capacity building, which requires a transformed role for the HE sector and a deeper collaboration between HE and other stakeholders. At the macro level, several key initiatives have been issued in recent years to promote national innovation capacities. In 2016, the State Council released the “Notice on the 13th Five-year Plan for National Science and Technology Innovation” (hereinafter referred to as “Notice”), with an aim to improve overall capacity building in constructing an innovation-­ driven society. Concrete goals of achievement have been set in quantitative indicators, such as by 2020, annual R&D input would be increased from 2.0% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 2.5%, the volume of patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) will be doubled and the revenue from the national technology contracts will be increased from 983.5 billion Yuan to 2000 billion Yuan. To achieve those objectives, a comprehensive set of strategies has been adopted to enhance the national innovation capacity within the period of the 13th Five-year Plan (2016–2020), including implementing new national key science and technology (S&T) projects, construction of competitive technological systems supporting industrial development, life quality improvement and sustainable development, enhancing basic research, fostering innovative human resources, improvement of service and governance systems for S&T development, construction of efficient research and development (R&D) organizations, improvement of technology transfer mechanisms and so on (State Council 2016a). In the same year, “Outlines of National Strategies for Innovation-driven Development”, another guiding initiative covering a longer timespan up till 2050, was issued by the State Council, indicating

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the major steps that China will take toward the ultimate goal of achieving the status of leading S&T power internationally and the creation of the knowledge society by 2050 (State Council 2016b). Both initiatives emphasized the role of HE as a main contributor to strengthening the national innovation and development capacity through improvement in discipline construction and human resource development and a deeper involvement in collaboration with industries and public research institutes. In line with the improvement of discipline construction and better quality in human resource development, other national strategies have been supplemented to help HEIs, especially leading research universities, improve their fundamental functions in education and research. Those major strategies include the “Excellence Project”, which was first initiated in 2009 and the “Double First-Class University Project” since 2017. For instance, in 2009, MOE together with other ministries, started the “Excellence Project”, aiming to construct a bunch of top-­standard bases to foster talents in basic disciplines within the 20 top research universities and then in 2010, another six “Excellence Plans” were implemented to foster talents in different specific categories. Currently, the target universities have been expanded to all the HEIs nationwide as the initiative entered its second phase in 2018 (MOE 2018). The “Double First-Class University Project” aims to construct worldleading universities and disciplines. It is the succeeding national strategy following the conclusion of the 211 Project and 985 Project within the HE system (State Council 2015b). The first group of selected universities was announced in 2017, including 42 universities enrolled for the construction of world-leading universities and another 98 universities for the construction of leading disciplines. Those initiatives articulated the necessity that HEIs should adopt an innovative and technology-sensitive approach toward capacity building in education and research to better cope with the new challenges brought about by the 4th IR. Japan In Japan, similarly, incorporating technological advancement with social development has always been a priority on the government’s agenda. In 1995, the Japanese government introduced the Science and Technology Basic Law and in the same year, an every five years’ publication of the Science and Technology Basic Plans was initiated, which announces the

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national strategies in S&T development and innovation. In the new century, the social challenges that Japan faces are still severe, such as the aging population, climate change, the limited availability of natural resources and the achievement of a sustainable society. The technological advancement in the era of the 4th IR will definitely bring about new opportunities, but meanwhile, it may also pose new challenges to society. For instance, in a joint research project conducted by the Nomura Research Institute (NRI) and researchers of the Oxford Martin School, the result showed that by around 2030, 49% of the current workforce in Japan is estimated to be replaced by AI or robots (NRI 2015). In order to incorporate more efficiently new technologies with social development, a new concept was proposed by the Japanese government and its CSTI, known as the “super smart society” or “Society 5.0” in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan (2016–2020). The definition of “Society 5.0” is given by the Cabinet Office of the Japanese government as follows: “A human-centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space” (Cabinet Office, Japan n.d.). In this new society paradigm, new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, AI and big data are efficiently applied to enable a fruitful connection between the cyber and physical spaces which ultimately serves for the achievement of better quality of life in the smart society. It is worth noting that, distinct from previous approaches which were technology-centered, “Society 5.0” adopts a human-centered approach which pursues an inclusive society with a good balance between economic growth and the solution of social problems. Given the wide coverage of the targets related to the full range of human-related issues, this approach calls for an open-innovation paradigm that features a strong integration of resources from various sectors across society and even from abroad. In this regard, it is highly expected for the universities and research institutes of Japan to collaborate with industrial and international partners to a greater extent in the pursuit of new knowledge creation and application. Since 2017, the Japanese government has given distinguished status to seven top national research universities as “designated national universities”. These universities are expected to co-work with industries to create innovations within the knowledge-based ecosystem for sustainable development (Yonezawa et al. 2020).

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Responses of Higher Education Toward New Demands in the Context of the 4th IR: Cases of China and Japan Because the external environment within which higher education is developed has dramatically changed and demands for high skilled and innovative human resources have become prominent, especially given the context of accelerated technology advancement, the higher education system can no longer remain unchanged. In order for HEIs to better fulfill their proper functions, the efficient and relevant strategies would probably be to improve their quality in education provision on the one hand and to seek greater involvement of the industry sector in order to improve the responsiveness of their services on the other hand. In the following section, the critical changes that are taking place in the higher education systems of China and Japan are examined in this regard. China After the large-scale enrollment expansion of the higher education sector since late 1990s, China has witnessed an increasing supply of human resources with high-level education attainment. Taking the case of engineering, by 2016, a total of 5.38 million students were enrolled in HEIs, spanning over 17,037 engineering programs nationwide, which collectively accounted for one-third of the total enrollment of undergraduate students in China (Liu et al. 2019). The large number of students majoring in engineering has made the Chinese higher education engineering system probably the largest scaled in the world. The achievement of the higher education system over the last decade has overwhelmingly expanded supply opportunities for higher education. However, at the same time, the unbalanced quality of higher education and the problem of the mismatch between the demand and supply in the labor market have aroused criticisms as well. In particular, the dramatic advancement of technological development such as AI has only made the situation worse. As a result, the call for a fundamental change in the higher education system has become stronger over time, and significant adjustments have taken place to pursue an overall quality improvement in educational provision. Probably the most influential policy initiative concerning the development of the higher education sector in China has been the “Double First-­ Class University Project”, which was initially introduced by the State

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Council’s issuance of the “Overall Plan to Coordinate Development of World-class Universities and First-class Disciplines Construction” on October 24, 2015 (State Council 2015b). The strategy was further clarified in the document entitled “Implementation Measures to Coordinate Development of World-class Universities and First-class Disciplines Construction” released by the MOE, Ministry of Finance (MOF) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on January 24, 2017 (MOE 2017). The designated universities include a list of 42 leading universities to be developed as “world-class” universities, most of which were also beneficiaries of the 985 Project, and 95 other institutions to develop “world-class” disciplines. This strategy aims to upgrade the Chinese higher education system to a “world-class” level through a comprehensive development framework in aspects such as faculty capacity building, modernization of governance capacity, innovation of personnel training, scientific research, social service provision and cultural heritage. Thus, the locus is more related to the critical improvement of quality, international rankings, research excellence and social services. Nevertheless, due to the stratification logic behind the selection of institutions to benefit from the strategy, concerns also arose that the issue of vertical differentiation inside the higher education system would be aggravated (Shen 2018). To cultivate high-quality and talented people that meet the new needs of society serves as one of the tasks of the “Double First-Class University Project”; however, as far as talent training is concerned, the following initiative infuses more concentration and is thus more relevant. The Talent Training Plan for the National Basic Subject was initiated in 2009, the aim of which has been to foster talents in the fields of engineering, medicine, agriculture, journalism and communication. Under the supervision and support of MOE and 13 other central government ministries, the selected 20 key universities constructed respective training bases to cultivate talented students for national basic subjects and explored mechanisms and models in terms of talent training. The joint effort has greatly improved the talent provision to meet the demands generated from social and economic development. After nearly ten years of experimentation, an advanced version, the Talent Training Plan 2.0 (hereafter referred to as Plan 2.0) was officially announced as the MOE of China issued its policy paper “Suggestions on Accelerating the Construction of High-level Undergraduate Education and Improving the Capacity of Talents” in 2018 (MOE 2018). Concentrated on talent cultivation, all HEIs need to optimize the structure and deepen the comprehensive reforms in the

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building of their courses. Rather than the individual plan model of the previous version, Plan 2.0 pursues talent training from a more systematic perspective. Covering all majors HEIs in China, it aims to enhance the overall quality of higher education and shift the development model from the mere expansion of scale to overall connotative development and eventually to realize full education modernization by 2035. In the three-year period from 2019 to 2021, Plan 2.0 is to be implemented under an integrated scheme with three core tasks centered on the four initiatives of transformation in engineering, medicine, agriculture and liberal arts. Compared to the past, the transformed engineering, medicine, agriculture and liberal arts demand an intensified focus on the new demands of society and thus illustrate stronger linkages between the knowledge supply of the HEIs and social requirements. Taking engineering for example, the “new” tasks it faces refer to not only coping with the new industries but also a new application of technologies and the integration of new technologies with the old (Liu et al. 2019). The Director of Department of Higher Education of MOE, Yan Wu, clarified concretely the three core tasks that this new plan aims to pursue in an MOE press conference held in April 2019, the key points of which can be summarized as follows (Wu 2019). • To implement the “Double Ten Thousand Project” for first-class undergraduate programs, by constructing approximately 10,000 undergraduate programs respectively at the national and provincial levels, encouraging a classified development among HEIs, and realizing the possession of first-class undergraduate programs in each category of HEIs; • To implement the “Double Ten Thousand Project” for first-class courses, which aims to specifically construct approximately 10,000 high-standard courses at both national and provincial levels, including off- and on-line courses and courses for social practice; • To construct approximately 260 first-class bases for talent fostering for national basic subjects which cover 17 disciplines from the natural sciences to the humanities. Plan 2.0 was put forward within the framework of the four national discourses since the 2000s on equality, quality, efficiency and rejuvenation as claimed by Li (2017), and as also illustrated by many other policy initiatives enacted over the last two decades. Guided by these discourses,

