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52INTERNATIONALIZATION AS INCENTIVE FOR COMPETITIVENESS OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN ARMENIA
Robert Khachatryan
The 21st century may very well become known as the century of the “global world” (McFarland, Senen and Childress 1993) in the chronological continuum to the late-20th century that was preeminently the century of the “democratic triumph” (Diamond 2008). The surge and process of globalization, the “spirit of the time” for democracy (Diamond 2008), the growing importance of pronounced ideologies and the pursuit to construct, safeguard and sustain democracy, and a sense of identity underlie much of what is currently happening in the world nowadays. Furthermore, a changed interplay of the relations between the state and society requires an extensive streamlining in the education practices in the 21st century.
The 20th century witnessed arduous efforts of world polities to withstand the ups and downs in their education systems. The 21st century has transformed into an age predominantly knowledge-based economy, where human capital plays an increasingly important role in the social outcomes. Accordingly, education is regarded a basic foundation that supports the long-term development and progress of any society. The well-organized and competitive education system is
' PhD, Head of Quality Assurance Center, Head of Chair on Education Management and Planning, Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences.
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the key to economic growth and social cohesion. This is also predicated on the reality that education is socially desirable. The EU and OECD countries consider investment in education as substantial input in the growth of society and social development, as well as embedding life-long learning at all education levels. Moreover, an educated workforce is also economically desirable because an educated worker is able to perform more complex tasks aligned with the labor market needs. Governments of developing countries are “therefore under pressure to increase spending on education to produce a more educated labor force” (Carnoy 1999: 16). Thus, contribution of the state towards the improvement of overall educational outputs may bring an added value and benefit both to the society and knowledge-based economy.
Nevertheless, rapid changes and profound transformations in the field of education have created not only opportunities for both advanced and emerging economies at all levels, but also challenges, namely, the the need to overcome the obstacles of the existing infrastructures and to eliminate factors negatively affecting the quality of education. This is further complicated by the presence of conflicting interests and contesting values between global, regional and local educational environments, and the necessity to engage and retain human capital. Furthermore, universities are to address many challenges of functioning in the rapidly changing world: challenges of growing markets and globalization, changes in labor markets and consequent emerging demands for competitive workforce, advancement of new information and communication technologies, massification of education, especially the increasing demand for higher education, cross-national and international measurements of education quality, new performance metrics on efficiency, accountability and transparency, global
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higher education ranking systems, competition challenges and consolidation-related issues in the field of education, knowledge management, cross-border educational activities, etc. These challenges can rarely be addressed individually.
Contextual Situation in Armenia
The issue is more complex and typical for societies in transition. The education in Armenia has not been excepted from impacts of these global tendencies and developments. In the period from regaining independence in 1991 to joining the Bologna Process in 2005, Armenia ideologically distanced itself from global educational reforms and did not make commitments to the indoctrination of educational reforms. This conceptually relates to an assertion that “educational reform may be seen as a ‘placebo,’ that is, “symbolic gestures designed to indicate governmental [etc.] awareness of the problems and sympathetic intentions, rather than serious efforts to achieve social change” (Campbell 1982: 328). However, after that Armenia has systematically attributed great importance to the formation of a functional education system, has formulated and implemented the strategy of revitalizing the country through science and education and has treated the development of education as a strategic priority in this drive. As education is input of government, state authorities should be mainly concerned with developing and implementing an educational policy that is geared towards competitive practices of higher education institutions (HEIs), because the main output is produced by them. The level of interdependence between policy fields is on rise in Armenia. Hence, internationalization in the Armenian higher education institutions is to some extent aspired and desired. Armenia certainly pushes forward the processes of reforms and steady development of education.
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However, the country currently faces challenges of reforming its education system to respond to the constantly changing global demands and educational reforms of the developed societies and countries with well-established national systems and infrastructures. Additionally, there are major challenges in relation to social, political, and economic cultural transformations. These challenges include, but are not limited to dramatic demographic changes (increasing migration flows, especially “brain drain” among the youth, inflows of heterogeneous residents and age structures); growing global competition, leading to a considerable shift in the distribution of the economic power at regional level; changes in science and technology but notably the growing importance of organizational and societal innovation, rather than purely technological innovation and challenges common of societies in transition (social cohesion, protection of human rights, etc.), imbalanced development between general and higher education systems, insufficient state investment, and governance malpractices in the Armenian higher education system.
