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in similar ways as the mainland university student organizations? In what way and
to what extent? Studies need to be done on how Macau’s higher education can main-
tain its autonomy so as to not only serve the needs of the society but also build true
colleges and universities that do not lose its mission to train students with critical
and creative thinking skills.
Fifth, equally important to study are students and their learning experiences.
Who goes to college, and what kind of colleges and universities do they go to?
What are their studying experiences? Are they equipped with critical and creative
thinking skills? There is little study on those issues. For example, is there a strati-
fication of Macau’s HEIs? Do students of different socioeconomic backgrounds
have the same opportunities to attend the university they want? Li Mei’s and Mark
Bray’s ( 2006 ) research on mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macau
found that it is virtually impossible for students from workers and peasants fami-
lies to pay their own costs of education. So those self-paying students tend to
come from middle or upper middle class families. What about Macau students?
What kind of schools do students from different socioeconomic backgrounds go
to? Do they get the kind of training they should get in a university? Lam Fat Iam
( 2007 ) criticized some universities for recruiting thousands of MA students with-
out accountability of what they had learned. We do not seem to have any research
on these and other issues on students and student learning outcomes.
Sixth, we mentioned de-professionalization above, a related question that is
mentioned in the literature but lacks research in is the issue of postcolonialism.
A postcolonial mentality can be defined as benchmarking Western universities
in managerialism, corporatization, and commercialization, as seen in the pur-
suit of rankings or world-class universities, even if these concepts have been
criticized often by Western scholars. The widespread use of contingent faculty
in the USA, who teach more than 50% of the courses in colleges and universi-
ties, has been a serious issue in higher education, a key indicator of de-profes-
sionalization and marketization. The problem here is that the decolonized
peoples may still rely on the colonizers’ (in this case colonizers in general, not
particularly the Portuguese or the British) policies and philosophies of gover-
nance rather than basing those on their own culture and a glocalized vision (see
Bill Chou 2012 :98; Law 1997 ; and Mok and Cheung 2011 on colonization
issues in Hong Kong; Lin Rongce 2008 ). Local and indigenous knowledges are
marginalized, while professors are de-professionalized. Maybe further decolo-
nization is needed, and higher education needs to strike a balance between local
and global knowledges (see also David Chan 2008 and Soudien 2008 on neoco-
lonial and post-colonial perspectives in higher education) and between the man-
agement and the faculty.
Z. Hao