The pattern of students from Southeast Asia leaving their home country to pursue higher education abroad is not new. For most of the last century, the interest in technology transfer tended to drive CBE traffic, which tended, therefore, to flow mainly in one direction, from developing to developed countries.

At the postgraduate level, technology transfer remains a major driver of the South-to-North traffic. Students from middle level countries, however, continue to travel abroad for undergraduate education, even when universities at home have already demonstrated the capacity to deliver programmes of comparable quality.

Student motives for seeking an overseas education vary and overlap. Some may simply want greater freedom from parental supervision. Many also see the value of learning about another culture and, perhaps, mastering another language. The belief that an overseas degree opens up better career opportunities in transnational institutions serves to justify the higher costs of CBE. Governments have stepped in to defray these costs, as concerns over globalisation and the emergence of the knowledge economy have combined to give CBE greater momentum.

What is also new is the interest among universities in developed countries in CBE. World class universities from Europe and the US now send their faculty to conduct courses overseas in various forms of partnership with national institutions. Some even set up branch campuses abroad.

Multiple factors, which are not mutually exclusive, explain this interest: the tuition revenue from overseas students to help the bottom line; access to a larger pool of student talent to support research programmes; synergy with universities and the private corporate sector overseas.

Higher education institutions in developed and developing countries have discovered a common interest in CBE. They also recognise that they operate widely divergent systems of higher education. Different curricula, modes of instruction and academic requirements may present insurmountable barriers for CBE students. Partners in CBE will need to reach consensus on how to "harmonise" their "diversities". The World University Presidents Summit provided an exceptional platform for discussing this issue. More than 600 of the nearly 1,600 participants came from overseas. Some 87 countries and different types of institutions in the higher education sector were represented. In an international gathering of this scale, it was impossible to ignore the differences in the operating environments and the experiences of the participants.

One panel featured two speakers on higher education governance, one from Australia and the other from Africa. The generic governance issues they discussed were identical - providing greater access to higher education, maintaining quality standards, and managing relations with the government and their regulatory agencies. But the stark contrast between the socio-economic and political realities in the two continents defied efforts to draw meaningful comparisons between the challenges facing an Australian and an African university president.

"To harmonise diversity," participants agreed, did not mean "to homogenise differences". Homogenisation suggests somehow reducing the differences among the elements of the mixture. The result of the process would be elements more similar to each other, but each of them becoming different from what they were at the starting point. The task of harmonisation should be to determine how different institutions can constructively work together for their mutual benefit, despite their differences. Harmonisation should not lead to redefining the identity of a cooperating institution.

The starting point for a harmonisation process, as the summit recognised, is the acceptance of diversity. It may be useful to stress that this must also be the terminal point. Harmonisation should not eliminate diversity.

But the term "diversity" must also be construed in its proper context. "Diverse" is often understood simply to mean "different". On display at the summit was a whole range of diverse models of higher education institutions. Some aspire to comprehensiveness, offering to their students the widest range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary programmes.

Others opt for focus, concentrating on a specific field, such as business management. A few commit to cutting-edge research aimed at advancing the frontiers of knowledge.

It is the unfortunate burden of regulatory agencies and a source of confusion to the public that the one term - "university" - covers multiple models of post-secondary education. If we must respect or even celebrate diversity, as some in the summit suggested, we must understand diversity in terms of many different types of institutions, each of them committed to a distinctive mission.

Diversity, regrettably, is also often used, almost as a code word, to hint at differences in levels of achievement and, worse, differences in performance standards. It is not helpful to characterise a "bad" institution, a diploma mill without the capacity to deliver its stated objectives, as "different". Respecting diversity should not extend to condoning mediocrity.

In pursuing the goal of harmonising diversity, the initial task may be to encourage birds of a feather to flock together. In the end, it makes sense to harmonise standards only if they are meant to serve as benchmarks for institutions committed to the same mission. The faculty of a community college does not publish as many papers in refereed journals as does the faculty of a research university.

But the research university does not produce graduates on the per capita cost of the community college. They perform different tasks and, if they are both creditably meeting their objectives, are equally entitled to support.

The author is the secretariat director of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation.

Edilberto C de Jesus

Special to The Nation