Achievements, challenges, and opportunities: Redesigning higher education in East Asia for a better future

This editorial piece sets out the background of the special issue ‘Redesigning higher education in East Asia for a better future’. On the one hand, East Asian higher education has made phenomenal achievements in the last two decades, in both quantity and quality. On the other hand, it faces lingering intrinsic and extrinsic challenges. A major source of the intrinsic challenges is the persisting tensions between the local cultures and the imported modern Western university model. The extrinsic challenges are related with the global power dynamics in higher education, manifested in global knowledge asymmetries, academic dependence, and the center-periphery continuum in the global higher education system. Focusing on the efforts and opportunities in East Asian higher education, the nine articles of this special issue center around the question of ‘how can higher education in East Asia be redesigned to advance its own development and contributions to society?’ Diverse perspectives are employed to explore East Asian higher education at macro, meso, and micro levels, surrounding three themes. It is hoped that this issue can contribute to the ongoing exploration of higher education in East Asia and attract more attention from worldwide higher education researchers to study this rich and important field.