Education 2.0: Exploring the challenges of Corvinus University in the long tail economy of global higher education

Our basic storyline is how the business and economics higher education landscape has changed with the introduction of the Bologna programs. We borrowed the fashionable long tail concept from e-business, and used it for modeling the new landscape of internationalization of universities. Internationalization, mobility, and the appearance of the internet generation at the gates of our universities in our opinion has brought us to a new e-era which, appropriately to our web analogies we might as well call Education 2.0.In our paper first we show the characteristics of the long tail model of the Bologna-based European higher education and potential messages for strategy making in this environment. We illustrate that benchmarking university strategies situated in the head of the long tail model will not always provide strategic guidance for universities sitting in the tail. For underlining some key concerns in the Hungarian niche, we used Corvinus University as a case study to illustrate some untapped challenges of the Hungarian Bologna reform. We explored three areas which are crucial elements of the “tail” strategy in our opinion: a) the influence of state regulation, b) social situations and impacts and c) internal university capabilities.

Worker remittances and the global preconditions of ‘smart development’

With the growing environmental crisis affecting our globe, ideas to weigh economic or social progress by the ‘energy input’ necessary to achieve it are increasingly gaining acceptance. This question is intriguing and is being dealt with by a growing number of studies, focusing on the environmental price of human progress. Even more intriguing, however, is the question of which factors of social organization contribute to a responsible use of the resources of our planet to achieve a given social result (‘smart development’). In this essay, we present the first systematic study on how migration – or rather, more concretely, received worker remittances per GDP – helps the nations of our globe to enjoy social and economic progress at a relatively small environmental price. We look at the effects of migration on the balance sheets of societal accounting, based on the ‘ecological price’ of the combined performance of democracy, economic growth, gender equality, human development, research and development, and social cohesion. Feminism in power, economic freedom, population density, the UNDP education index as well as the receipt of worker remittances all significantly contribute towards a ‘smart overall development’, while high military expenditures and a high world economic openness are a bottleneck for ‘smart overall development’.