A leading Australian education analyst has questioned whether Australia is ready for the coming Asia-Pacific century in education and research, ahead of a conference of deans of education from across Asia and Australia, to be held at the University of Melbourne from June 4 - 6.

Professor Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, and has been conducting research into education trends in the Asia-Pacific.

Professor Marginson warns that countries like China and Singapore are pouring investment into education and research, which will transform their economies and societies.

“Malaysia is another high public investor in education and in Korea the number of scientific papers increased by 12 times between 1988 and 2001. In Australia, public investment in tertiary education, which is the main source not just of funds for teaching but for basic research, is rapidly going backwards”, he explains.

Professor Marginson says Australia is engaged with the Asia-Pacific but lacks the capacity for deep cultural understanding that knowledge of Asian languages brings.

“Most Asia-Pacific education systems are equipping themselves with English at a rapid rate to enable the populations to be more globally effective. Australia lacks capacity in Asian languages, meaning the emerging Asian knowledge economies understand us linguistically, but we do not understand them. This places Australia at a disadvantage in competitive terms.”

In a report to be presented to the conference, Professor Marginson has identified eight key factors that determine the global competence of a nation, or an institution, in higher education. Analysis of Australia’s performance against these key criteria relative to other OECD nations provides an indicator of our key strengths and weaknesses.

The eight key criteria for global competence, and the findings on each, are:

Investment in educational institutions – Australia’s performance is middling. Private investment is relatively high but public investment is disappointing given our per capita GDP level. While Australia has a higher participation rate in upper secondary education than the USA, the USA invests nearly twice as much in education as a proportion of GDP, spending more than Australia from both public and private sources. Public investment in tertiary education and research in much of the OECD region and Asia (including China, Singapore and Korea) is increasing while public funding per head in Australian tertiary education dropped by 30 per cent between 1995 and 2003.

Participation in education – again, Australia’s performance is middling. There is concern that a fifth of our students in the 15-19 year old age group drop out of education and that participation rates are stagnant while they are improving rapidly in many other countries.

Research funding and performance – Australia has been strong in the area, but this is now declining in comparative terms. The big problem for Australia is the erosion of long term basic research capacity in universities due to declining public funding per student in the last 20 years.

Connectivity: languages and technologies – Australia’s technologies are reasonably good, but broadband policy is critically important and needs attention. Our foreign language capacity is poor, and among the weakest in Asia-Pacific, which will be a key issue for Australia in the future.

Cross-border student and staff flows in both directions – Australia recruits excellent numbers of incoming students, however numbers of outgoing students are poor, especially to Asian nations, mainly due to the language barrier. Staff flows in both directions are good.

Standing in global university rankings – Australia is not doing well enough in the influential Shanghai Jiao Tong research ranking, if we want to continue to see ourselves as a significant knowledge society in the global era. Our standing in the Times Higher Education ranking is very high but the methodology is shaky and artificially boosts Australia's position.

International networks and alliances - Australia's performance in this area is good and our universities are more engaged than most. We need to do more in Asia in terms of long term research collaboration. Again, building our language capacity is important. Although English is the common global language of research this is less true in non-science fields, and capacity to speak local languages is in any case essential to deep immersion and long term engagement.

Spirit of global engagement – Australia’s engagement with the outside world is very active and enterprising - but we need a more rounded engagement, with diverse focus, and not just on student recruitment.