April 15, 2013

Jorge Balan launches book about Latin America higher education institutions in the knowledge economy

Jorge Balan, member of the Form and Forces network, has recently edited Latin Americas New Knowledge Economy: Higher Education, Government and International Collaboration. This is the seventh in the Global Education Research Reports series jointly published by the Institute for International Education and the American Institute for Foreign Study Foundation. Previous books have examined higher education initiatives and exchanges in China, India, and the Middle East, as well as new developments in global mobility.

The book reviews the policies, institutions, and programs that helped bring about these changes, as well as their outcomes in terms of access, workforce training, and research. In this piece, leading scholars from Latin America in the U.S. explore key issues, including higher education’s role in advanced workforce development, trends in academic mobility and outcomes for brain circulation, and investment in the region by U.S. universities and corporations.

Author

Dr. Jorge Balan is an Argentine sociologist who has published extensively on comparative higher education policy, academic and labor mobility, rural-to-urban and international migration, and regional development in Latin America.

He has been involved with CIRGE since 2007 in topics related to doctoral education in Latin America.

He contributes regularly to International Higher Education, a leading newsletter, and has published with Philip G. Altbach a book on World-Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America (Johns Hopkins University Press), with translations published in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His most recent paper on research universities in Latin America was published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, volume 79, number 3, 2012.

He is currently a Senior Research Scholar and Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, where he teaches a graduate course on Higher Education Policy in Developing Countries. Dr. Balan has responsibilities within the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Global Centers program, and is an external researcher with the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad, a leading Argentine think tank based in Buenos Aires.