ABSTRACT

Abstract

Globalization promotes free economic activities across territories of countries without any hindrances by State authorities. As a phenomenon, it has a ubiquitous effect on a spectrum of human activities spanning cultural, political, economic and even educational spheres. While globalization makes the world smaller by facilitating a collapse of State boundaries and increased open markets for exchange of goods and services, it brings in its wake novel pressures on higher education institutions to re-invent, re-engineer and re-align it to meet new demands in knowledge production and ensure international competitiveness of these institutions. This paper seeks to examine some of the effects of globalization on the future of universities. It presents a discourse on the pressures brought on by globalization and concludes that the reality is that with globalization, universities in their traditional form have been re-fabricated. The system of knowledge demand and production has changed and the traditional locus of research within universities may have also been predominantly relocated.

 Keywords: Globalization; Higher Education; University; Research; Knowledge.