Erratum: Education hubs and private higher education expansion in small island developing states contexts : the case of Mauritius
Abstract
Background: This article is located in the context of governments of small island developing
states supporting education hubs in collaboration with local and global partners. Whilst
current literature on the development of education hubs focuses on the macro policy
perspectives looking at how education hub policies are designed and enacted upon at national
level, there are relatively few studies on the micro perspective of the institutions.
Aim: By comparing the agendas, experiences, potential and drawbacks of these
institutions, the article explores the sustainability prospects of these variants of
education hubs.
Methods: We selected three case studies: a public distance education university, a local private
university and an international branch university within the same broader environmental
context to examine how a ‘vision of possibilities’ is played out within three different institutional
agendas.
Results: The case studies reveal that marketisation and privatisation marginalise the pursuit
of quality which recedes in preference for securing international economic resources to activate
the local developmental agendas and how the exercise privileges skewed power relations
which maintain centre–periphery hegemonic hierarchies in the cross-border collaborations.
Conclusion: The uptake of an education hub as a national target exemplifies how the uncritical
and indiscriminate borrowing of policies normalises and is reframed to appear as ‘moments of
equity’. But in reality it promotes individual competitiveness at the expense of the common good.