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educational development at all levels pursues the ultimate objective of educational modernization through the promotion of critical aspects such as quality enhancement and structure optimization. In the case of Plan 2.0, it is more closely linked to the capacity building of HEIs in talent fostering, which is particularly concerned with quality enhancement and innovation. As stressed by Director Wu, the Plan is not merely a single educational reform but rather a “quality revolution” due to the fundamental changes brought to the talent-fostering institutions and mechanisms of the entire higher education system, which would hopefully in turn lead to a new stage of educational development in China. The quality of education has further been stressed through the announcement of the “Integrated Plan for Deepening the Reform on Education Evaluation in the New Era” by the State Council of China in October 2020. It provides guidelines for future evaluations of HEIs in aspects such as teaching, discipline construction, effects of the “Double First-Class University Project” implementation, funding allocation and international cooperation (State Council 2020), highlighting an integrated effort in changing the evaluation framework to be more quality-oriented. The changing context of the institutional framework for the development of higher education and the redefined talents demanded by society has urged universities to react promptly. Worth noting is the responsiveness of universities in their program adjustments. Particularly in recent years, universities have moved more rapidly in adjusting the programs they are providing. The MOE more recently released an announcement that among all the HEIs in China, 50 institutions each initiated more than 5 new programs within 2019, with the most popular new program—set up by as many as 180 HEIs—being the AI Program, followed by the Program of Data Science and Big Data Technology, and the Program of Intelligent Manufacturing (MOE 2020). Meanwhile, a prominently widened scope of cooperation between universities and the industry sector can be observed. Universities are not only seeking conventional research collaborations but also exploring novel ways to involve industrial partners in further innovations and practical programs such as cultivating talented students. For example, as one of the leading research universities in China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) established a long-term collaboration with Huawei, a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, in 2012, mainly covering talent cultivation in science and technology, joint research and network building in conventional fields such as information

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technology, new materials and engineering technologies. In a recent contract signed in 2019 to pursue strategic cooperation, the cooperation between the two parties has been scaled up to be an all-round and deeper one, exploring more inter-disciplinary and new collaborative research areas such as AI, optical telecommunication and Internet of Vehicles (IOV) (SJTU 2019). Such upgrading in terms of collaboration with the industry can also be seen in other research universities such as Tsinghua University, Fudan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, among others. Furthermore, the upgraded collaboration between the higher education and industry sectors is also manifested in the promotion of the entrepreneurship education of university students. Notably, the recently enacted “Methods on the Management of National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Plans for University Students” by the MOE specified that universities accept the fundamental responsibilities for implementing and managing the training plans, but meanwhile encouraging a significant involvement of the industrial sector in participating and mentoring in the training process (MOE 2019). The ultimate objective of the method is to foster talented people in innovation and entrepreneurship who will meet the needs of constructing an innovative country. In addition, university students are encouraged to form teams for innovation. Unquestionably, the industrial sector has become an increasingly crucial partner of HEIs in enhancing their main functions, that is, knowledge production, talent cultivation and provision of social services, especially given the changing connotation of talents and fast updates of knowledge as a result of dramatic technological advancements. Japan Japan had 795 (86 national, 94 local public and 615 private) universities by 2020. The higher education system is rather hierarchical, and governmental funding of the higher education sector tends to be concentrated on a limited number of top research universities, especially among the ten top research universities. Historically since their establishment, Japanese universities have sustained deep links with industry and played a fundamental role in importing technologies and supporting national development (Goto and Baba 2007). For instance, they emphasized the acquisition of practical technological knowledge and skills, and their faculties helped promote today’s giant firms in some industries such as those producing

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electrical equipment and others through the provision of consulting services, in many instances becoming technological officers or even starting new enterprises (Kato and Odagiri 2012). Although until the late 1980s, professors were not encouraged to commercialize their research outcomes and take positions in firms because of their public status as civil servants of national universities, they sustained informal linkages with industry by various means such as donations or by sending industrial researchers to universities as graduate students or visiting scholars (Wen and Kobayashi 2001; Asonuma 2010). Over the past two decades, significant reforms have been introduced to promote active university-industry linkages through formalized frameworks, particularly since the Incorporation of National Universities in 2004. The government, especially the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT 2019) has established various programs to improve universities’ responsiveness to the increasing demands from industry and society. Accordingly, Japan's industry-­ university collaboration has been increasing year by year in aspects including innovation promotion and human resource cultivation, among others. Along with the deepening of the National University Reforms, notably, two recent initiatives have been particularly critical concerning the knowledge and human resource production of the higher education system in Japan, that is, the “Designated National University” and the Doctoral Program for “World-leading Innovative & Smart Education” (the WISE Program). The national universities are the most competitive in research capacity within the Japanese higher education system (Kobayashi 2000) and thus are the collective backbone for the promotion of science and technology in Japan. Starting from 2017, the Japanese government established a distinguished status called “designated national university” and subsequently selected nine universities (Tohoku, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hitotsubashi, Tsukuba and Tokyo Medical and Dental University) through 2020. These universities were selected via three indicators, namely their performance in research capacity, collaboration between industry and society, and participation in international cooperation (MEXT 2016). Their research capacity is assessed by performance in obtaining Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the government covering as many as 14 disciplines in natural science, social science and humanities. The capability of universities in generating revenues resulting from collaboration with industry via such joint and commissioned research

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is stressed, while indicators of international cooperation are measured by performance in co-authorization with international partners and the ratio of international students and Japanese students studying abroad, both undergraduate and graduate, on the basis of total students registered. These designated national universities are expected to be globally competitive and take leading positions. Hence, they are encouraged to commit to the enhancement of social innovation through collaborations with industry and government and to generate income as a consequence of economic development through innovation. These universities are also expected to foster high skilled human resources who can work closely with industry and stimulate innovation. In this regard, the government has set up recommendation reports indicating the dimensions of desirable graduate education with a strong pursuit for inter-disciplinary research and in new areas and close connection with industrial and professional sectors, and has encouraged that graduate education be linked to social innovation and problem-solving through project-based grants. It can be suggested that the role of national universities will further be emphasized in accelerating national capacity building in innovation, problem-tackling and human resource cultivation through cooperation across sectors and even national borders. Still, Japan’s top research universities face serious challenges with shortages in university endowments compared with other top research universities, especially in the US. In 2021, the government decided to establish a 10 trillion national fund for supporting research at top universities to catch up with world-leading universities in other countries. While the details of the scheme are still under discussion, only a very limited number of top national universities are expected to participate in this funding scheme. Given the challenges facing the Japanese government to achieve Japan’s Society 5.0 vision and the growing reluctance of young people entering doctoral programs (the so-called PhD flight), universities in Japan are expected to reform their graduate educational structures to foster high-­ level “knowledge professionals” who are able to take the lead in generating cutting-edge innovation and tackling problems brought on by the development of technologies and societies, aspirations which eventually propelled the launch of the WISE Program by Japan’s Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in 2018 (JSPS 2020). The program aims to fundamentally transform the quality of graduate schools in universities by financially supporting a 5-year program combining a Master’s/Doctor’s

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degree based on universities’ initiatives which demonstrate their own strengths and institutional characters. By 2019, a total of 26 programs had been selected. The objective of the WISE Program is to foster talented people with a high-level accumulation of knowledge enabling them to generate new genres of innovation and take on the challenge of solving complicated societal issues. To achieve that, such talented people are expected to not only have solid professional knowledge in a particular discipline but should also be familiar with industrial and societal needs and possess a good capability for conducting inter-disciplinary research. Therefore, universities are encouraged to establish collaborations with other universities, research institutions and corporations, both domestic and abroad. For instance, in the “Forefront Physics and Mathematics Program to Drive Transformation” of the University of Tokyo selected in 2019, the cooperating institutions include universities from Europe, Asia and North America such as the École Polytechnique, the California Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University and Seoul National University, as well as research institutes and corporations such as Nippon Steel Corporation and NTT Corporation. Being the academic hub of excellence, these programs will also serve as vehicles to facilitate the smooth mobility of human resources and new knowledge (ibid.). Universities in Japan have been more responsive to the challenges that arose along with technological advancements and societal development. A wide range of innovation education has been encouraged and universities themselves have also committed to the provision of innovation education. For example, by integrating different educational divisions within the Graduate School for Engineering, Osaka University set up the Center for Open Innovation Research and Education (COiRE n.d.) in 2016. Divided into five divisions, namely Development of Young Researchers, Interdisciplinary Collaborative Education, University-Society Collaboration, Promoting Innovations and Future Design, this center serves as a platform to foster technological and societal innovation through close collaborations with various stakeholders, including industries and local governments. In addition, it also nurtures future leaders capable of promoting innovations in society (COiRE, Osaka University). It seems that Japanese universities—the leading research universities in particular—have already been exploring potential solutions to tackle the challenges posed by re-coordinating resources inside and outside of these institutions.

