Education hubs

Education hubs are a policy tool that has been used by governments in the quest for becoming competitive territories within what is often called the global ‘knowledge-based economy’. Singapore, Malaysia, Qatar and Dubai are just a few places that have implemented governmental strategies that use the term ‘education hub’. These strategies are based on attracting transnational higher education institutions and international students. Our entry discusses the empirical phenomenon of education hub policies across different geographic contexts, tracing the concept's development in the existing academic literature. Most scholarly work, usually developed from within the field of higher education policy and by practitioners, either constructs broad-based typologies or is written from a single national context. Relatively little research on education hubs has taken an explicitly comparative angle and/or connects education hub policies to social, political and economic developments outside of the higher education sector. As a multi-scalar and context-dependent phenomenon embedded in regional and urban development policies, education hubs are framed by geographical imaginaries and strategies of place branding. Seen through the differential mobilities of students, staff and curricula, hubs reflect the uneven geographies of higher education and are constituted by and through the imperatives of globalizing capitalism.