This week’s reading focused on the four main goals that would push a country towards higher education internalization, these four main rationales are: academically, politically, economically and culturally. Globally, institutes of higher education are investing a multitude of resource outside of finances into this venture. For just about every country in the world, politics is a major part of their day to day lives. Whether we realize it or not, politics have a major effect on how we go about our day to day lives, and how we live our lives in general. With this in mind, it seems plausible that the academic, economic, and cultural stand points for towards higher education internalization are simply branches of a political tree. All nations, not matter what they preach wants what’s best for the nation, so no, it’s not the needs of the people first, it’s the needs of the nation as a whole. When the nation is “good” and all needs are met, this goodness can trickle down and affect the people, when all the needs of the nation aren’t met, this too affects the people.
This for the good of the nation is shown in this week’s reading. Hans de Wit outlined the possible benefits of internalization, there is little to no mention of how the students would be affected, instead, the larger focus is on the nation or rather the government. Academically, policies are geared toward “raising the visibility and stature of the national higher education system” (pg. 7), thus by improving the nation’s institutions global ranking, economically, nations have found that improving their educational quality will have an effect on their national economic development, politically, nations feel that having students develop linguistic and cultural competence could be molding future government leaders that could detect national threats, lastly, culturally, nations believe that having “multi-cultural” view point of the world could help in finding solutions that are “also global in scope”(pg. 8).
It is possible that nations have seen the shift that is occurring in education and are finding ways that it will benefit them in the long run, while the nations might not be explicitly looking for the betterment of its people, a nation funding and paving the way for higher education internalization does just that. The people rely on the nation, and the nation relies on its people. It’s a giving and taking partnership, the foundation of which is different, as with all relationships, you know what you have to offer, but you also want to know and be assured that entering this partnership will make you both better in the long run.