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However, this does not always mean that these experiments in higher education directly lead to visible changes in graduate recruitment by industry, as evidenced by the serious recruitment situation facing graduate students such as PhD holders. A 2018 report released by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy Library (NISTEP) of MEXT, entitled “Survey on Research Activities of Private Corporations 2018”, which was based on data collected from companies with a capital stock of at least 100 million yen and which carry out internal research and development (R&D), indicated that among 1293 corporate respondents, only 13.0% of them (168 corporations) hired R&D employees with doctorate degrees and merely 2.1% (27 corporations) hired post-doctoral R&D employees in 2017 (NISTEP 2019). The employment problem facing graduates with doctoral degrees can also be demonstrated by the annual report of “Basic Survey on Schools”, conducted by MEXT. The 2020 survey indicated that of all graduates with doctoral degrees, only 68.9% were successfully employed in that year, among which, barely 54.7% were in regular employment and 14.2% in non-regular (MEXT 2020). The survey result also suggested that the ratio of regular employment among graduates with doctoral degrees was much lower than that for Master degree graduates (75.7%) and those with undergraduate degrees (75.2%). Probably due to the unfavorable situation concerning the employment of graduates with doctorate degrees, the numbers of Master degree graduates entering doctoral programs have been shrinking in Japan, especially over the last ten years. Generally speaking, for Japanese universities, the key strategies seem to be more related to the critical issue concerning the sustaining and improvement of the universities’ research excellence and quality of human resource development so as to enhance innovation and international competitiveness, which in turn help attract global talents and resources and further improve research excellence and the quality of higher education, achieving a virtuous cycle eventually.

Global Scenarios of University Education: Implications from the Two Case Countries Higher education has always taken an important role in economic and societal development due to its capability for producing knowledge and skilled talents. However, societies being impacted by such as Industry 4.0,

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or Society 5.0 in Japan, and the SDGs set as the new global development agenda, have posed new challenges and new demands on all sectors and their players. The dramatically changing economic, social and technological contexts ask for a stronger role for innovation and thus require increasingly enhanced research output and talented people with high skills, creative minds and a broader base of knowledge. Furthermore, the continued pattern of deepening globalization has further intertwined all the contributing elements necessary for technological and social advancement across sectors, nations and regions. Given these new contexts, what roles can higher education play and how should these questions be critically reconsidered? Undoubtedly, universities need to stay accountable in their roles as key social actors. In the age of Industry 4.0, universities are more universally expected to take good advantage of their endowments in human resources cultivation, scientific and technological innovation and research commercialization and play roles from a holistic perspective as resource coordinators, research hubs, incubators for innovative and talented people and social service providers. Whether the higher education system can respond effectively will closely impact the capacity building of affected nations in coping with the new challenges brought about by the increasingly competitive external environment. To achieve that, on the other hand, the higher education system must remain responsive to new technologies to improve its resilience and robustness. In the emergency caused by the outbreak of the Coronavirus for instance, Chinese universities managed to overcome the crisis of system breakdown by quickly offering online courses. By April 3, 2020, a total of 0.94 million courses were delivered through various online teaching platforms and applications, involving 0.95 million faculty members (Wu 2020). The stable implementation of online teaching and learning is made possible not only because of the adoption of new technologies but also through the integration of social resources. In all 37 online courses and technology platforms offered free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online courses to universities as well as training programs to help as many as 3.94 million faculty members conduct online instruction (ibid.). Following cases such as China, South Korea and US, universities in Japan also actively introduced online education under the declared State of Emergency. By May 12, 2020, as many as 66.2% of HEIs (708) had already adopted online instruction while another 30.5% were under consideration (MEXT 2020). After passing the first wave of infection in the summer of 2020,

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however, the Japanese government strongly recommended the provision of face-to-face instruction or the combination of face-to-face and online-­ based instruction, considering the limitation of online-based instruction in effective communication and mental health care, especially among the newly enrolled students. As we can see, it is necessary for universities to take good advantage of new technologies and the incorporation of social resources to maintain their function as key social actors in helping to cope with the challenges and crises faced by their nations. Universities need to redefine the scope of their three fundamental functions, namely teaching, research and social service and recognize the interconnection between them. As far as teaching is concerned, universities need to determine what education is required and what capabilities of graduates are mostly valued in advancing society and make quick and effective responses toward such changes. Institutions need to be adaptive and constantly adjust their scope of knowledge provision and the mechanisms of education delivery. Course adjustments and the promotion of inter-disciplinary course settings under the framework of “Double First-­ class Universities Project” and “Talent Training Plan for the National Basic Subject” are exactly how Chinese universities responded toward such emerging external demands. Furthermore, determining the capabilities required of graduates is another critical issue that universities should consider. In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted at the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, the lifelong learning perspective was articulated to ensure the achievement of sustainable development (United Nations 2015). For higher education institutions, it implies at least that universities should have their graduates prepared with a lifelong learning mindset and be capable of undertaking learning activities throughout their lives. Certainly, the implication of sustainable development within higher education systems cannot be limited to the sole aspect of human resource cultivation, as it meanwhile suggests a holistic role for higher education systems in supporting the capacity to deal with other issues related to sustainable development, such as poverty alleviation, environmental preservation and peaceful society building. The vital role of innovation in reinforcing competitiveness also calls for the capability of knowledge generation, integration and application. Universities may have to incorporate more innovation education within their educational programs, as well as provide inter-­ disciplinary courses, changes which have already taken place in many Chinese and Japanese universities. For that purpose, adjustment of

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internal resources allocation and partnership with external stakeholders is necessary. Investing in university research and building new partnerships and cooperative mechanisms can be the two critical areas to help higher education meet the challenges that sustainable societies demand (Owens 2017). Universities continue to strive for research excellence and international impact to improve and sustain their competitiveness internationally, which in turn will make them more advantaged in resource acquisition and distribution (e.g. global talents and research investment) and collaboration formation. Furthermore, higher education systems need to assume broader responsibilities in generating social benefits other than student enrollment and research output through social service provision and research commercialization. In this regard, collaborating with the private sector and local governments to apply research excellence to commercial activities will be further enhanced as a means of generating investment for research and applying research outcomes for social wellbeing. Such collaborations may not necessarily be confined within national borders—quite the opposite, a larger scope of networks is necessary to facilitate the mobilities of knowledge, resource and talented people. Transforming higher education systems, such as those in China and Japan, also provides implications for student mobilities. As education provision and the internationalization of research output going beyond national borders are significantly growing, universities are required to improve their responsiveness accordingly. In a report released by the British Council in 2012 on the changing higher education landscape from the perspective of international collaboration in teaching and research, entitled “The shape of things to come: higher education global trends and emerging opportunities to 2020” (British Council and Oxford Economics 2012), the research identified a very strong correlation between student and trade flows in certain countries such as Canada, Japan, China, South Korea and India. The result also suggested that the-then emerging economies, such as China and India, because of their growing importance to world trade, were potentially becoming popular study destinations and have seen significant research production and international collaboration. Potentially, for the Chinese higher education system, inbound student flow may outpace the outbound student mobility due to the fast-pacing development of its economy and the significant improvement of its international research impacts. Therefore, it is reasonable for Chinese universities to prepare for the potential challenges that engaging with international

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students and scholars would bring. In the case of Japanese universities, due to shrinking enrollments, they also have been making great efforts in attracting international students and young researchers to meet the needs of talented people in innovation promotion. It seems that in the age of emerging societies and increasing demand for innovation, higher education systems are increasingly required to change in a dynamic and adaptive manner. We could see increasing efforts that universities devote to improving the education quality, research capacity and collaboration with other sectors to enhance their institutional strength and international competitiveness. Rationally, beyond student mobility, flows in research resources and scholars would most probably grow as well. Furthermore, such mobilities may take place not only across geographical boundaries but also across disciplines, institutions and sectors.

Conclusion The arrival of the 4th IR is one of the best examples representing the challenges the HE sector confronts, especially in the discourse illustrated in the new global development agenda that deals with problems from a sustainable development perspective. Undoubtedly, the global HE system should be dynamically adjusted and universities need to be more adaptive toward such external changes and improve their efficiency and accountability. Especially in East Asia, manufacturing and knowledge industries have become leading sectors within which high skilled workers can contribute significantly within their own industries. At the same time, these innovating enterprises act easily beyond national borders. This situation can stimulate either self-sustained immobility (Japan) or a one-way mobility toward established economies (brain drain) (China) eventuating in a flatter and casual mobility. Even more, there is a strong possibility that people across the globe are daily connected through online means eliminating some of the conventional constraints of physical distance, as illustrated so plainly by the rapid diffusion of online communication under the COVID-19 Pandemic. All these factors have posed challenges to universities in terms of the quality and relevance of education delivery and research output. Therefore, what is important for HE systems may relate to the need to assure a balanced development between institutions, improve overall education quality and sustain research impacts within international standards.

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In all, HE systems are embedded in complex social systems and the functions of universities and the innovation they can provide should be viewed from a holistic and sustainable perspective. It is necessary for universities to act as knowledge hubs, incubators of talented people and coordinators of the resources necessary for social innovation. Here, university education linked with innovation is not necessarily detached from the needs and capabilities of local society. The situation is quite the opposite. Active collective engagements of national and local communities and industry are in increased demand, but at the same time, globally activated skills and attitudes will continue to be developed.

