Regional Cooperation and Cross-Border Collaboration in Higher Education in Asia: Ensuring that Everyone Wins

Increasingly in recent years, governments and stakeholders in Asia have demonstrated a resurgence of interest in investing in higher education as a means of promoting competitiveness and economic growth. This has spurred higher education leaders to seek ways to effectively utilize the available resources to raise quality and efficiency in higher education. One widely advocated strategy for accomplishing these ends is greater regional cooperation and crossborder collaboration among higher education institutions. Such collaborations have taken many forms, including student and faculty exchanges, dual and joint degree programs, twinning between pairs of universities, and the formation of university networks.

After a decade of rapid growth that saw western universities opening branch campuses abroad, this activity is increasingly concentrating in the Asia region. Also, leading universities of advanced Asian countries are increasingly pursuing branch campuses in developing countries in the region. Countries in the region pursue regional cooperation initiatives for quality assurance and the harmonization of education and skills qualifications to support labor mobility and regional economic integration. Regional cooperation can play an important role also in helping to share country-level lessons and good practice experiences in, for example, institutional partnership models and diversification of higher education systems.

While regional cooperation and cross-border collaboration are increasingly popular among higher education experts, the level of enthusiasm and the nature of the concerns of higher education administrators and institutional leaders, on whom the operation of these collaborative programs actually falls, are less well understood. This publication, Regional Cooperation and Cross-Border Collaboration in Higher Education in Asia: Ensuring that Everyone Wins, investigates the extent that governments and higher education leaders from across Asia believe that regional cooperation and cross-border collaboration can provide an effective strategy for strengthening higher education in the region, and examines the issues they believe need to be addressed if such collaborations are to be successful. It also examines the wider international experience with university collaboration, which may offer lessons for the development of these arrangements in Asia. The publication provides operational recommendations for supporting governments of developing countries and universities in the region in pursuing regional cooperation and cross-border collaboration in higher education development, including:

• Provide a clearinghouse of information on models of regional cooperation and cross-border collaboration, and on regional experience with these models;
• Develop and provide information and planning tools for use by university personnel in identifying appropriate collaboration partners; and
• Develop and provide information and planning tools for use by government personnel responsible for national oversight of regional cooperation and cross-border collaboration among higher education institutions.