Globalization calls for changing education policy regimes, and policy-producing structures. Proponents of the theory argue that countries need to develop new theoretical perspectives around the linkages that globalization has on new production process and educational policy. Education, hitherto seen as the very backbone for human survival and societal well-being, must be organized in a different way. Pedagogic discourses are now awash with business concepts like efficiency, effectiveness, performance and productivity. And now new buzzwords and phrases have been coined – “market democracy”, “competitive individualism” wherein they argue that competition is the key word for success.
The view on education is hardly different. Education can no longer be confined within the bureaucratic organizational boundaries but should be governed by market forces. Welfare bureaucrats who long held the view that education is a public good function of the state are now branded as inefficient. What is now emerging as a new policy paradigm in the West about education is ‘lifelong learning’, embracing all forms of education – formal, informal and non-formal – as the new model of education. They call this “lifelong learning”, which is seen as one of the important vehicles for poverty alleviation where significant gaps in literacy achievement across age, genders and social groups persist.
How will Nepal, for instance, suffering from a plethora of problems ranging from very low enrolment, poor quality of education and outdated and irrelevant education at the higher levels to lack of skills among the graduates compete or even integrate in the knowledge economy? Going by the World Bank’s rhetoric, it is also unclear who will be the winners and who will be the losers and how widespread will be the economic impact of the knowledge economy on Nepal? How rapidly will it occur? What needs to be done?
According to an OECD publication (1999), the answer to these questions lies in providing cheap and easy access to a high-quality knowledge infrastructure, especially in education. Though it is difficult to hypothesize a to-do-list for a country like Nepal borrowing from the OECD countries, the proponents of the knowledge economy argue that the forces affecting higher education around the world are strikingly similar – expanding enrollment, less public funding (per student), and more private investment.
It is currently debated in academic discourses in Nepal that there is a disconnect between the skills universities provide and what the industries need. Argues UNESCO, that at university level, the functions such as research, discovery and innovation become important in the 21st century to respond to the demands of the knowledge society. Though there are neither empirical evidences nor comparable data from Nepal due to the dearth of publications and journals on knowledge economy, examining the implications in the OECD countries, two trends can be observed in the case of education taking an example of the UK. First, a growing number of intermediary organizations and agencies are getting involved in both R&D and its application in practice. Second, in partnerships with such organizations, practitioners are able to be more influential as clients than they ever were with university education. This reflects a more general challenge to education system to foster genuine learning—and true motivation to learn—rather than simply strong performance.
At the outset, it is seen that the implications for the universities in Nepal are immense in the global knowledge-based economy. The key challenge lies in positioning higher education institutions by developing a better infrastructure, governance, and management systems, among others. Thus, the policymakers must work with educational leaders and other key stakeholders to reposition higher education in Nepal to face the emerging challenges brought about by global knowledge-based economy. But how do we that?
According to a World Bank (2000) publication, the repositioning of the education system should be in accordance with the knowledge economy and supportive of its four pillars: One, supportive economic and institutional regime (which provides incentives for the efficient use of existing and new knowledge and the flourishing of new enterprises); two, an educated and skilled population (to create, share, and use knowledge); three, a dynamic information infrastructure (to facilitate effective communication, dissemination, and processing of information); and four, an efficient innovation system of firms, research centres, universities, consultants, and other organizations to tap into the growing stock of global knowledge, assimilate and adapt it to local needs, and create new technology.
However, the debates miss a key point here. How can Nepal integrate in the knowledge economy without its higher education institutions first attaining massification? Expansion of higher education, making them inclusive to reach to as many as possible is a critical challenge in Nepal. This is because imparting higher education to a growing number of population and workforce will support knowledge-driven growth, foster lifelong learning concept for citizens, with an emphasis on creativity and flexibility, to adapt to a constantly changing demand of a knowledge society. Yet another logic for massification of higher education is that it leads to more access to low-income and deprived groups and an opportunity to enhance their higher education and skills, thus raising their income and improving their living standards through increased job opportunity.
At present, the picture in Nepal reflects a growing gap between those who have access to knowledge and those who are deprived of such access. This is primarily because tertiary education system in Nepal is traditionally monopolistic as it exercises monopoly in knowledge production and dissemination and remains essentially out of the reach of a large low-income population. Thus, to integrate Nepal into the global knowledge economy, there is a huge challenge ahead to make the present elite higher education a mass institution, accessible, and provide high quality, relevant, and affordable education to the burgeoning masses. Staying current to the global developments and introducing relevant programs of studies may also require the decentralization of governance, including granting of full-fledged autonomy status to the Tribhuvan University campuses. This may require mergers of the large unwieldy campuses; creation of learning conglomerates; and centres of excellence with very specific and high quality programs.
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