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Japanese). Retrieved from https://www.mext.go.jp/content/202000513-­ mxt_kouhou01-­000004520_3.pdf National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP). (2019). Survey on Research Activities of Private Corporations 2018 (in Japanese), NISTEP REPORT, No. 181, Tokyo. Retrieved from https://nistep.repo.nii.ac. jp/?action=pages_view_main&active_action=repository_view_main_item_ detail&item_id=6646&item_no=1&page_id=13&block_id=21 Nomura Research Institute (NRI). (2015). Forty-nine Percent of the Japanese Workforce can be Replaced by Artificial Intelligence or Robots (in Japanese) Retrieved from https://www.nri.com/-­/media/Corporate/jp/Files/PDF/ news/newsrelease/cc/2015/151202_1.pdf Owens, T.L. (2017). Higher Education in the Sustainable Development Goals Framework. Eur J Educ, 52, 414–420. Pearson. (2019). The Global Learner Survey. Retrieved from https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/global-­store/global/resources/Pearson_Global_ Learner_Survey_2019.pdf Penprase, B.E. (2018). The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Higher Education. In Gleason, N.  W. (ed.), Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (pp.  1–11). Retrieved from https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­981-­13-­0194-­0_1 Peters, M.A. (2017). Technological Unemployment: Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(1), 1–6. Schwab, K. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Davos 2016. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-­fourth-­industrial-­ revolution-­what-­it-­means-­and-­how-­to-­respond/ Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (2019). SJTU News: SJTU and Huawei Signed Agreement on Strategic Cooperation Partnership (in Chinese). Retrieved from https://news.sjtu.edu.cn/jdyw/20190111/94795.html) Shen, G.Z. (2018). Building World-Class Universities in China: From the View of National Strategies. Retrieved from http://www.guninetwork.org/articles/ building-­world-­class-­universities-­china-­view-­national-­strategies State Council, People’s Republic of China. (2015a). Notice on the “China Manufacturing 2025” Initiative (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www. gov.cn/zhengce/content/2015-­05/19/content_9784.htm State Council, People’s Republic of China. (2015b). Notice on the Issuance of the Overall Plan to Coordinate Development of World-class Universities and First-­ class Disciplines Construction (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.gov. cn/zhengce/content/2015-­11/05/content_10269.htm State Council, People’s Republic of China. (2016a). Notice on Issuance of the 13th Five-year Plan for National Science and Technology Innovation (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2016-­08/08/content_5098072.htm

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State Council, People’s Republic of China. (2016b). The Issuance of the Outlines of National Strategies for Innovation-driven Development (in Chinese). Retrieved from www.gov.cn/zhengce/2016-­05/19/content_5074812.htm State Council, People’s Republic of China. (2020). Integrated Plan for Deepening the Reform on Educational Evaluation in the New Era (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2020-­10/13/content_5551032.htm UNESCO. (2019). Beijing Consensus on Artificial Intelligence and Education. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000368303 United Nations (UN). (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations. Retrieved from https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld Wen, J. and Kobayashi, S. (2001). Exploring Collaborative R&D Network: Some New Evidence in Japan. Research Policy, 30, 1309–1319. World Economic Forum (WEF). (2015). Deep Shift Technology Tipping Points and Societal Impact. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_ GAC15_Technological_Tipping_Points_report_2015.pdf World Economic Forum (WEF). (2016). The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs.pdf World Technology Network (WTN). (2015). World Summit on Technological Unemployment. Retrieved from https://www.wtn.net/ wtn-­technological-­unemployment-­summit Wu, Y. (2019). Introduction on the “Talent Training Plan” 2.0 (in Chinese), Press Conference on April 29, 2019, Tianjin. Retrieved from http://www.moe.gov. cn/fbh/live/2019/50601/twwd/201904/t20190429_380086.html Wu, Y. (2020). Coping with the Crisis, Seeking for Changes: Strengthening International Online Teaching Platforms and Curriculum Construction (in Chinese), Online Conference on Universities’ International Online Teaching Platforms and Curriculum Construction, April 10, 2020, Beijing. Retrieved from http://sf.cufe.edu.cn/info/1297/9265.htm Yonezawa, A., Hammond, C.  D., Brotherhood, T., Kitamura, M. & Kitagawa, F. (2020). Evolutions in Knowledge Production Policy and Practice in Japan: A Case Study of an Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Disaster Science. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 42:2, 230–244, https:// doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2019.1701850.

CHAPTER 3

The Impact and Implications of the 4th Industrial Revolution on Student Mobility in Asia Pacific Region Nopraenue S. Dhirathiti

Introduction This chapter considers two issues in higher education. The first is to portray the current policy framework and rhetoric of the 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) and its implications for higher education policy. The second section of the chapter describes the influence of changing paradigms of learning on student mobility. Several countries have articulated the opinion that responsible social sectors, especially higher education, will be able to accommodate the multiple transitions of Industry 4.0 by developing new strategies to produce graduates with the requisite competencies in demand by innovative industries. The most pressing question related to manpower development is how nations will cope with disruptive technologies which alter the

N. S. Dhirathiti (*) Mahidol University, Salaya, Thailand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Ashizawa, D. E. Neubauer (eds.), Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16065-3_3

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landscape of production, commerce, user experience or any combination thereof. The potential wealth conferred by developing a disruptive technology has induced many countries to identify strategies that focus on developing innovative industries to accelerate growth, depicted as an ‘S-curve.’ Examples of advanced industries include robotics and smart devices, aviation and logistics, medical hubs, bio-fuels and bio-chemicals as well as the development of digital and artificial intelligence (AI). Countries are transitioning from one S-curve to another by accomplishing a rapid migration from light industry and low wages (Industry 2.0) to heavy industries and advanced machinery (Industry 3.0), finally to ‘smart’ industries, smart cities and a smart society Industry 4.0. As summarized by Vaidya et al. (2018), the multiple migrations to the current state of digital deployment and intelligent design have altered manufacturing processes. In so doing, organizations have also been transformed, and this trend will continue as manufacturers will exert increasingly finite control over the product life cycle to ensure it is responsive to the demand for increasingly customized products. These transformations require reconceiving the workforce. Industry 4.0, while still nascent in development, already includes a familiar vernacular: the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet, Smart Manufacturing and Cloud-based Manufacturing. The recent emerging consensus among heads of state in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the probable futures of ASEAN has also emphasized facilitating seamless trade and data protections while simultaneously pushing digital trade and innovation, enabling cross-border digital payments, broadening the digital talent base, fostering entrepreneurship and coordinating activities. Together, these IR 4.0 vectors will generate new business and economic environments for contemporary graduates (Limviphuwat 2019). Higher education appears to be thrust into a central role, shaping and implementing policies which are still emerging. In the ASEAN region, higher education reforms in Thailand, China, Taiwan and elsewhere have reconceived university missions and provided the institutions with the resources necessary to facilitate and implement the transition to IR 4.0. Examples of such emerging programs are ‘Thailand 4.0,’ ‘Made in China 2025’ or ‘Productivity 4.0.’ National governments have tasked the higher education sector as well as specific leading institutions of higher learning to take a pivotal role in producing a new kind of graduate who can engage in and advance disruptive technologies, innovations and economies. The specific elements of program redesign in higher education include training

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or relevant ‘learning experiences’ that will provide the necessary skill sets for graduates. The rhetoric of the new framework for higher education policy is exerted not only at the national level but at the institutional level as well (Baygin et al. 2016). The adaptation of educational institutions to IR 4.0, and its attendant collateral internal disruptions, have created the so-called period of VUCADEMIA (VUCA = volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) (Lockey 2017; Weber et al. 2019). Higher education institutions are being bombarded with demands for access and accountability, fiscal austerity and responsiveness to an unpredictable but connected world, all in the context of diminished resources and a pronounced demographic shift to an aging population. To successfully navigate IR 4.0, higher education must be nimble, embracing multiple modes of delivery while serving the core mission of producing graduates who enter the workforce with skills relevant to the fast-moving global environment. Positive adaptations to VUCADEMIA include satisfying the core mission through traditional, virtual or other types of experiential learning (World Economic Forum 2016). The second objective of the chapter is to examine the extent to which the changing paradigm of learning as a result of Industry 4.0 has affected student mobility programs within the Asia Pacific. Student mobility is a key factor that can enhance skill sets, mindsets and experiential learning processes, each of which will inherently affect students’ abilities to pivot toward the new economic horizon and social constructs. As put forth by Ziguras and McBernie (2011) and Kuroda et  al. (2018), international mobility, as a cornerstone of higher education internationalization strategies, has a strong base in the Asia Pacific where intra-regional student mobility is growing faster than the movement of students to other regions. Therefore, this chapter explores and classifies current practices of student mobility within the region and demonstrates how each implicates the nature and objectives of the mobility programs and the expected tangible and intangible results as a result of Industry 4.0. Using as a unit of analysis the activities of key implementers in promoting relevant policies in the internationalization of higher education, it is fairly apparent that student mobility programs in the Asia Pacific are being promoted and implemented at three levels: multilateral, national and individual institutional programs. For decades, student mobility programs have been regarded as important learning experiences which should be supported by national governments as well as institutions of higher

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learning (He and Preudhikulpradab 2018; Rego 2018). As Knight (1999, 2004; Knight, and International Association of Universities 2006) and Zolfaghari et al. (2009) have asserted, internationalization of higher education is not only about internationalization at home but also internationalization abroad. With the university’s core missions framed by the triad of education, research and student affairs, integrating internationalization into these areas requires complementary, intertwined strategies. Higher education institutions can bring internationalization to the host nation by providing an international atmosphere for students through curriculum reforms, attracting more foreign students or ensuring diversity within the classroom by enrolling a mixture of students, foreign staff or providing variety in the language of instruction. By seeking to enroll more international students in the classroom, curriculum designs ensure a greater mobility for both short-term and long-term foreign students, and may also serve to recruit more full-time foreign students. Thirdly, the internationalization of research demands networks of globally connected academic staff, researchers and students. Finally, student affairs offers a broad range of opportunities to confer an international experience, through cultural activities, clubs, welfare missions, skill development and language practice. The disruptive technologies of Industry 4.0 can promote these diverse initiatives by providing exposure to new skill sets through collaborative project-based or experiential learning among groups of international students.

