Academy Fellow

Dr Simon Marginson (MAE, FASSA, FACE, FACEL) is Professor of International Higher Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He was formerly Professor of Higher Education in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne where he worked in 1993-1998 and again from July 2006 to 2013. Between 1998 and 2006 he was Professor of Education at Monash University and Director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education. Professor Marginson works in sociology and policy studies in relation to higher education, and comparative and international education in the global environment. In 2001-2002 he directed the ASSA Project on 'The contribution of postgraduate training in the Social Sciences to Australia' and in 2006-2007 prepared an OECD policy report on Higher Education and Globalisation. In 2012-2013 he directed the Australian Council of Learned Academies project on 'STEM - country comparisons'.

Professor Marginson's current projects are focused on globalisation and higher education, international students, the public good role of higher education, higher education and social inequality, comparative higher education systems, and university strategies in the Asia-Pacific region. His core studies are of (1) the university as an institution, its variations and trajectories, in the global environment; (2) the development of a humanistic political economy of education; and (3) inference in the social sciences.

Director, ESRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council for 2015-2020.

In 2001 Simon Marginson was awarded an Australian Research Council Australian Professorial Fellowship. In 2011 he received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to International Education, at the Australian International Education Conference, Adelaide. In 2014 he was elected a member of Academia Europaea, was the Clark Kerr Lecturer on Higher Educaiton at the University of California, and received the Research Achievement Award at the US Assocation for Studies in Higher Education. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK.

Awards for scholarship:

2001: Outstanding Publications Award of the American Educational Research Association Division J, for 2000 (with Mark Considine)

2002: George Z. F. Bereday award for the best journal article of 2001, Comparative and International Education Society (with Marcela Mollis, University of Buenos Aires)

2008: The Woodward medal in Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Melbourne, ‘in recognition of an exceptional contribution to knowledge in the field’, for research published in 2003-2007 on higher education and globalization’. The University’s rules state that: ‘The Woodward Medal is awarded annually to a member of staff for research published in hard copy up to 31 December of the preceding year, but not published in the current year of the application that is considered to have made the most significant contribution by a member of staff to knowledge in a field of humanities or social sciences’.

2010: Critics Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) for the 2010 book Imagination: Three models of the imagination in the age of the knowledge economy (Peter Murphy, Michael Peters and Simon Marginson). ‘The Critics Choice Award serves to recognize and increase awareness of recent scholarship deemed to be outstanding in its field’.

2011: Melbourne Education Research Institute Research Institute Staff Research Award, ‘for an outstanding research record by a staff member’, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

2011: Article ‘Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education’, in British Journal of Sociology of Education in 2008, named by Routledge/ Taylor and Francis as a highly cited article in Education in 2010.

2013: Article ‘Higher education in East Asia and Singapore: Rise of the Confucian model’, published in Higher Education in 2011, named best article on comparative and international education, by the Comparative and International Education Society’s Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG)

Selected publications

Books and Chapter

Marginson, S. & Considine, M. (2000) The Enterprise University: Power, governance and reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP [1463 Google Scholar citations 19.03.15]

Murphy, P., Peters, M. & Marginson, S. (2010). Imagination: Three models of the imagination in the age of the knowledge economy. New York: Peter Lang

Marginson, S., Nyland, C., Sawir, E. & Forbes-Mewett, H. (2010). International Student Security. Cambridge: Cambridge UP [120 Google Scholar citations 19.03.15]

Marginson, S., Kaur, S. & Sawir, E. (eds.) (2011). Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific: Strategic responses to globalization. Dordrecht: Springer

King, R., Marginson, S. & Naidoo, R. (eds.) (2011). Handbook of Higher Education and Globalization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar

Marginson, S. (2013). Higher education and public good. In P. Gibbs & R. Barnett (eds.), Thinking About Higher Education, 53-69. Heidelberg: Springer (2013).

Tran, L., Marginson, S., Do, H., Do, Q., Nghuyen, N., Le, T., Vu, T., Pham, T. & Nghuyen, H. (2014). Higher education in Vietnam. New York: Palgrave

Freeman, B., Marginson, S. & Tytler, R. (eds.) (2015). The Age of STEM: Educational policy and practice across the world in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Routledge

Articles

Marginson, S. & Rhoades, G. (2002). Beyond national states, markets, and systems of higher education: a glonacal agency heuristic. Higher Education, 43 (3), 281-309 [499 GS, 97 SSCI]

Marginson, S. (2006). Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education, Higher Education, 52, 1-39 [534 Google Scholar cites 19.03.15, 98 SSCI]

Marginson, S. (2007). The public/private division in higher education: A global revision, Higher Education, 53, 307-333 [183 Google Scholar cites 19.03.15, 27 SSCI]

Marginson, S.(2008). Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and relations of power in worldwide higher education, British J. of Sociology of Education, 29 (3), 303-316 [129 GS, 45 SSCI]

Marginson, S. (2011). Higher Education in East Asia and Singapore: Rise of the Confucian Model, Higher Education, 61 (5), 587-611 [100 Google Scholar cites, 19.03.15, 15 SSCI]

Marginson, S. (2012). Including the Other: Regulation of the human rights of mobile students in a nation-bound world. Higher Education, 63 (4), 497-512

Marginson, S. (2013). The impossibility of capitalist markets in higher education. Journal of Education Policy, 28 (3), 353-370

Marginson, S.(2014). Student self-formation in international education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18 (1), 6-22

Marginson, S.(2014). University rankings and social science. European Journal of Education, 49 (1), 45-59