A Contribution to Understanding the Process of Globalisation of Higher Education and Approaches to Its Study

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to contribute to an overall understanding of the phenomenon of globalisation of higher education. Given that in our country the globalisation of higher education has been approached without attempting to provide a more comprehensive definition of the phenomenon, in the first part of the paper, the basic elements and domains that provide the basis for a more complete definition of the globalisation of higher education will be listed and a difference will be made in relation to similar phenomena, such as internationalisation and Europeanisation. Apart from a more comprehensive understanding of globalisation by pointing out its epistemological foundations in the papers from the end of the 20th century, which the domestic scientific public did not pay enough attention to, the paper also provides an overview of approaches to the study of the impact of globalisation on higher education, both the initial ones, which were developed by international organisations, and the academic ones, which enabled a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of globalisation of higher education. By contributing to a more comprehensive definition of the observed phenomenon, in this paper we intend to contribute to a broader understanding of the phenomenon of globalisation relative to the current view in which globalisation is understood as a modern phenomenon and its impact on higher education is observed after a certain period in which it supposedly arises. The paper affirms the claim that globalisation is just a new name for a phenomenon that has existed in modern civilisation for much longer than the end of the 20th century, and the expansion of higher education contributed to its genesis.

Keywords

• globalisation
• higher education
• higher education policies
• europeanisation
• approaches to study