The 4th Industrial Revolution Policy in Asia Pacific Industry 4.0 is interpreted differently across the Asia Pacific region, depending on the national policy and the country’s level of economic development. In the manufacturing sector, Industry 4.0 has introduced smart processes through the IoT to streamline processes related to the production of commercial goods. Service economies, such as those found in Singapore, have embraced Industry 4.0 by digitalizing services. One example is the use of financial technologies or ‘Fintech’ in commercialized services to increase operational efficiency, lower costs, enhance customer experiences and provide edge of products and services (‘Fintech grows up’, Not listed 2019). Generally, national policy regarding Industry 4.0 comprises reforms in the industrial sector by encouraging the adaptation of businesses to ‘4.0’ manufacturing and retailing methods. In the realm of education, Industry 4.0 innovations have played a significant role at

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both vocational and university levels. Upon closer examination, the adoption of Industry 4.0 in the more advanced economies of Asia Pacific and beyond has taken the form of encouraging collaboration between industry and education rather than simply endeavoring to innovate upon the delivery of instruction. Several innovative reforms now promote mutual understanding and an exchange of ideas within a variety of communities including research, manufacturing practice and entrepreneurial activities. These collaborations enhance meaningful connections between higher education and business sectors that can inform the development of relevant curricula as well as improve upon the career-readiness of graduates (Hawkins and Mok 2015; Rufai et  al. 2015). In Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region, the policies of Industry 4.0 have facilitated closer ties between education and the industrial sector, and in some countries new policies attempt to expand the innovations of Industry 4.0 to comprise elements of social development. Japan, for example, has introduced a diverse set of policies loosely gathered under the umbrella ‘Society 5.0.’ These policies seek to integrate the innovations of Industry 4.0, including IoT, AI, big data and so on, into industrial development and beyond, into the very fabric of society. Since the post-war era, Japan has vigorously embraced the role of technology in industry, so it is perhaps natural that the S-curve of Industry 4.0 was succeeded by an expansive permeation of tech into society. With respect to education policy, the economic and industrial reforms of post-war Japan have been the framework within which Society 5.0 is introduced. For example, the Japanese government enacted the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan in 2016 (Granrath 2017) which covers many expected elements of Industry 4.0, such as innovation and internationalization. The key difference is the promotion of a ‘Super Smart Society’, or Society 5.0. Education is reconceived to also encompass human strengths, such as skills in communication, leadership, endurance, curiosity and comprehension. To encourage this pivotal shift, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) is promoting two radical education policy changes, including curriculum reforms to make grade progression more flexible and provide additional support classes to ensure there are no gaps in comprehension of subject matter. These reforms are particularly necessary in primary and secondary education to ensure that qualified students progress through school acquiring meaningful preparation for the rigor of higher education. The MEXT also removed some

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barriers which had previously inhibited the creation of more interdisciplinary programs in higher education; this has created an expansion of programs which integrate traditional subjects and newer high-tech subjects such as data science, programming and so on. In Taiwan, Industry 4.0 has been rebranded as ‘Productivity 4.0.’ These policies aim to optimize the smart supply chain ecosystems of leading industries, including metal, transportation, machinery, food and textiles (Wu 2016). Central to these policies is an upgrade from current precision machinery to a smarter version, also known as ‘smart machinery,’ encompassing the use of a wide range of robotics, IoT, big data, cyber security and physical systems. In relation to Productivity 4.0 policy, the specific aims are twofold: develop technically proficient R&D manpower as well as skilled workers entering the industry from technical and vocational colleges, respectively. Apart from these upgrades to technical competency and skills, the country has also attracted a high number of tertiary enrolments from foreign nationals seeking education in Taiwan. Therefore, the availability of skilled engineers and scientists as well as other professionals serves as an able and ready workforce for new industries. The focus of higher education in Taiwan, therefore, is to develop midto high-level talent and thereby increase the pool of qualified personnel in the labor market. By setting a very clear goal, the Ministry of Education as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has set the course to strengthen practical skills in higher education by bringing industry, education and research together. Higher education is therefore encouraged to diversify its core mission to refocus on mid-career development and training (MOFA, Taiwan 2015). Several interesting national projects are being introduced as a joint effort between ministries to build the capacity of the current and future workforce through education. For example, the Higher Education Sprout Project was launched to reinforce the international competitiveness of Taiwanese higher education institutions through the development of cutting-edge research centers which utilize university specialities and integrate industrial resources (Ministry of Education, Taiwan 2018). As stated previously, the policy to recruit qualified foreign students has been the flagship program of the Taiwanese government with abundant scholarships available for further education. In recent years, this policy has been instrumental in setting a trajectory for inbound student mobility to higher education institutions in Taiwan. In 2015, China launched ‘Made in China 2025’ to stimulate manufacturing innovations with 10 key sectors related to robotics, AI and

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energy-­sufficient technologies (Almagor 2018; Xu et al. 2018). Given the influence of rote learning in most Asian cultures, China’s educational system was thought to be insufficient for the task of providing the human resources necessary to achieve the aims of the policy—namely disruptive innovation. Hence, overall education reforms were initiated to address this challenge by creating tighter linkages between industry and education, a theme seen often in this transition to Industry 4.0, as well as a focus on intentional talent development to create a pipeline of professionals to meet the needs of industry (Li 2017). These partnerships between higher education institutions and industries—such as AI, smart manufacturing and other new sectors—have been supported and promoted by the government. Like many other industrial countries, the private sector in China is also being encouraged to engage in curriculum design and reform, as well as provide internships for students and joint ventures with higher education institutions to internally mobilize students and faculty members to gain real work experience. Specific targets for higher education have been introduced to further enhance reforms, such as directing the nation’s top 40 universities to develop world-class programs and the remaining 90 or so universities in the top tier to develop niche disciplines that expand upon national strengths and support the specific growth needs of Industry 4.0. Similar to Taiwan and Japan, inbound student and staff mobility from foreign countries is encouraged through scholarships and grants to foster intellectual synergies and knowledge transfer. The countries of Southeast Asia, specifically Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, provide examples of the national government’s discourse and policies related to Industry 4.0. The government of Thailand clearly states through the announcement of Thailand’s National Strategy (2018–2037) in the Royal Gazette dated 13 October 2018 that the heart of Thailand 4.0 is the preparation of the manpower through educational reform, skill development and the improvement of economic opportunities for all. Through educational reforms and the incorporation of the Office of Higher Education and the former Ministry of Science and Technology into a new ministry called the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) in 2019, the policies seek to align teaching and learning to the needs of industry through being more problem-­oriented, purposeful and outcome-based. Skill development is promoted through integrated education, training and other career development schemes. Finally, the reforms seek to increase economic

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opportunity by addressing the existing problems of poverty and inequality of economic and social opportunities. Accordingly, there is an obvious link between the onset of the 4th Industrial Revolution and the implementation of higher education policy. Higher education is perceived to be the conduit through which the three Industry 4.0 goals are actualized. The Thai government coined ‘University 4.0’ as evidence that it believes universities will spearhead the transformation of industry. University 4.0 conveys the notion that institutions of higher education must recast their programs and adapt their administrative goals to invest more heavily in human resource development and the transfer of knowledge and skills to society. Higher education institutions must not only be a repository for research but must also serve as launchpads for developing technology and innovation (Othakanon 2018). Perhaps the expectation is most explicitly stated in Thailand that universities should serve as the key policy actors through which Industry 4.0 solutions and strategies will be exerted. The wide-ranging plans include curriculum development, research, engagement with industry and skill upgrades as well as new avenues of experiential learning and lifelong education. In the future, Thai graduates are not supposed to be assessed in the traditional sense, through evaluation of knowledge acquisition, but rather by how well they are able to translate their knowledge into real-world scenarios, demonstrating the ability to apply, analyze and solve problems. These advances in assessment demand equally innovative learning methods. Singapore has taken the initiative to develop a ‘Smart Nation’ accompanied by rather undefined yet wide-ranging policies that encompass government services, public transport and health. While other countries have concentrated effort on smart manufacturing, Singapore tends to focus more on the service industries, such as the TechSkills Accelerator. In this program, students are assigned to study key areas such as AI. Smart Nation Scholarships are also offered jointly by several national agencies to provide funding for outstanding students to pursue information and communication technology-related degrees. The Smart Nation Fellowship program has also been launched to support both academic and industrial linkages by drawing experts from both sectors to collaborate on developing national projects. These examples from Singapore suggest that the government is interested in motivating young students to delve into technology fields and service-based industries (Smart Nation and Digital Government Office 2019). The student mobility initiatives seen in Taiwan are also

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evident in Singapore in that qualified students are induced to join the skilled labor force through scholarships extended to foreign students. In Malaysia, ‘Industry4WRD’ (Industry Forward) was coined to assist the manufacturing sector to migrate toward adopting Industry 4.0 technologies and processes. While specific strategies were not promulgated, the initiative has been credited with increasing the level of activity in the manufacturing sector and elevating its contribution to the economy, such as the capacity to innovate expanded and skilled laborers enter the market. Similar to the Thai reliance on higher education, schools in Malaysia were re-designed to enhance the capabilities of the existing workforce from 2.0 to 4.0. Many development programs are currently being introduced through higher education institutions to reskill and upskill the workforce for specific manufacturing sectors. As seen elsewhere in Asia, higher education institutions are seen as the primary driving force to provide students with the necessary skill sets to work in the Industry 4.0 environment (Ministry of International Trade and Industry 2018). In a slightly different approach to innovation, the Australian government’s Industry 4.0 policy focuses on advanced automation and robotics, machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communication, AI and machine learning as well as sensor technology and data analytics (Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Australia 2019a). Several mechanisms have been launched, including the so-called Advanced Manufacturing Forum which has been set up to develop, review and implement national policy relating to 4.0 innovation. Much of this policy aims to develop manufacturing capacity through the ‘Industry 4.0 Testlabs’ project. Each Testlab project brings together five higher education institutions to collaborate in assisting businesses in the transition to smart factories through the provision of a physical space for businesses and researchers to trial, explore and showboat Industry 4.0 technologies, processes and innovations. The Testlabs also work in reverse, enabling the cooperation of higher education institutions and SMEs to gain new skills and take full advantage of opportunities offered by Industry 4.0 partners. In addition to focused partnerships, the Testlabs provide a vehicle for the Australian government to offer education and training opportunities at educational institutions to ensure the labor force can keep pace with relevant skills for the new advanced technology industries. These projects are being implemented in parallel with other programs such as the Industry 4.0 Higher Apprenticeship Program which provides skill development for future workers through a combination of industrial apprenticeships (also

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known as work-based study) combined with associate degrees in a wide range of sectors: advanced manufacturing processes, automation and robotics, cloud computing, IoT, smart sensors and more. Projects supported and funded by the Australian government underscore the importance of developing shared expertise between the industrial sector and academia, and in so doing create internal student mobility between the two different sectors (Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Australia 2019b).