As a reaction to all these challenges, the reforms undertaken are definitely catalysts for internationalization and they cause fundamental changes in the emergent paradigm of education. Internationalization is a “core issue of concern to the higher education enterprise, touching directly on questions of social and cultural relevance, institutional quality and prestige, national competitiveness, and innovation potential.... institutions also view internationalization as a source of potential revenue” (Rumbley, Altbach and Reisberg 2012: 3).
Whilst Armenia, as a democratic society, is still designing its own education system based on national vision and strategies, the advanced practices and exemplary policies found in the leading education systems should be tapped
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into. In order to obtain competitive advantage, the Armenian higher education system should further advance an open environment and break down traditional barriers between academic disciplines in order to enhance appropriate arrangements to encourage knowledge-competitive practices and integrate distinctive aspects of different subject areas into the process of reinvigorating educational policy.
So far Armenia has not reinvigorated heterogeneous dimensions of its societal priorities in the democratic role of higher education. Though Armenia does have limited natural resources, intellectual potential in Armenia is an important factor in the reform agenda of its education system and should not be ignored in the reform processes. The intellectual wealth of knowledge and best practices of the field must serve as a basis for the development of interrelated values that constitute the prime components of the social construct underpinning all government activity. This social construct facilitates the operation of the important mechanism of collaborative partnership that must exist between education providers and education recipients to achieve effective governance, between education and industry to generate better conditions for the practical implementation of research results and to make a tangible impact on society. Hence, education and conveying knowledge from one generation to another is the first to be inevitably taken into consideration as a stable guarantee for meeting the needs of global development in the information and knowledge era.
This objective is further complicated because the national context of Armenia has also undergone significant changes from social perspective. The diversification of population and increasing trends in the heterogeneity of population, especially the inflow of young Armenians from Diaspora, have necessitated
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opening the field in the traditional view of civic participation to the modern overview, to reflect the growing diversity of reforms and emerging institutions. With the paradigm shift and decentralization the very responsibility to strengthen and implement relevant structures was devolved to HEIs.
It is imperative to step beyond the interim problems of imbalanced development, insufficient state investment and governance malpractices in the Armenian higher education system and visualize a bigger picture of cause and effect relationships in incorporating a strategic approach of obtaining further knowledge and promoting internationally comparable indicators to examine effective educational reforms. Education reforms in Armenia are conceptually about changing values, dispositions, attitudes, behaviors, and principles. Thus, developing on the basis of the structural reforms in the education system and meeting the challenges of current economic trends, Armenia has adopted the policy of integrating to the outside world.
Current trends of modern education reforms in Armenia are designed to replicate the basic situation of international developments in the field of education. These reforms ensue in two trajectories: educational democratization and economic competition. Educational democratization involves such processes as establishing the democratic education system and raising the quality of education, altering the educational structure into three-layer construct of higher education, and introducing the concept of life-long learning into the general policy of current educational reforms. Economic competition involves the globalization and integration of economic practices, introduction of innovative and information technologies into the field of education, meeting the needs of education and labor markets, and close integration of science into enterprises.
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The reformers in Armenia should therefore diverge from the flow of international developments and amply frame the discourse of education based on nationally established practices of academia and its peculiarities in order to accelerate the establishment of a flexible learning system. Certain innovative solutions and strategies should be generated and incorporated into institutional reforms, and a multifaceted perspective of competences should be developed to interact in synergy towards the objective of rigorous research and teaching in higher education.
