2.2.2. Southeast Asia

In contrast to Africa, several Southeast Asian countries are engaged in the global supply chain, especially in high-tech industries. In 1959, Japan, England, Australia, and other nations supported the founding of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), an international university north of Bangkok, Thailand [66]. AIT ranks highly in sustainability and technology management [66].

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formed in 1967 to promote technical education and economic development in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand; it now includes ten member states. The Southeast Asian nations were engaged in global industrialization in the 1980s, creating alliances with international corporations to manufacture products for export. The ASEAN nations are involved in rethinking technical education through a series of strategic planning workshops offered by the Colombo Plan Staff College (CPSC) [34]. The CPSC supports national and regional meetings on economic and educational planning using an indigenous concept of development, a perspective advanced by the Australian leadership of the organization. They began rethinking technical education in relation to trends in technology and the high-tech supply chain and followed Western models of institutional development [35]. The Reagan administration had stopped funding the Colombo Plan, leaving room for a new Australian theory of change, with additional financial support from British and Japanese aid agencies [34,35].

By 2015, the ASEAN economic community had become a single market with a competitive superior production base. Many ASEAN countries' student loan programs are consonant with the World Bank advocacy guided by the Washington Consensus. Some are now adapting the Australian repayment model to deal with the stress created by student debt in less-developed nations [12]. The curriculum used in vocational schools was a priority for the ASEAN Economic Community or AEC [67]. Regional planning also informed research directions, including the alignment of programs with students' interests and their prior program content and teacher preparation [68].

#### 2.2.3. Latin America

Thirteen universities were founded in Latin America before Harvard was in the USA (1636) [69]. Yet other than the USA and Canada, the nations in that hemisphere are still not economically developed. Latin American countries significantly expanded their vocational educational training before 2010. For instance, enrollment in technological tertiary education in Brazil, a rapidly growing economy, increased by 140 percent between 2007 and 2013 [70]. Chile has also expanded access to higher education, including tertiary vocational training, by improving secondary education outcomes and creating a bigger pool of students [71]. Despite the progress in secondary and higher education, transitions between the educational system and labor market are still problematic in most nations.

Colombia, Mexico, and some other Central and South American countries have seen increased investment in tertiary vocational training to provide broader access to higher education, in order to further workers' social and technical development [72]. However, some common problems are impeding the progress and expansion of vocational education, such as misalignment between the market skill requirements and curriculum, lack of proper quality assurance of training and evaluation processes, and lack of a monitoring system to evaluate the educational outcomes of graduates [72,73].

## *2.3. Investment in Short-Cycle VET for Economic Development and Sustainability*

Tertiary vocational education programs, designed as pathways for educational equity across developed and less-developed countries, are challenged to address and fulfill different missions created by rapidly changing global circumstances. From the African and Latin American VET literature, it also appears that these less-developed nations are questioning the notion that the best path forward involves adopting models foisted on them by more developed countries. Developing education for the sustainability of populations in a world with rapidly changing climates is emerging as a priority.

This paper takes a step toward developing a broader comparative perspective on international higher education development than has traditionally been used. Developments in international trade, especially involving regional associations of nations in Europe and South Asia, alter vocational training and provide a way of viewing the movement of reform from short-cycle programs into baccalaureate programs at senior universities, if not the transformation of technical tertiary schools into polytechnics and technical institutes.

#### *2.4. Comparative Frameworks for Educational Globalization*

Heinz Deiter Meyer [41] has provided a compelling analysis of the global influence of the German, British, and American university models. Globalization of elite higher education provides an organizational structure within the less-developed nations that borrowed these organizational forms. Our analysis extends this comparative approach by considering short-cycle VET programs as a step in developing educational systems in industrializing, less-developed countries.

Since most of the developed nations reporting data were in the EU, we have some empirical evidence about the role of this network. However, it was not possible to distinguish South Asia nations from other less developed countries. Therefore, we could not confirm propositions about this region. Our interpretive stance is mainly based on the historical review (above) instead of discerning trends for this group of nations.

The discussion of policies above is exploratory rather than confirmatory, except for the EU. The empirical analyses in Sections 3 and 4 make comparisons of developed and less-developed nations. Since most developed countries with adequate WB data were in the EU, we can generalize about this regional network but cannot draw implications for most other developed nations.

Section 3 compares trends in key indicators in both types of countries. Section 4 uses fixed-effects analysis to discern national variables associated with investment in technical education and also explores whether the differences in development status explain differences in public investment in short-cycle VET.

Burton Clark [17,74,75] pioneered comparison of higher education systems, using history and organizational theory. Clark [76] originally studied records of US liberal arts colleges before evolving his method to compare national systems. We use Clark's ideas about the international migration of systems in the review above. The first step in this study revealed that histories and regional trade alliances had influenced strategies for vocational education. We also found a two-step process in the development of VET, from short-cycle courses to integration into tertiary systems.

Then, we consider trends in factors that influence planning for and developing shortcycle programs, along with the statistical association between these variables and national public spending. We examine trends in these variables to inform our interpretations of the econometric analysis in Section 5 (the conclusion).

The fixed-effects approach considers the influences of public spending and other factors on short-cycle tertiary education at the national level. By considering interaction terms between developed and less-developed statuses, we gain insights into the influence on nations' economic development. Since European countries comprise the majority of developed nations providing adequate data to the World Bank, we can speculate about this association. However, we do not control for regional associations in Europe or Asia per se in the analysis.

This historical analysis of higher and vocational education provides the basis for an additional proposition: the history of alliances during the empire, Cold War, and global periods also influenced public spending. This proposition remains speculative, as we do not include data on regional associations in the regressions. However, we use this two-step proposition as an alternative frame within the study, a topic we reconsider in Section 5.
