YUFA External

25 Apr 11 – Internationalization of higher education (IHE) signals the mobility of both software (academic knowledge, scientific expertise, resources and pedagogies) and hardware (financial, institutional and management aspects) across national borders in order to enrich, expand and improve student experiences in a globalized world. Speakers at the OCUFA Conference, January 2011: The Race to Globalize Higher Education in Canada addressed many of the elements of IHE. But the most critical barriers to IHE – financial gap between rich and poor countries’ universities / students, knowledge gap between countries on requisite parameters on curriculum to be disseminated, on ethics, diversity and mobility, were not adequately addressed. Layering the ways of, and elaborating on the need for, IHE do not sweeten it enough to become a global sharing and exchange of ideas. Globally and in Canada, IHE efforts so far seem to have turned out to be a doughnut with a big hole left to fill in the middle; merely wishing for it to be a tasty bun, would not turn it into one.

However, the conference has been timely and useful in drawing our attention to the major issues. Thematically, two important threads emerged from the ideas presented at the conference: one, Canadian attitudes towards, and realities of, IHE; and the other, Global trends in IHE.

Canadian attitudes towards IHE: The general finding of an OCUFA / CFS survey (Turcotte, A. 2011),¹ of Ontarians on public perceptions on IHE, shows that post-secondary education (PSE) in general is viewed as increasingly becoming too expensive to be accessible. Although the idea of internationalization in itself is received well, Ontarians favour incorporating international content in their own programmes and campuses, rather than setting up their universities’ branch campuses abroad. They also welcome the idea of attracting internationally trained faculty to their campuses. However, while welcoming international students, Ontarians consider charging higher tuition fees for these students as fair and are consistent in their broader aim to keep down domestic cost of higher education in order to maintain accessibility. A majority of Ontarians are also against large scholarships ($40K / annum) for international doctoral students, and oppose Ontario government’s recent move to create 75 new scholarships for international doctoral students in Ontario universities.

A warning that it would be unwise to treat IHE purely as a technical or scientific process of knowledge dissemination is sounded by a Canadian faculty survey results (Bond, S. 2011)². They reveal the need for understanding the complexities of IHE because the process, if taken as a scientific exercise, is likely to privilege knowledge as universal truth, and therefore, as objective instead of treating knowledge as constructed historically and culturally, and therefore subjective.

Canadian Realities on IHE: Increasing globalization has prompted universities to reposition themselves as beacons of the deepening knowledge economy. Changes in Canadian demography predict excess capacity areas to be filled by international students because of a decline in domestic demand for PSE. In this context, Canadians need to have a clearer understanding of IHE. But their assumption on IHE that it is inherently good seems to ignore problem that IHE might exacerbate power inequity between participant countries on brain drain / gain and its related impact on their economic relations. Canadian universities are late-comers to internationalization. In many countries, internationalization process occurred during the period 1970-1985, when Canadian universities emphasized their Canadianization process. Responsibilities for, and policies of, IHE have been confounded by the split between Federal (International Affairs & Trade) / Provincial (Education) jurisdiction (Jones, G., 2011).³

However, currently, a pragmatic Canadian approach to IHE, as found in the results of AUCC’s Knowledge Export Survey of 2006 (White, R, 2011),⁴ shows that more than a third of AUCC- affiliated universities offer educational programmes / services abroad through institutional partnerships in 41 countries; two thirds of the universities are interested in designing similar programmes. China and India rank first and second as target countries for these products. The top areas of international educational products in demand are: Business and Computer Science. Methods of delivery for these products are: On-site host (83.5%), Distance education (2%), a combination of On-site and Distance (11%) and Branch campuses in Canadian universities (3.5%).

In “Advantages and Challenges of Off-shore Programme in the Developing World,” Ian Lee (Sprott School of Business at Carleton) narrated, as a case study, Carleton University’s success in internationalizing its programmes in areas such as Business and Engineering, attempts that have benefitted the university through internationalizing its faculty and its curriculum.

Global Trends:

Australian Experience: IHE in Australia is perhaps a model from which Canada might draw. From WWII to 1990, Australia’s aims were: international relations and financial support for international students. Since 1990, IHE’s policy radically changed in favour of recruiting fee-paying international students to subsidize the cost of higher education in Australia. Seven Australian universities earn more than a fifth of their annual revenue from the international student fees (Meek, L 2011)5. This analysis is the only one in the conference speeches that dwelt on the financial implications of IHE, a theme left mostly untouched by the Canadian speakers.

Global Attitudes: A survey (of 745 higher education institutions in 115 countries and of 18 national associations of universities) by International Association of Universities (IAU) on IHE (Egron-Polak. E, 2011)6 yields a comparison of the global trends in internationalization. As the results show, the key rationale for IHE is on the preparedness of student to function in a globalized world (Graph: 1). On student mobility, sharp imbalances are found in the number of international students sent compared to those received from different regions / countries (Graph: 2).

The IAU survey shows that universities need to confront the potential negatives of IHE, e.g., the risks of some developing regions being left behind and the prospect of student mobility becoming "elitist". As overseas undergraduate students represent less than 1 % of the student body internationally, IHE does not seem to reach undergraduate students. Although less affluent, Asia and the Pacific universities report a substantial increase in their favourability of and emphasis on IHE from the time of the last survey in 2005. Globally, IHE seems to be moving to the centre of higher education policy although the emphasis varies from region to region (Graph 3)7.

Egron-Polack also emphasized the risk of affluent countries’ universities being less concerned about the impact of their programmes, goals and biases on their partner universities. Enhancing one’s "reputation" was the main goal of internationalisation for European universities. Egron-Polack added that universities in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East prioritize their own region above others, for their students who are sent internationally. This tells us that the current global strategies fall short of attracting universities in these regions to partner with those in Europe or North America. In fact, IHE would fail in its goal if poorer and advanced countries’ universities become mutually exclusive in their networking, because there is a global consensus on IHE’s goal of achieving mutual knowledge-sharing and understanding between affluent countries’ students and those of the developing world.

Globally, higher education institutions ranked "Improving student preparedness for a globalised world" as the most important objective of IHE. The highest risk of IHE, as identified in the survey results, was "commodification and commercialisation of education", closely followed by "brain drain". The various survey responses indicate that the key to IHE’s success is the financial factor. Globally, universities identified inadequate financial resources, both internal funding from their own universities and external funding from other public and private sources, as the most critical obstacle (Graph:4). Perhaps, the next conference on IHE should address how to augment financial resources in order to enhance global knowledge sharing and partnerships between universities. This might fill the hole and sweeten the doughnut.

_______

All graphs are from: Egron-Polak, Eva (2011). OCUFA Conference Presentation.

_______