Armenia implements an array of policy reforms at various levels of governance. These reforms ensue in two equally important processes: a top-down process and a bottom-up process. A top-down process proceeds from the RoA government and the RoA Ministry of Education and Science that are concerned of their responsibilities in the field of education. A bottom-up process mainly proceeds from state higher education institutions that bring their own strong commitment to real contribution of sustainable advancement of education in Armenia. However, there is an drastic disparity between these two processes. Higher education institutions as stakeholders are not actively engaged in the development of educational policies in order to embody the interests of those groups of population that they serve. HEIs target only at the micro level and benefit their constituents with impact mainly within their specific context, while acting in congruence with the national bodies might contribute to educational reforms and thus have a meaningful impact at the macro level to achieve the overall objectives of the higher education policy. Thus, there is an ongoing preponderance of short-term and long-term activities geared towards producing competitive education system in Armenia.
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It is crucial to acknowledge that HEIs are key players in the successful transition to a knowledge-based economy and they harmonize the incongruities between continuous reforms in the Armenian education system and knowledge creation. Specifically, challenges of education reforms in Armenia are characterized by existing top-down centralized management, poor governance and institutional bureaucracies that incapacitate the European or world values in the higher education. HEIs also play an important role in the reform agenda of overall education system and significantly contribute not only to organizational and educational innovation, but also purely to technological innovation and overall competitiveness of the education system. Furthermore, HEIs provide formal education for a new generation of leaders who are agents of change that multiply and extrapolate the effect at society level. This new generation might further provide the pools of expertise and supply human resources for establishing centers of excellence. HEIs also acknowledge that internationalization fosters internal competition; both between the HEIs at the national level and “within the walls” of any given HEI. Others want to be “on par” with those with international dimension.
These challenges of education reforms might be typical for emerging democracies in the period of economic and social transition to adapt the best practices and mechanisms of governance from mature democracies and economies. So far, this discussion has never been driven by theoretical propositions, and no attempt was made to create an integrated corpus of empirical data on the impacts of internationalization in Armenia. Accordingly, this theoretical exploration might set up the ground for developing a conceptual framework on the objectives of sustaining an efficient and competitive system of higher education in Armenia.
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In addition, there is limited amount of literature on the role and impact of internationalization at global level. The literature on the development of higher education in Armenia is relatively scarce, too. The examination of the literature on higher education reforms and current national and institutional internationalization efforts shows the lack of studies on the internationalization process in Armenia. This gap calls for exploration of the challenges, opportunities and strategies of the higher education internationalization in Armenia. This article further views the overall conceptual framework of internationalization as the process of integrating international or global dimensions into strategic priorities, functions or delivery of higher education at both national and institutional levels.
Framework of Litemationalization of Higher Education
The process of internationalization is multidimensional and there is no common understanding of the term. Within the framework of higher education, the international dimension of the curriculum has undergone through progress in terms of transition from area studies and foreign language approach to the integration of international, global, and comparative perspectives into academic program content and related processes (Knight 2004: 27). According to Knight (2008) and de Wit (2002), there is no covenant on a precise or universal definition of internationalization. Some authors describe internationalization as synonymous with the term globalization and use it interchangeably, assuming the internationalization process as globalization of education. Others, however, perceive it as a process inevitably impacted by aspects of globalization, but make clear differentiations between the two phenomena (Enders, 2004; Klieber, 2007; Knight & de Wit, 1997; Knight, 2008). According to these authors globalization
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refers to increased interdependence, convergence of markets, cultures, ideas, and knowledge across borders. Internationalization, on other hand, is a process that encourages relationships and mutual collaboration between states.
Generally, the literature on internationalization can be divided in two tracks. The first includes the US-based approaches (Hudzik, 2011; Green & Olson, 2006) focused on institutional internationalization and considers institutions as a major force leading to internationalization. The second is predominantly European (Knight, 2004, 2008; de Wit, 2002; Enders, 2004; van de Wende, 1997, 2001, 2004), which explores national and supranational levels of internationalization.
Van der Wende (1997: 18) presents a broad definition of internationalization as a “systematic effort aimed at making higher education responsive to the requirements and challenges related to the globalization of societies, economy and labor markets.” This definition includes specific rationales and important elements of internationalization. The Bologna process is an example of organized intergovernmental responses to internationalization. The 1999 Bologna Declaration set the long-term goal of convergence of different European higher education systems into the European Higher Education Area. The Declaration became the primary framework used by signatory countries for modernization and reforms of the European higher education.
