P

arents have options to send their children to local or overseas universities amid a competitive global market.

In the context of transnationalism characterized by economic, political, cultural integration and a diasporic community, higher education has become a top-priority issue for most people. The prevailing belief now is that the thirst for knowledge and technology can be quenched by pursuing formal education. No wonder the issue of education has become a concern for most parents and the government.

For low- and middle-income parents, local higher education institutions are the preferable choice for their children. Yet, there are other options for parents who can afford the hefty price of education, overseas higher education institutions become the eventual goal.

For the latter, studying abroad has become a favorite lately, as it is felt to offer plenty of benefits. It sharpens students'€™ cross-cultural understanding, broadens their knowledge horizons, increases linguistic proficiency and expands social networks, among other things.

The competitive global markets, coupled with growing concerns about the best way of making use of new science and technology, have also pushed the government to take serious heed of the improvement of quality human resources through education. It is laudable that the Indonesian Directorate General of Higher Education (DIKTI) has allocated a special budget to financially aid Indonesian students to pursue further studies both in the country and overseas.

Thanks to this government-sponsored aid, a number of both local and overseas university graduates (with master'€™s and doctoral degrees) have been produced.

While concerns about exporting students needs to be addressed, the essence of higher education is still viewed in a rather orthodox manner, with the overseas universities being hierarchically ordered as more superior or advanced in knowledge production than the local ones. This is further exacerbated by the foreign assessment boards that purportedly buttress this widely held perception and perpetuates a perception of higher education being a homogenous commodity.

Efforts to compartmentalize universities into a ranking system obtained from the assessment of higher education institutions world-wide are apparently product-oriented, dismissing much of what is going on in these intellectual sites. Among other questions is how ideas from the scholarly exchanges are generated and hatched, what social and political obstacles hamper the process of teaching, learning and researching, and how such hurdles can be dealt with. All of these are constitutive of the product assessed.

However, times have changed. From the perspective of transnationalism, the divide between local and overseas higher education has become rather fuzzy, as the very constellation of identities, cultures, knowledge and ideologies merge, constituting a single learning community. The integration of ASEAN countries, for example, will likely form a unified community of diverse people from different linguistics, cultural and identity backgrounds.

Clearly, the spirit of transnationalism has galvanizing forces to reshape and reorientate the directions every higher education institution is taking. Universities are no longer sites of the sole knowledge transactions among academia and the knowledge or ideas being imparted in one institution cannot be expected to transcend local or national boundaries.

What'€™s more, knowledge and ideas impartation and transaction taking place in a site called a higher education institution should not be devoid of social essentials, upon which students'€™ and teachers'€™ ways of thinking are shaped and reshaped. At this juncture, we come to realize that the assertion of hierarchical order in higher education institutions becomes moot.

It is the very localities, along with the societal needs, where the institutions are operating that matter and condition what needs to be included in their educational programs.

There is now a covert indication that higher education in the context of transnationalism is undergoing a paradigm shift from the emphasis on knowledge resulted from an exclusive intellectual transaction to the society-informed knowledge.

With this imminent changing orientation, we cannot expect one-size-fit-all models of learning or research that apply to all educational contexts. They are simply non-existent. In order to conduct research on the country'€™s nautical conditions, for example, one shouldn'€™t cling to a research model devised by academics affiliated with renowned universities abroad.

Likewise, a learning model imported from abroad might be of no relevance to solve learning problems here where the needs and conditions of the students differ radically.

To this end, Prabhat Patnaik, an Indian academic, says that the interests of societies vary and may not be congruent with each other. He cautions that education should not be meant to '€œsatisfy the preference of the buyer'€, but should be '€œundertaken in the interest of the people'€.
___________________________________

The writer is an associate professor of English at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@gmail.com.