Hello everyone! My name is Elaine Truong and I am in my second-to-last semester of the MS-Ed HEA program at Baruch. I went to Hunter College for my undergraduate degree where I majored in political science and minored in English literature. I recently started working as an academic advising coordinator for graduate students at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs. I am interested in higher education policies and law and how these affect disadvantaged students.

This week’s article did a great job in providing us with the overview of international higher education policy: what it meant in the past and what it means presently. From the Altbach article, one of the purposes of internationalizing higher education was to spread peace and diplomacy during or after times of tension and conflict. For example, the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship came about after World War II as a way to foster diplomacy and development in war torn countries or in third world countries that recently received their independence. However, as the Cold War advanced; students and institutions of higher education became political objects in the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The internationalization of higher education was used as a political tool to spread one country’s influence in a region over the other country. Although, the Cold War has officially ended, the use of higher education to increase influence and dominance in the international arena has not ended.

Presently, the argument for the internationalization of higher education, according to the Oxford Trends report, is to allow students to gain worldly experiences and to develop soft skills that employers will find desirable. The underlying narrative is essentially the same, which is to have students from one region dominate the job economy and thus become the dominant international power. Higher education has become a means to an end, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I do agree with the presumption that students who “study abroad” are able to develop certain soft skills that are valuable to employers in an ever-expanding and inter-connected world. These skills are important for students, but what worries me is that students from other regions are more likely to get this experience than American students. As the Oxford Trends note, the most mobile students are students from Asia, specifically China. Chinese students chose to study abroad in higher proportions in comparison other regional students. Many of these students chose to study in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Therefore, is an  imbalance of students between countries that send out the most students and those that take in the most students. It is in the interest of the US to try and correct this imbalance of students who study aboard with new policies and programs that allow students to be competitive on the international level. I found the Green article the most interesting because it identifies this imbalance and it puts into perspective how few US institutions of higher education are actually thinking about internationalizing. At School of Public Affairs, where I work, the focus has continued to be internationalization. So, it is very interesting to know that our school is part of the minority who are focused on internationalizing

Overall, I found the articles very eye-opening this week and really enjoyed the focus on the policy trends in international higher education.

References

Altbach, P.G. and Wit, H.D. (2015).  Internationalization and global tension: Lessons from history. International Higher Education, 81, 2-4.

Green, M.F. (2015). Is the United States the best in the world? Not in internationalization. International Higher Education, 81, 7-9.

University of Oxford. (2015) International trends in higher education 2015.