In some cases, internationalization is approached as an activity such as increasing student and faculty mobility and building international partnerships at institutional and national levels (Knight, 2008). In other cases, internationalization is about integrating international content or perspective in each of the academic disciplines (Kreber, 2009). According to Stier (2004), different under-
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standings of the term lead to its divergent conceptualizations: “some people see it as process, some as a state of things and some as a doctrine” (Stier, 2004, p. 84). She argues that actors have divergent motives for internationalization and these motives lead to different ideologies.
Knight (2008) presents a conceptual framework for internationalization strategies at institutional and national levels. The strategies at the institutional level are divided into academic and organizational. Academic strategies focus on academic programs, research, scholarly collaboration, external relations and extra-curricular activities. Organizational strategies involve governance, operations, services and human resources. Policies include any national or institutional level strategies related to the international dimension in higher education such as cultural, scientific, immigration, employment and others (Knight, 2008).
Both Knight and de Wit approach internationalization as a process and explore how different factors and rationales shape and influence this process. Knight (2008) emphasizes the national level in her most recent definition. Knight (2008) suggests this definition as a concept that can be applied to many different countries, cultures and education systems. Furthermore, Hudzik (2011: 8) writes: the “ultimate purpose behind internationalization is better connection of institutions to a changing local and global environment and providing more relevant service to society and clientele under these changing realities.”
A shortcoming of much of the literature on internationalization in higher education is that specific contexts to which the concepts and frameworks are assumed to be applicable have not been specified. These Western perspectives that predominately focus on institutional internationalization in de-centralized systems have not considered the role of this process in transitional countries
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with developing higher education systems. However, Qiang’s (2003: 250) definition of internationalization as “important resource in the development of higher education towards, first of all a system in line with international standards; secondly, one open and responsive to its global environment” is of relevance to understanding the process in Armenia. The growing knowledge-based economy in Armenia requires a rapid development and internationalization of higher education that will be responsive to the demands of the local and global labor markets.
Thus, Qiang’s (2003) and Knight’s (2008) definitions of internationalization, along with Stier’s (2004) concepts of internationalization provide the conceptual framework for further analyzing this process in the Armenian higher education system. The role of the government and national policies in the process of higher education internationalization adds additional context to these frameworks.
Conclusion
Overall, the earnest pursuit of education gains the capacity to visualize a broader spectrum of perspectives. The educational reforms in Armenia should be transformed into a more competitive reality, especially in times of the growing scarcity of the professional workforce. This is further convoluted by the fact that education is an integral component of the knowledge-based economy of Armenia, contributing relatively large portions of the gross domestic production and employment. And, consequently, higher education system is forced to improve itself in the directions of both efficiency and competitiveness.
Ever-increasing shifts in the education realm have created unique contemporary problems that are global in impact and, therefore, pose challenges previ-
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ously unprecedented in complexity. On the whole, globalization is a driving force in the development of higher education reforms, rather than a process within itself. Understanding the impact of globalization and internationalization as well as the context of their emergent trends might influence the design of strategies and models that are applicable to Armenia with its transitioning higher education system. Furthermore, they should be strategically comprehended in initiating a strategic approach to implementing current reforms in the education paradigm.
Thus, the process of internationalization in the higher education context in Armenia has designed several new constructs that in the long will run create competitive advantage for Armenia. These constructs include new balance in government-university relationship, institutional and academic autonomy, expansion of access to higher education, new external pressures of accountability, increased number of universities hospitable to internationally minded-scholars, and support to academic staff in the changing context of higher institutions. The components of international education include mobility of students and teaching staff, study abroad and exchange initiatives, foreign student population in Armenia, among others. These inputs produce the quality of combined outputs such as the quality and credibility of scholarly judgment and increasing number of publications in international peer-reviewed journals, increasing faculty involvement in overseas activities.
December, 2015
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