Renovating internationalisation for the 21st century

Higher education internationalisation is not dead, nor dying, but under significant pressure to change. These are the conclusions of a panel of three of NAFSA’s five current Senior Fellows who presented at the recent 2018 conference of NAFSA: Association of International Educators on 30 May and who co-authored this article. 

Before more than 100 attendees from numerous countries, we laid out the trends, challenges and opportunities facing higher education internationalisation. A view we strongly shared was that in the 21st century, societally relevant higher education routinely accesses global pathways of cutting-edge knowledge, ideas and student and scholar talent. 

Further, integrating an international and comparative perspective throughout all three higher education missions – teaching/ learning, research/scholarship and community engagement – is an imperative. Among many current trends and specific issues, several were highlighted in the presentation.

Globalisation and the third higher education mission

Populist reactions to globalisation, for example, Brexit and elections in the United States and Europe, underscore the need to internationalise higher education’s ‘third’ mission of community engagement and problem solving, particularly in partnership with communities and societies intent on bridging the local and the global. 

There are coalescing obligations to provide workforce-ready graduates for a global economy as well as to partner with communities to develop cross-border economic opportunities, connections, citizenship-building and understanding.

Integrating refugees and at-risk migrants

The challenges in today’s global society are multiple and can sometimes seem distant from the work being done in internationalisation of higher education. Nevertheless, there is a great need to see internationalisation beyond the conventional and to connect it more effectively to those issues that are apparently distant. 

Today, for instance, the recorded 65.6 million forcibly displaced people and 22.5 million refugees who have had to flee their home countries raise another challenge for higher education internationalisation. 

Their children will need K-12 education and teachers who are prepared to help them; some will seek access to university education; and most will demand continuing education opportunities; some are scholars at risk. 

So far we have not had to think of international education mobility in these terms, but displacement has now become a form of mobility that requires us to respond. While developing cross-cultural understanding has always been a core component of mobility programmes, the mobility of refugees and their needs compel us to accept a pressing moral obligation. 

New forms of mobility with demographic change 

Mobility is diversifying in other ways as well, driven by varied motivations, modes of participation, such as short-term and active learning options, and outcome expectations, such as careers, jobs and immigration. These are outside the once mainstream forms of mobility of a semester or longer and liberal-arts-oriented experiences. 

Many new forms aren’t counted in the statistics and yet they are the principal avenues of mobility growth. Mobility figures have risen from roughly two million students two decades ago to estimates of as many as 12-15 million by 2030, counting all forms. Additionally, there are some 13 million cross-border, online students today.

The evolution of mobility extends to cross-border movements of faculty and scholars, seen by some as global brain circulation. Institutional mobility, for example through transnational education and a proliferation of inter-institutional partnerships in education, dual or joint degrees and research, is also expanding. 

These mobility changes are made possible and necessary by the emergence of a global higher education capacity, fed by the rapid expansion of the world’s middle class, although this is regionally uneven, and by a national thirst for higher education that is responsive to knowledge-economy priorities.  

By 2030 about 58% of the world’s middle class will be in Asia, rising to 65% by 2050. Higher education participation rates are exploding with more than 50 countries now having rates in excess of 50%.

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