Building from the last reading, this week’s topic covered “Cross-border education”, this type of education is geared towards “establishing partnerships among institutions on national, regional and international levels, creating educational hubs, encouraging domestic institutions to create campuses and programs abroad, and regulating cross-border educational activities”. Cross-border education seems to be a vital aspect of internationalization. It uses online and hybrid courses also with other programs and research projects that are spread globally which furthers the rate and accessibility of higher education on a global scale (P38-39), this improves the quality of education on the home front as well. Remembering that internationalization pushes for peaceful times, it is refreshing to learn that the United States wants to start cross-border initiatives with the Middle East, this more than likely will not be met with open arms from the general population, but it is a step in the right direction.

As the world changes and advances many countries are growing to become “interdependent”, leading the University of the Philippines (UP) system to look to internationalization. UP takes aspects of academic culture and pedagogy (ethos and value systems) from different universities to mold their own. This allows for the strengthening of resources, but the institution is able to keep its sense of self. The 2008 Charter of the University of the Philippines mandated the national university to “serve as a regional and global university in cooperation with international and scientific unions, network universities, scholarly and professional associations in the Asia Pacific region and around the world”. This system has internationalization written right into their mandate, something that may become the norm for many other institutions in the not so distant future.

Although America feels as though it is the educational capitol of the world, it is important that our students are well-versed in most if not all matters of the world and can relate to others outside of our country, to achieve this, schools have been implementing internationalization initiatives in K-12 as a way to implement culture, linguistics and other foreign matters under policies geared toward internationalization. It can be hypothesized that having students like this who ultimately go on to furthering their education or pursuing careers in different job markets, has many benefits. One such benefit would be if any of these students become educators, they already have the tools of internationalization, or some kind of base understanding, these educators reach out to 100s if not 1,000s of students while perfecting their craft, and these students can go on to do the same, sort of like the domino effect.

References

Azanza, R. (2014, February 21). “Symbiosis”/”Mutualism” and the University of the Philippines’ Enhanced and Strategic Internationalization Agenda. Retrieved February, 2016, from http://www.up.edu.ph/symbiosismutualism-and-the-university-of-the-philippines-enhanced-and-strategic-internationalization-agenda/

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.