Student Mobility Examined at Three Levels Given the high hopes for universities to scale up the proficiency of the labor force commensurate with the demands of Industry 4.0, it should be no surprise that student mobility has become a milestone for many national governments. Higher education institutions are seeking a diverse student population with broad international experience and exposure. In the following section, we turn to the multinational, national and institutional frameworks which promote student mobility. As mentioned previously, student mobility programs in Asia Pacific can be examined on three levels: multilateral, national and institutional frameworks. Multilateral Mobility By definition, multilateral exchange programs focus on networks of members which share a structure for mobility between any combination of partners. Factors contributing to effective programs often involve credit transfer and quality assurance systems as well as a top-down approach with strong governmental involvement which tends to lead to more engaged member institutions, as is evident in the European Union and its experience with the Bologna Process (Gleeson 2013; Hou et  al. 2017). The largest program in Asia—the University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP)—engages 600 institutional partners. In the UMAP suggested guidelines, member institutions participate by sending and receiving two students for 1–2 semesters for credit study. Using a bottom-up approach without direct funding or mandates from national governments, UMAP has based its strength on the UMAP credit transfer system which facilitates the exchange in recent years (UMAP, n.d.). Another example of the multilateral exchange program is the ASEAN International Mobility for Students (AIMS) piloted between Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, also

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initially known as the M-I-T program, and SEAMEO RIHED in 2009 (The AIMS Research Working Group 2019). The program was expanded to cover additional ASEAN and other countries in Asia Pacific, including Japan and Korea, reaching a new milestone of 4,000 students and the participation of approximately 60 institutions in recent years. The key success factors include the financial support of respective national governments and the credit transfer program. The Collective Action for Mobility Program of University Students in Asia (CAMPUS Asia) is a trilateral program between China, Japan and Korea modeled on the European Union’s Erasmus program. The program itself is unique as it requires the participation of top universities, the inclusion of joint/dual degree programs and an emphasis on quality assurance mechanisms. Led by the Japan-China-­ Korea Quality Assurance Council, the strong support of governmental organizations is also a key success factor of this program. By creating trilateral consortia and generally building on existing collaborations in each area, participating institutions support around 30 exchange students with high academic performance to take part in this program. Although CAMPUS Asia does not develop its own credit transfer system, the support from governmental organizations and the focus on quality assurance have made the program fairly successful (MEXT 2017). National Mobility The second type of student mobility program is unilateral, sponsored by one nation and tending to focus on inbound or outbound mobility. Many countries have a program or an agency that oversees the allocation of government funding for the purpose of international education or international mobility. The funding usually covers a wide range of inbound and outbound short-term and long-term student mobility as well as full-degree scholarships and other support. Generally, these organizations provide an outline of requirements, and universities within the country propose programs for funding. In some cases, the government may focus on specific countries with which it has pre-existing educational agreements or diplomatic ties. In other cases, the funding may be provided for specific political or economic purposes, to develop manpower toward national goals. Examples can be found in many countries, including Australia, China, Japan and Korea. Australia is one of the leading countries in Asia Pacific with a high level of both outbound and inbound international mobility. Throughout the

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past decade, the number has consistently increased, reaching nearly 50,000 outbound students in 2017 with more than 30 institutions actively participating in the mobility programs. Approximately the same number of inbound international students registered in 2018 for mobility and foundational or enabling courses, accounting for six percent of all international students in Australia (Department of Education and Training 2019a, 2019b). The renowned Colombo and New Colombo Plan (NCP) have been flagship programs of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade since the 1950s with a revamp of the latest scheme in 2014. The program supports Australian undergraduate students taking part in outbound exchange activities, such as credit-bearing and non-­ credit-­ bearing exchange, internships, mentorships, practice and research. With 40 host institutions in the Asia Pacific region, the program promotes outbound movement of Australians who seek engagement in the international community and who can serve as ambassadors for their country within this geographically dispersed area. One of the oldest mobility programs in Asia Pacific, the Colombo Plan provides training and education so that students can contribute upon their return to Australia in demonstrable ways, such as through physical capital and infrastructure, technology and developing other basic public settlements such as hospitals, roads and schools. The Colombo Plan is an example of a national government policy to increase skill levels which can be reinvested in development projects and service delivery relevant to the needs of the society at the time. In addition to the outbound support, the Australian government provides scholarships and other assistance for students from member countries to study and gain practical training in Australia. By the 1980s, over 20,000 students had the opportunity to study in Australia in their field, with the intention that they would assist their home countries’ technological, economic, social and political development (Ministry of Home Affairs, Australia 2019). China is also extremely active in providing overseas mobility programs. As discussed previously and also by Tamene et  al. (2017), the Chinese government has played an important role in laying out blueprints for international mobility, especially oriented toward increasing the number of inbound students. The numbers bear out its success: the number of international students increased to approximately 500,000 students in more than 1,000 higher education institutions in China by 2019 (Ministry of Education, China 2019). Higher education institutions have adopted education reforms since the 1990s and have simultaneously embraced

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their new roles in facilitating the mobility programs. The Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) is the main agency to administer government scholarships for international education. In contrast to the Australian emphasis on outbound mobility, China generally targets students who are citizens of a specific region or discipline and supports them to complete full-degree programs in China. Some of the more notable scholarship programs for inbound students include the ASEAN-China Young Leaders Scholarship Program or the Pacific Islands Forum Program. Both are examples of China’s effort to mobilize students in certain geographical areas and create a greater connection between China and manpower in the region. Perhaps one reason is strategic—Industry 4.0 innovations require skill sets not readily available among citizens, thus creating an incentive for research collaboration between institutions or the ability to recruit top students from other locations (CSC 2018). Both the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture (MEXT) and the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) have been major national agencies promoting inbound and outbound student mobility in Japan. While MEXT has provided full scholarships (Monbukagakusho) to 70,000 students since 1954 to students from all over the world, JASSO oversees the administration of a wider range of governmental scholarships for both full-time and short-term students. Coupled with the policy announcement of the Japanese government entitled ‘The 300000 Foreign Students Plan Campaign,’ Japan has diversified several different schemes and services in response to the plenitude of student mobility preferences. The agency provides information to students and higher education institutions to help facilitate student exchange; it also channels direct funding for outbound and inbound exchanges and extends support through accommodation centers for international students. Apart from the inbound side of the Japanese mobility programs, many other programs have been launched over the years to promote outbound students to other countries, including the Go Global Japan Project, the Young Ambassador Program or the Asian Gateway Initiative. The inbound mobility programs have been utilized to encourage foreign students to familiarize themselves with Japan, many of whom stay on to work for Japanese companies while others return home to work for Japanese enterprises in their home countries. The outbound mobility programs, on the contrary, seek to furnish experiences abroad, exposure to the international environment and an understanding of the world outside Japan. These experiential learning programs provide students with a portfolio of global skills which are vital to their

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employability and serve their employers well in a diversified economy (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan 2019). The Korean government is following suit with other Asian countries by addressing the imbalance between outbound and inbound mobility. As discussed by Kwon (2013), the number of Korean outbound students to other countries has been rising steadily since 2005. However, the number of inbound foreign students has remained low compared to the outbound number. By establishing the National Institute for International Education (NIIED), the Korean government enhanced its capacity to administer governmental scholarships as well as other support services for internationalization, with the goal to attract more foreign students and assimilate them into the manpower pool of the Korean economic environment. The Korean government provides financial support for inbound short-term exchange students through the credit-bearing Exchange Student Support Program. A separate mobility program has also been launched to promote better collaboration and understanding between China, Japan and Korea under the International Education Exchange Program. Similar to China and Japan, inbound exchange programs seek to increase the number of foreign students living in Korea. The scholarships include collateral funding to develop counseling support and services for international students in Korea through campaigns, such as ‘Study in Korea,’ and the International Student Service Centre, which runs students’ associations (NIIED 2019). Apart from the multicultural exchange opportunities among neighboring East Asian countries, these programs also serve to promote improved understanding and cohesion between historical adversaries. Perhaps most acutely, these inbound programs also serve to address the challenge of developing a skilled workforce in the context of an aging society. Similar to Japan, the strategy adopted by Korea to familiarize foreign students with the local culture, workplace ethics and the local environment perhaps indirectly, yet crucially, promotes the view that Korea is a desirable employment destination. Student Mobility as an Institutional Practice At the institutional level, the top higher education institutions in the Asia Pacific region are currently aiming to increase the number of exchange students both for inbound and outbound categories. For most universities, this is a global effort rather than a regional focus. Most universities have adopted similar exchange programs codified through bilateral

