Political challenges and changing agendas for higher education in Hong Kong and Singapore

The purpose of this paper is to examine the changing policy agendas for higher education in Hong Kong and Singapore over the last decade. Both city-states identify themselves as regional education hubs, because becoming an education hub is seen as a way to compete effectively in the international higher education market and therefore as a strategic response to neoliberal globalization in higher education. In this context, an instrumentalist approach, which stresses the notion of education as a service industry and the global competition for talent, is adopted to develop higher education in the two cities. However, this instrumentalist approach has brought public sentiments towards the open-door policy and has sparked off some tensions between global and local. This paper picks up these issues to examine the significance of local politics in higher education policy and its implications for the conceptualization of higher education governance in Hong Kong and Singapore. This paper is in three sections. The first section reviews the original policy agenda, which emphasizes the importance of higher education to enhancement of competitiveness and increase of economic growth, for higher education development in the two city-states. The second section reports the formation of public opinion, which ties to recent shifts in higher education policy in the two places. This leads to the third section, which discusses the implications of the new policy agenda for governance of higher education. This section argues that the developments of the education hub strategy in Hong Kong and Singapore have demonstrated that the implementation of neoliberal discourse and practices and the adoption of global academic capitalism can be subjected to local politics. This argument exemplifies that they may be a need to update the conceptualization of higher education governance in East Asia. Copyright © 2015 2nd International Conference on Public Policy.