Critical review of a glonacalized master of finance curriculum development : a case study of cross-border cooperative program in the Greater Bay Area of China

Abstract

China has become one of the key players in higher education due to the large size of its tertiary sector and governmental efforts for internationalization of higher education. The new forms of cross-border higher education institutions (i.e. Sino-foreign cooperative schools in Chinese terms) were rapidly growing in the past two decades in China. These institutions have been established to borrow Western higher education models to internationalize the system and provide different higher education learning experiences for students. They provide students with opportunities to study at the local partner schools to receive equivalent high quality oversea degrees without traveling overseas. Current literature on cross-border higher education have explored many factors that influence the success and failure of the partnership in the domains of students, teachers, curriculum and general management. One key issue in the curriculum domain is to deal with the tensions between the equivalence to foreign home curriculum and the relevance to host countries’ national/local realities. It remains unclear about how to adjust the Western curriculum to ensure a nuanced balance between comparability and adaptability. To fill this research gap, this study investigates how global, national and local elements interact, complement and/or contradict in the development, implementation and assessment of Master of Finance curriculum at the case study university CUHK (SZ). Inspired by Marginson’s glonacal agency heuristic, Oliva’s model of curriculum development and Leask’s internationalization of the curriculum, the study employs a three-phase sequential research design that incorporates views of three groups of stakeholders (students and alumni, academic and industry instructors, and administration members). It finds that the faculty was given great capacity to develop and implement the postgraduate Finance curriculum. Using the home program curriculum as the template, the curriculum at the case study institution adopts a balanced combination of standardized global Finance theories and practices and customized China/Greater Bay Area Finance policies and practices. The content is not one way from the West to China, but a “trans-local” style of internationalization that emphasizes both theoretical foundation and practical application in business. The instructors contain both oversea-trained professors and experienced national/local industry practitioners who incorporate many local cases into teaching materials. The medium of instruction is mainly English with a few exceptions of Mandarin for explaining China specific issues. From learners’ perspective, alumni and current students appreciate the fact that the leaders have noticed the gap between globalized curriculum and local job markets and have attempted to bridge the gap by both contextualizing the curriculum and including local practitioners as instructors. Overall, the tensions between the global and the local are not insurmountable in the case study as the local becomes more global. This challenges the presumption that the global and the local are mutually exclusive and there has to be a tradeoff between them. Indeed, the boundary between the global and the local in the courses, instructors and students are blurred as described in the narrative chapter. As China becomes more global, cross-border education is necessary to cultivate future leaders who can reference global knowledge to solve national/local practical problems. The practical significance of this study thus becomes clear. Since the case study program is still developing, policymakers and higher education practitioners can obtain first-hand information on the dilemmas and difficulties faced by cross-border programs in host countries such as China. This case study offers a hand-on reference and potential solutions for cross-border universities in managing their highly complex curriculum issues.