Should Higher Education Be Vocationalized? The Role of Liberal Arts Education in Hong Kong

In the last few decades, 1 the term ‘globalization’ has gained increasing currency in academic discourse (Fukuyama 1992; Giddens 1990; Robertson 1992; Sklair 2002). Globalization has affected all countries and has transformed economies, politics, commerce, and education worldwide (McNally 2001; Albrow 1996; Bauman 1998; Gray 1998; McGrew 1992; Mok and James 2005; Yang 2005). To maintain and improve their competitive advantage in an increasingly networked global market, governments in Asia have made serious attempts to create additional higher education opportunities for their citizens in order to produce a high-quality labor force capable of dealing innovatively and creatively with the challenges of a knowledge-based economy. With a rapid increase in higher education enrollment, higher education in many parts of the Asia– Pacific region has expanded from select groups of elite institutions to vast and complex systems (Marginson 2016; Mok 2016a).