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agreements, affording students a wide variety of options. The home and host universities negotiate entry requirements for student exchanges, including the target inbound and outbound numbers. Students will generally apply to their home university and earn credits through relevant required courses or elective courses at the host universities. These shortterm and long-­term exchange programs are either voluntary or serve to fill a requirement for degree program completion in some institutions. Student mobility programs are instrumental in providing students with the necessary skill sets to engage productively in a multicultural setting. To effect greater internationalization, some institutions have set a target for outbound and inbound mobility. Many higher education institutions in Indonesia, for example, have begun to require participation in an international program for degree completion. Some institutions in Hong Kong have likewise adopted a target of sending all students abroad for a short-­ term exchange. These examples of higher education institutions incorporating student mobility as an indicator of internationalization reflect the broad awareness that international experience confers mutually beneficial experiences through cross-cultural exchange as well as diverse training and work opportunities. Universities understand that graduates with a global mindset are highly desired within the internal labor market as well as regionally and globally. A few universities stand out in this endeavor, offering examples of best practices. The National University of Singapore (NUS) is known for its clear vision of creating a pool of graduates to serve both the international and regional market, and in support of this mission, it has administered student exchange programs through the Global Relations Office, with 300 partner universities in 40 countries. In the Academic Year 2017/2018 alone, approximately 2,000 students took part in each of inbound and outbound exchanges. The majority of students participating in this program are expected to have a GPA above 3.0 and take part in at least one credit-bearing semester. In addition, NUS has wisely invested in its mobile students by providing pre-departure training to serve as ‘ambassadors’ and to promote the University as an exchange destination for local students in the host country. Another example of NUS fully capitalizing on student experience abroad is the integrated exposure to the host country’s business climate through tours and discussions. Students on outbound exchanges to China, Hong Kong or Taiwan can take part in the Student Exchange Program (SEP) Plus Program upon arrival in the host country. Well-designed student mobility pre-departure and ongoing activities can

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prepare students to absorb as much as possible from their experiences (NUS 2015). In Hong Kong, international student mobility is widely valued as transformative for society and industry as international competencies are increasingly valued by employees and employers alike. Oleksiyenko et al. (2013) note that Hong Kong officials have for many years been mindful of the outbound-inbound student flow and governmental policies have sought to facilitate cross-border education balances. Higher education institutions in Hong Kong have readily followed suit in promoting international student mobility. For instance, Hong Kong University (HKU) provides an outbound exchange for students to attain experiential Industry 4.0 learning through a range of different choices, generally built upon bilateral agreements with partner universities which include partial financial support. For instance, the HKU Worldwide Undergraduate Exchange Program offers a standard bilateral exchange opportunity focusing on the personal growth of students in foreign countries. Students serve as the university’s brand ambassadors and are required to share their experiences post-exchange. The Worldwide Plus Visiting Program allows HKU students to spend up to two semesters at high-profile partners which reserve a specific number of seats for visiting HKU students. Other shorter-term study abroad programs focus on outbound HKU students attending summer or winter programs, similar to those previously discussed, with a focus on language, culture or academic fields of general interest. Some region-­ specific programs attract special interest, such as China’s Belt and Road initiatives. These experiential opportunities developed by HKU are intended to provide multiple platforms from which students can select and align outbound experiences with their own personal and professional interests. In Korea, the leading tech university, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), provides a wide range of outbound mobility programs in addition to the more typical bilateral academic exchanges. The KAIST non-academic programs provide access to cross-­ cultural business experiences through volunteer programs across the globe. One such novel program, Engineering Without Borders, established as a non-profit organization by KAIST students and staff, provides students with the chance to develop appropriate technologies for people in need around the world. Similar to Hong Kong University, special mobility programs for top students are also available for those who plan to take part in a research exchange at partner organizations, such as NASA in

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the United States. Some universities in Taiwan, such as the National Taiwan University, focus on internship mobility rather than more typical academic programs. Although standard bilateral exchange programs are also in place with partner universities, a range of scholarships is made available for internship programs abroad, including outbound internships, participation in accelerated career track sessions or professional coaching sessions. These programs aim at improving students’ employability by focusing on practical career skills for Industry 4.0 business environments (KAIST 2016). In Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia mobility programs are actively promoted at the regional level through AIMS and the AUN, as mentioned previously. Standard bilateral outbound programs, such as long-term semester exchanges, short-term exchanges or summer programs are usually provided for students in higher education institutions in these countries. Some universities prioritize key partners which can offer students specific experiences, such as technology-focused programs or courses. Universitas Indonesia, for example, provides special information online for partners in Japan, Korea and Australia, allowing students to easily find exchange information and special arrangements between these partners. Top students in Malaysia, such as students in Universiti Malaya, can also apply for exchange programs in world-class universities in Europe and the US.  In Thailand, Mahidol University has promoted student mobility of all types, both for outbound and inbound exchange as well as internship opportunities in partner universities across the globe. Similar to KAIST in Korea, one of this institution’s signature mobility programs is the platform ‘MU Backpack,’ which provides funding for a group of students to gain hands-on experience and engage in active learning under the broad theme of global citizenship in ASEAN countries. Another flagship inbound mobility program at Mahidol University is a 2–3-week experience with partner universities during which students are sent on a problem-­ based active learning program in Thailand’s leading enterprises and businesses. These examples illustrate the wide variety of strategic partnerships with diversified objectives, each aiming to equip students with different skill sets and perspectives ranging from cultural, technological, social to academic purposes (The AIMS Research Working Group 2019). Many universities in Australia have established student mobility programs as their standard practice for internationalization. Standard exchange opportunities are also based on bilateral agreements with partner universities similar to those mentioned previously. However, another unique but

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popular mobility program connects students with community projects, such as those conducted by the Macquarie University Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) program. As it has a similar structure to an outbound internship program, the placements are with selected charitable or community organizations of social benefit, and generally they are in collaboration with a partner university in a host country. The University of Sydney has also launched a similar program in coordination with partner universities to identify the community or charitable organization which best aligns with the student’s interests. In this way, higher education institutions help students develop skills while demonstrating value and gaining the experience necessary to ensure future employability. In addition to service-based exchanges, several programs integrate academics as well. The Global Leadership Program at Macquarie University accompanies a full-degree program at either the undergraduate or the post-­ graduate level. The program aims to provide students with a broad range of experiences to improve the competitive standing of graduates. Although outbound participation in a host country is not compulsory, the nature of the program allows students to decide to invest in cross-cultural awareness and leadership development and high-demand skill sets in the Industry 4.0 labor market (Macquarie University n.d.).

Conclusion Industry 4.0 has entirely reframed study-abroad programs from an emphasis on cross-cultural awareness to a much more intentional focus on developing student skill sets, identifying mutually beneficial exchanges between academia and industry, a long-term focus on post-graduate employability, opportunities for research and exposure to advances in technology, each of which satisfies the market imperatives of Industry 4.0. Multilateral agencies, national governments and higher education institutions have readily integrated these drivers in program development and have recast the rationale for promoting student mobility programs within their respective institutional charters. While institutions and organizations have developed a wide variety of programs, a common characteristic is the implicit understanding that graduates need a diverse skill set to be competitive, and that outbound mobility provides an excellent vehicle for experiential learning as well as promotion of the institution. Panning out from the microeconomic

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viewpoint, national policies which promote student mobility are driven by the desire to import diverse skills which support national economic growth. The diversity of programs reflects various institutional strengths while also integrating industry needs. The outbound programs are experiential, multifaceted and multicultural in nature. Students no longer participate in student mobility programs solely for the sake of cultural adventure or for credit-bearing purposes, although these elements still figure prominently in mobility programs at any level. Students who participate in programs abroad also acquire knowledge about the political, economic and business environment of their host nations. This broad exposure can have a significant impact on student career choices. Cross-cutting regional and global problems have elicited sweeping changes in national governments and higher education institutions with respect to the components of student mobility programs. These challenges afford students the opportunity to gain a local understanding of global problems, and how the host nation devises culturally relevant solutions. Community service abroad is an excellent vehicle for skill development and cross-cultural appreciation. This chapter has elucidated the rationale and current conception of student mobility programs in the Asia Pacific region. The diversity of programs reflects the trajectory of Industry 4.0 in each country, and the partnerships between government and education in response to labor market needs. The success of these programs hinges on two factors: common credit transfer and the co-investment of government. Most exchange programs are still credit-bearing, thus institutions must cooperate in developing credit transfer agreements. The second imperative is less straightforward: will educational institutions and governments remain equally invested in sustaining the programs which provide students with essential skill sets and learning experiences for Industry 4.0?

References Almagor, D. (2018). “Made in China 2025” versus “Industry 4.0:” Will digitalization compete with China’s relative advantages in manufacturing?. Retrieved from https://www.presenso.com/blog/Industry-­4-­China on 15 August 2019. Baygin, M., Yetis, H. and Kasakose, M. (et al.) (2016). An effect analysis of industry 4.0 to higher education. The 15th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET). 8–10 September 2016. Istanbul, Turkey. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/ document/7760744/authors#authors on 12 July 2019

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CHAPTER 4

Education Economics of Student Mobility in Asia-Pacific and the Fourth Industrial Revolution Takashi Sekiyama

Introduction The dynamics of international student mobility are influenced by educational, political, social, cultural, and economic factors. The “push” factors relate to students’ home countries and the “pull” factors relate to the host countries (Cummings 1993). This push-pull theory explains the dynamics of international student mobility as it relates to macro structures including state policy, educational systems, and socio-economic situations. Analysis of the macro level, however, cannot explain the microstructure of the factors that divide individuals who go abroad to study from those who do not. Similarly, the push-pull theory says little about whether a government should support international student mobility or not. In this regard,

T. Sekiyama (*) Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Ashizawa, D. E. Neubauer (eds.), Student and Skilled Labour Mobility in the Asia Pacific Region, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16065-3_4

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educational economics is a useful way to analyze the microstructure that influences individual decisions made by students and governments. This chapter explores the challenges of international student mobility in the Asia-Pacific region from the perspective of educational economics that students face during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Studying abroad has two economic dimensions: “consumption” of individual intellectual desires and “investment” in human capital. Whether the purpose is consumption or investment, an individual chooses to study abroad only when utility outweighs the costs. This chapter discusses studying abroad with a cost-utility analysis. How does the Fourth Industrial Revolution change the cost-utility structure of studying abroad? What challenges do Asia-Pacific higher education institutions face? This chapter also analyzes the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by employing a literature review and theoretical modeling. It discusses the implications obtained from the theoretical model and the possible impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on international students’ desire and ability to study while taking into consideration the many aspects of social concern lined to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Literature Review: Impacts Brought About by the Fourth Industrial Revolution As stated above, the education economy argues that studying abroad can be seen as the “consumption” of individual intellectual desires and “investment” in human capital. The question is whether studying abroad can pay off even in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. No matter if the motivation is “consumption” or “investment”, as long as the utility associated with studying abroad exceeds the costs, studying abroad has worth for the student. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, however, is likely to have significant impacts on the cost-utility structure of studying abroad. This literature review section first explores such socio-economic impacts brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A mathematical economic model of studying abroad is then developed by taking the literature review into account.

