Internationalization of Higher Education in East Asia

Abstract

A book of review of: 'Internationalization of Higher Education in East Asia - Trends of student mobility and impact on education governance, Edited by Ka Ho Mok & Kar Ming Yu, London & New York: Routledge, 251 pages, 2014, ISBN: 9780415705035'Ever since the General Agreement on Trade in Services was ratified in 1995, member states have committed to considering higher education as a service to be traded rather than as a common good and to remove obstacles to trading (Phillipson forthcoming). Higher education, by consequence, is increasingly viewed as a commodity, which has paved the way for international benchmarking and global university ranking systems in which universities compete for the brightest and best students and staff from a global pool of candidates (Hazelkorn 2011). Indeed, “competition has become a central preoccupation of the higher education subsector” (Portnoi et al. 2010: 1).