Concern over money motive in internationalisation

It is time for promoters of international student programmes to stop acting as if they are “white knights”. That is the view of Hanneke Teekens, one of many scholars studying the internationalisation of higher education who are worried about the ethical pitfalls that have opened up with the meteoric rise in the number of foreign students in the West, writes Douglas Todd for The Vancouver Sun.

Foreign student programmes were largely born out of a humanitarian urge to help the world’s under-privileged, Teekens says. The Dutch expert is not alone in questioning how the phenomenon has turned into a multi-billion dollar business, with the attendant competition and marketing rhetoric.

The number of students studying outside their countries has quadrupled in three decades, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the past 10 years alone, Canadian colleges and universities have more than doubled their cohort of foreign students to 225,000 in 2011.
Full report on The Vancouver Sun site