This week’s readings, while all centering around strategy, were extremely different in nature. The first article I read, “Global Strategy & Internationalization at OHIO,” gave a great, but lengthy overview of a global University’s strategic plan and vision for its future. The document reviewed important points such as what OHIO University offers currently to its students, what their personal strategy is to create and prepare global leaders moving forward, how the present trends of higher education play a role into their goals, and ultimately the framework that they will focus on in order to accomplish their goals. Something I really liked about this piece was the fact that they include a “Questions for Further Dialogue” part at the end of each section. When reading a huge piece such as this, I find that as the reader, it can sometimes be a helpful tool to pause and absorb everything you have just read. The questions helped prompt the reader to think deeper and more critically about OHIO and their global plans and strategies. I also greatly enjoyed their use of graphs, charts, and “Fast Facts” sections. This helped dissect the article into reader-friendly portions.

The next article I read was “BRIC Universities as Institutions in the Process of Change.” As a side note, I was not aware that “BRIC” was an acronym for “Brazil, Russia, India, China” In the future, it may be helpful for the article to have that mentioned somewhere before we begin reading so we have more of a framework for what the title means. In this excerpt, the author discusses how each country influences change in their universities and how the institutions have responded. As expected, each BRIC state establishes a unique relationship with its higher educational system, based on the political structure present.

The last article I read was the global strategic plan of Middlesex Community College from 2014-2017. I found this extremely interesting because it was nice to compare and contrast from other strategic plans of 4-year universities. Their plan just reestablished to me how important the globalization of higher education is. Although community colleges are not always considered in research, etc because of the varying nature of their students, faculty and academic offerings, I was impressed to see that a community college has acknowledged the ever-present trend of “going global” and has established groundwork to accommodate their students this way.

After reading all of this week’s articles, something that I found was a reoccurring theme was the basic need to create a global strategy, and the greater nod that these pieces have as to the direction our higher education institutions are headed worldwide. I was looking at NAFSA’s website and found a really cool page titled “Trends & Insights” of global Higher Education. I think that these links really speak to a lot of the points we have discussed in class, such as going global, but at what cost? or the limit of academic freedom on global campuses. Feel free to click the link and take a look!