I found this reading helpful in outlining the motivations and goals surrounding international education as well as providing some key terms that are crucial when speaking about internationalization.  It starts out by providing four major categories of motivations for internationalization.  They are academic, economic, political, and social/cultural.  As the reading notes, they are all interconnected, and I found that they all have an underlying goal of improving an aspect of the home country through collaboration and the exchange of ideas.

Student mobility involves sending residents of one country to study in a different country and also includes attracting international students to study in a country or region.  This is differentiated into two categories: “degree mobility” and “credit mobility.”  I have also heard these referred to as “degree seeking” and “non-degree” students.  I feel like those terms are a bit more intuitive, but maybe they are more closely tied to visa regulations than scholarly discussions of internationalization.

Within the student mobility category are two types of mobility – inbound and outbound.  Policies designed to encourage “inbound mobility” include scholarships, immigration regulations, and “study-in” informational marketing campaigns.  Outbound mobility is when countries send students to study in another country with the hopes that those students will gain skills abroad and contribute to an aspect of development in that student’s home country.  Some incentives are similar to those related to inbound mobility including scholarships or other economic incentives.

I was glad to see the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (BSMP) as one of the examples for outbound mobility scholarships.  I used to work on this program, as the US portion of the program was administered by IIE.  This program had a short-term and long-term intensive English component for students whose English was not ready for academic study in their field, which is what I worked on.  This is a great way to increase diversity and reach students that had not travelled internationally before or did not have the means to study English in Brazil.  Although this program sent students to various countries, the US was the largest hosting country for the program.  At one point there were 20,000 BSMP students in the US!  As noted in the history reading from last week, these programs and policies are subject to external influences.  In recent months the Brazilian economy has not been doing so well and the president is under scrutiny for various reasons.  Therefore, the Brazilian government has had to dramatically scale back the program.

I really enjoyed the sections on what I consider to be lesser known internationalization initiatives including regional mobility and scholar mobility.  It makes sense that regional mobility would be an area of focus for many countries, especially smaller countries that have a lot to gain from cooperating with their neighbors.  One example is the recognition of exams and qualifications by the Nordic Council to increase mobility in that region.  In the scholar mobility category, I thought the repatriation efforts, mostly through financial benefits for scholars living abroad was an effective way to fight against brain drain in many countries.