Higher education systems are in a constant state of change nearly everywhere. In particular, the changes in the socio-economic context caused by the impact of globalisation have inevitably led to changes to the university sector. Since capitalism has generated new global infrastructures that information technology has played an increasingly important role in the global economy, the popularity and prominence of information technology has unquestionably changed the nature of knowledge, and is currently restructuring higher education, research and learning. It is in such a wider policy context that an increasing number of institutions of higher learning are being established with new missions and innovative configurations of training, serving populations that previously had little access to higher education. Apart from accommodating a larger number of students, higher education institutions are required to improve their administrative efficiency and accountability in response to the demands of different stakeholders like government, business, industry, and labour organisations, students and parents as well. The present paper reflects upon the impacts of globalisation on national policy, with particular reference to examine how the higher education sector in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China has been transformed under the increasingly popular / global tide of marketisation and decentralisation. There are a lot of changes in common between the higher education sector in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China and that of elsewhere, which suggests that higher education developments in these societies have been affected by the similar trends of globalisation. But before we jump to this conclusion, maybe we should also bear in mind an alternative hypothesis that local factors are crucial and determining factors for changes. More specifically, this paper sets out in this wider policy context to compare and contrast the similarities and differences in terms of the copying strategies

In recent years, higher education in Hong Kong and Singapore has envisaged unprecedented changes and reforms, which affect significantly the daily lives of academia in addition to the management style of the university. Globalization is manipulated as a rationale for reforms with an aim to cope with the age of fast-changing technology and knowledge-based economy. Meanwhile, globalization embraces several values that prevail among universities, namely: economic rationalism, academic capitalism and corporate managerialism. The university becomes more business-like and enterprise-oriented. Business practices such as performance indicators, benchmarking, quality asurance and control, commercialization of applied research, user-pay principle, market incentives, and diversification of resources are transplanted to the higher education sector.
These phenomena demonstrate a paradigm shift from perceiving the university as a cultural institution to a public service one. Following the Anglo-American experiences of public sector reforms, higher education is similarly required to achieve the goals of "efficiency, effectiveness and economy" in the name of New Public Management (NPM). Smarter and wiser higher education, in terms of resource allocation, emerges at the expense of the traditional ethos of collegiality among academia for institutional decision-making and management. This article examines the impacts of higher education reforms on academe and academia in Hong Kong and Singapore. It is argued that higher education is cloaked by a pessimistic atmosphere, in which academics are pressurized by ever harsher external scrutiny over teaching, research and university administration.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]