Higher Education Policies in Promoting ASEAN Community: The case of Myanmar

The purposes of this paper were to present a general overview of the background of Myanmar higher education, the higher education policy formulation, and the faced challenges related to its higher educational policies for promoting ASEAN community. In order to achieve the purposes, two research methods; documentary research and in-depth interviews were employed. The purposive random sampling was used to select the participants. The key informants were the executives in higher educational policy setting and the stakeholders. The data were analyzed by content analysis. The study demonstrated that higher institutions in Myanmar have been under the supervision of 13 ministries and are allocated budgets by Ministry of Education. At the same time, the universities are concerned with their own governance, administration, and respective ministries. The findings showed that the policy development process of the higher education has gradually transition from the highly centralized to be the part of the participation of many relevant groups from educational stakeholders. The research also revealed the faced challenges related to Myanmar higher educational policies for promoting ASEAN community. The major challenges were concern with student equity, access, autonomy and choices; language; information technology and facilities; human resource; financial; research; and quality assurance and credit transfer.