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The Increase of Global Knowledge Stock and its Obsolescence The Fourth Industrial Revolution significantly enhances the global capacity for the creation of knowledge and the speed at which it is produced. This increases the volume of global knowledge stock. On the other hand, a rapid increase in knowledge also means that obsolescence accelerates. The knowledge society is emerging from the simultaneous growth of the Internet, mobile telephony, and digital technologies which have revolutionized the role of knowledge in our societies (Bindé et al. 2005). The capacity to gather and analyze information has existed throughout human history. The concept of the present-day knowledge society, however, is based on the vast increases in data creation and information dissemination that result from innovation in information technologies. What makes the knowledge society exceptional are the sheer quantities of knowledge and information produced daily and the use of ICT in data-intensive processes (Vallima and Hoffman 2008). Artificial intelligence and machine learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution move both information and knowledge creation forward in their capacities to use intelligence to digitally create meaning independent of user-driven ICT, making a knowledge society different from an information society. The former serves to transform information into resources that allow society to take effective actions for the improvement of human circumstances, but the latter only creates and disseminates raw data. Information alone does not create knowledge. During the Third Industrial Revolution, the evolution of the Internet enabled individuals to connect anywhere and anytime wherever digital technologies were accessible. The capacity for individuals to produce and use data on a global scale, however, does not always result in knowledge creation. For knowledge creation to take place, there are requirements to create awareness, meaning, and understanding (Castelfranchi 2007). The anticipated new technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution make it possible for machines to learn from experience, perform human-like tasks, and help convert information into knowledge. Universities must equip graduates with “cross-skills” which are non-­ cognitive skills in communication, translation between technology and practice, empathy, and critical thinking. Most university curricula are designed around the consumption of knowledge. However, in a time when computers can extract information from thousands of textbooks in a second, the number of humans consuming the content of a limited

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number of textbooks is relatively insignificant. Similarly, in an age in which intelligent machines can perform countless tasks in a moment, it is not necessary for many people to become proficient in similar tasks. Rather, the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution require cross-skills. Future leaders must be able to imagine a new society and address its challenges.

Enhancing Global Connectivity Without Physical Movement In the Fourth Industrial Revolution society, people can be globally connected without having to physically travel. The biggest impacts of the Third Industrial Revolution were computerization and web-based interconnectivity developed in the 1980s and 1990s. As information technology further develops during the Fourth Industrial Revolution, online communication could displace traditional in-person communication. In fact, the wave of online communication has been accelerated by the spread of COVID-19 recently. This trend may greatly influence both learning methods and working styles for the next generation. Needless to say, online communication without physical travel would have a strong impact on concept, styles, and forms of studying abroad. Future students will learn in different ways than they have in the past, and developments in information technology could influence students’ mobility and desire to study abroad. The development of information technology such as massive online open courses (MOOCs) could expand access to university education for millions of previously underserved students around the world (Asmaa 2019). Even if this does not turn out to be the case, the necessity for studying abroad may decrease significantly due to the spread of online courses. On the other hand, online and tech-enhanced teaching within universities may enable universities to teach students with diverse backgrounds more efficiently and to open up their campuses to a more global community of both faculty and students. One example of an initiative of this sort is Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). COIL involves the co-development of a course module by two or more instructors from different countries. COIL courses often embrace the use of digital technology to bridge the distance among different parts of the world. Typically, forms of interaction include online discussion groups, videoconferences,

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class-to-class meetings, and online workgroup projects. COIL was initiated by the State University of New York to extend the enriching benefits of international education to a broader spectrum of students, faculty, and staff than presently are able to physically study abroad. Now a number of higher education institutions in several Asia-Pacific countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, and Russia participate in COIL projects (SUNY 2020). In particular, due to the impact of COVID-19, movements to adopt COIL as a substitute for traditional study abroad programs are becoming popular in Europe and the United States. Another example of online teaching is EdX. EdX was originally founded by MIT and Harvard University to offer MOOCs. Now, a growing number of elite universities are offering online graduate and certificate programs. More than a few Asian-Pacific universities can be found in the list of its charter members, including Australia National University, Kyoto University in Japan, Peking University in China, Seoul National University in South Korea, and The National University of Singapore (EdX 2019). Likewise, online courses can expand access to higher education and help students and workers all over the world to update the necessary skills in a fast-changing Fourth Industrial Revolution society. In addition to the development of information technology, another factor influencing studying abroad is the creation of entirely new institutions with more global and interdisciplinary curricula and a greater emphasis on strong collaborations between students within a residential community (Penprase 2018). One example is the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, instituted by Yale University and the National University of Singapore to provide a residential liberal arts college within Asia. Yale-NUS College offers a range of interdisciplinary science courses and quantitative reasoning, literature and philosophy from both Eastern and Western cultures. At this college local students are able to develop skills necessary in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution without leaving their home city.

Increasing Inequality One of the biggest social impacts brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the increase in the income gap between rich and poor that the Third Industrial Revolution helped to create. For example, Oxfam estimated in 2017 that just eight men had the same wealth as the poorest half of the world (Hardoon 2017). Another report stated that the bottom

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half of wealth holders collectively accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth in 2019, while the richest 10% had 82% of global wealth and the top 1% alone had 45% (Shorrocks et  al. 2019). As technology growth benefits the richest, the rest of society, especially the poorest, suffers. The very design of our economies and our economic principles has taken us to this extremely unsustainable and unjust point. As a result of increased automation and mechanization as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, business owners, capitalists, and highly skilled workers are expected to experience significant economic benefits. In an economy where machines and computers create greater value, capitalists who invest in them benefit. Employers and business owners also benefit from better mechanization, as labor costs can be reduced. It is also anticipated that many new jobs will be created for highly skilled workers in fields such as IT, mathematics, architecture, and engineering. Automation, on the other hand, can drive low- and medium-skilled people into unemployment or lower-salaried jobs. According to a report from the financial institution UBS, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to a polarization of the labor market and widening income inequality. This is because those with income, skills, and assets will experience greater benefits. The report also forecasts that industries such as manufacturing will return to developed countries as technologies such as robotics, automation, and 3D printing become more widespread. These technologies can provide products and services more cheaply than offshore low-wage workers. As a result, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be relatively advantageous for developed countries. On the other hand, developing countries will lose the comparative advantage of their abundant low-skilled workforces. Developing countries are likely to face even greater difficulties during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Baweja et al. 2016). Given that poor families cannot afford to give their children higher education, the inequality brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution reproduces the disparity between rich and poor that is seen in educational inequality. The human capital theory argues that those who have acquired higher skills through education are more likely to earn higher incomes. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution system, highly educated people will have the advantage. However, higher education is a costly investment, and the ability to make that investment depends largely on the financial situation of the student and his/her family.

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Economic Model of Studying Abroad This section develops a mathematical economic model of studying abroad by taking into account the review in the previous section. Costs and Utilities The cost of studying abroad includes tuition and living expenses, as well as the income the student would have received by working at home. An individual chooses to study abroad when the benefits gained by studying abroad exceed these costs. On the other hand, studying abroad offers additional benefits. One is an increase in lifetime income. Human capital theory states that a major component of education economics is the knowledge and skills acquired through education as capital generates private and public benefits in the future. Undertaking higher education is an important method of accumulating human capital. In particular, studying abroad may allow students to accumulate human capital in ways not possible in their home countries and may enable them to earn higher incomes in the future. From this reasoning, Gerhard and Hans (Gerhards and Hans 2013) regard studying abroad as “transnational human capital”, while Murphy-Lejeune conceptualize it as “mobility capital” (Murphy 2002). The benefits of studying abroad are not limited to increased lifetime income. On the consumption side, the joy of living abroad and experiencing different cultures is also an important benefit. In other words, the individual may choose to study abroad when the utility, including not only the expected increase in lifetime income but also the consumption aspect, exceeds the costs. Such individual motivation to study abroad can be expressed by a mathematical economic model. Since individuals form human capital by receiving education, the function of human capital accumulation can be assumed as follows:

h  kH  4.1 function of human capital development 



Here, h is the amount of human capital of an individual, k is the knowledge acquisition rate, and H is the knowledge stock that exists worldwide. In other words, the function (4.1) indicates that an individual's human capital is determined by how much knowledge that exists in society can be

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acquired. Here, the following function (4.2) is obtained assuming that the knowledge acquisition rate k depends on the education level e that the individual receives. Note that k (0) = 0, k′ > 0, and k″ < 0.

k  k  e  4.2 



It is assumed that the global knowledge stock changes with the power of the representative individual’s human capital level h. The change in the amount of global knowledge stock is represented by H . It is important to note, however, that knowledge becomes obsolete over time. Particularly in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the speed of knowledge obsolescence is expected to accelerate faster than ever before. It cannot be ignored. Therefore, the global knowledge stock is discounted at a constant rate δ(0