
GLOBAL: Trends and drivers in internationalisation

Then, 15 years ago came the move from cooperation to competition where the active recruitment of international students became a broader focus of internationalisation, spreading from English-speaking countries to continental Europe and coinciding with a move to teaching in English in order to make study there more attractive.
Around the same time, Anglo-Saxon countries intensified their cross-border operations by moving institutions and programmes abroad, developing branch campuses and franchise operations, particularly but not exclusively in developing countries.
Under the combined pressures of the demands of the global knowledge economy, the graying of Western societies and increasing competition from emerging economies, the focus of internationalisation has been shifting again in the past few years.
On the one hand, competition for international students has become more global, as countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea and the BRICS countries of Brazil, China, India and South Africa, have targeted international students. Big sending countries have increasingly become receiving countries too.
On the other hand, we have seen a shift from mass recruitment to a more selective approach focusing on the most talented students and scholars. Countries like Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands have followed the approach the United Kingdom and Australia pioneered 30 years ago and have introduced full-cost fees for non-EU-EER students and scholarship schemes to attract the best.
Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom are undergoing a shift from quantitative to more qualitative recruitment of international students. In the United States, which has been consistently both a stable leading recipient of international students and a sender of students abroad - but percentage wise in terms of its overall student body a rather minor actor - there is increasing concern about how this competition is affecting its attractiveness as a destination for talented students and scholars. The trend of graduates from China and India to return home instead of staying on in the US is also feeding this concern.
In an essay with the polemic title, "The end of Internationalisation", Uwe Brandenburg of CHE Consult and I wrote recently:
"Over the last two decades, the concept of the internationalisation of higher education has moved from the fringes of institutional interest to the very core. In the late 1970s up to the mid-1980s, activities that can be described as internationalisation were usually neither called that nor carried high prestige and were rather isolated and unrelated.
"...In the late 1980s changes occurred. Internationalisation was invented and promoted with its importance ever-increasing. New components were added to its multidimensional body over the past two decades, so that it moved from being about the simple exchange of students to the big business of recruitment, and from activities impacting on an incredibly small elite group to a mass phenomenon."
This process is also described as mainstreaming of internationalisation. This is a general trend occurring in different parts of the world, but with different emphases, roles and positions.
Like higher education, its internationalisation is still largely embedded in institutional, national and regional cultures and systems, and expresses itself in specific ways by disciplines and their relation to society as well as by levels and type of education.
Its position changes over time in response to political, societal and academic developments in each of the countries. Some examples in the field of tuition fees are: in the different states of Germany, the attitude to tuition fees changes over the years depending on the political parties in power; Austria first introduced tuition fees, then abandoned them and is now considering introducing them again; Scotland, unlike England, became tuition free, but now sees itself forced to consider introducing fees again as a result of developments with tuition fees in England.
So there are different approaches, and national and regional factors are still crucial. But at the same time, global developments have more influence on higher education and its international dimension than ever.
Among international educators there is still the notion of internationalisation as something good and globalisation as something evil. The reality, though, is more complex. As Uwe Brandenburg and I wrote:
"Internationalisation is claimed to be the last stand for humanistic ideas against the world of pure economic benefits allegedly represented by the term globalisation. Alas, this constructed antagonism between internationalisation and globalisation ignores the fact that activities that are more related to the concept of globalisation (higher education as a tradable commodity) are increasingly executed under the flag of internationalisation."
The defining line between competition and cooperation is becoming more obscure.
Internationalisation is still primarily driven by activities and related targets, such as the Bologna target of having 20% of students being internationally mobile, trends towards larger numbers of international students and more teaching in English.
In the late 1990s a movement started in Europe named 'Internationalisation at Home', which focused more on internationalising the curriculum and the teaching and learning process, rather than interpreting internationalisation as being exclusively concerned with the 5% to 10% of mobile students. The movement had resonance even beyond Europe, in particular in Australia and the United States, but its impact is still limited.
The global knowledge economy, though, will force more attention to be focused on the internationalisation of the curriculum, as the knowledge and skills of all our graduates have to reflect that they are able to operate in a more connected world.
How do we define intercultural and international competencies for our students, how do we include them in our curriculum and how do we assess them? These are questions which institutions will have to focus on more, rather than on the mobility goals which now dominate their internationalisation strategies.
* Hans de Wit is professor of the internationalisation of education at Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, and co-editor of the Journal of Studies in International Education.
* This is an edited version of a talk Hans de Wit gave in the UK at the University of Edge Hill symposium on changing trends in international higher education on 16 March.