Future paths of international higher education

IAU Horizons, the Association's news and information magazine is addressed primarily to IAU Member Institutions and Organizations, but is also sent to a selected audience beyond the IAU Membership such as Ministries of Higher Education, international organizations, national and regional associations of universities and others.
Future paths of international higher education (IAU Horizons Vol. 18, no.3 & Vol.19, no.1)
By Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia. The landscape of international higher education is constantly changing. Our task – as scholars of international education, as well as practitioners who need to understand international education – is to identify the most important and decisive paths to take. What are the trend lines in international education that will shape everything else?
In recent years, the trends that have been especially important in creating international education and internationalised education have been (1) study abroad/student mobility, (2) research collaboration and (3) university rankings. But internationalisation will not stand still and other trends are emerging which could shape the future of international education.
The following three trends or paths have been identified as becoming increasingly important:
The growing pluralisation of advanced higher education
More countries now provide higher education at advanced levels and the number will keep on rising. A total of 49 countries now maintain systems of higher education that publish more than 1000 journal papers per year in science and social science (as collated by Thomson). The threshold of 1000 journal papers is a useful indicator for the presence of local research and doctoral capacity. This number of 49 countries is an increase of almost 30% in the number of countries with their own capacity in research in just 15 years. This trend indicates that there are now many more countries capable of attracting visiting students, scholars and researchers, and acting as collaboration partners, either among neighbouring countries or across the world. In turn, this will increase the ‘horizontal’ aspect of student mobility, with a reduced proportion of mobility concentrated in a few dominant countries like the USA, UK, Germany, France and Australia; and with mobility patterns in the world as a whole beginning to look more like mobility patterns within Europe. In addition, as the capacity of higher education improves in emerging countries, we can expect more students and researchers from the long established systems to spend time in the emerging countries. We can already see this in the growth in the number of American students going to China.
A growing emphasis on hard-edged indicators of internationalisation
Within the administration of government programmes and also institutions’ own strategies for building international awareness and engagements, a growing emphasis can be seen on hard-edged indicators of internationalisation. No one has ‘nailed’ the problem of developing a fully satisfactory set of indicators – one that both contains coherent numerical measures, and is sufficiently comprehensive to cover the many aspects of internationalisation – but there are several projects under development. This focus on hard-edged indicators shows that many systems, and some of their institutions, want to achieve more intensive and self-transformative international experiences. They want to bring an international dimension to the knowledge content of the curriculum, to enhance global skill-building and to improve intercultural relations in culturally mixed classrooms. They want to move from rhetoric and bland mission statements, to changing the nature of the education that everyone receives.
This is a very challenging task, and there is always a danger of placing too much emphasis on those elements that can be counted – so that internationalisation becomes limited, formulaic – but if the drive to achieve internationalisation is strong enough then progress is made. A strong example can be seen in those East Asian systems like China and Singapore that use targets and formal benchmarks to drive improved internationalisation.
The emergence of mass open online courseware
Mass open online courseware (MOOCs) is becoming accessible from leading universities with top brand value: Harvard-MIT... Read more in IAU Horizons Vol. 18, no.3 & Vol.19, no.1.