Foreign Students in Higher Education

Globalization and Education Globalization involves a number of different elements, including economic integration, freedom of capital movements, and the increasing "transfer of knowledge, cultural stability" and an increase in cultural interactions (Al-Rodhan, 2006). The process of globalization has been fostered by industrial-age improvements in transportation, communication and through political and economic liberalization. One of the antecedents of the era of globalization was the creation of the European Common Market.

When this was extended to not only allow for goods and capital to move more easily across borders but labor as well, this ushered in a new era of mass migration. Today, many of the world's leading cities have incredibly diverse populations, as people from all over the world are drawn by the economic promise of major urban hubs. One of the areas where this trend can be seen is with education. For decades, education has been trumpeted as a pathway out of poverty.

Aid programs to the developing world often focus on providing better access to education as a result of this reality (Grootaert, 1994). Where education and globalization intersect is at the level of higher education. Many developing countries have relatively underdeveloped higher education sectors, whereas countries in the developed world have highly-developed higher education sectors. They use their education as a form of competitive advantage, turning out talented graduates to be the leaders of tomorrow.

People from outside of these countries rightly see the advantages of an education at a Western institution, usually with preference given to education in English and to institutions with a strong reputation. As such, demand for places at schools in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia has increased substantially over the past couple of decades. Coupled with a decline in public funding for universities in many Western nations, many such schools actively compete for foreign students as a means of balancing their budgets (Besser, Cronau & Cohen, 2015).

Many, however, feel that the pendulum has swung too far, that domestic schools are catering too much to foreign students. Many people in education and politics, as well as prospective students, have become concerned that the emphasis on recruiting foreign students has reduced the amount of opportunity for domestic students, creating a goal conflict within the higher education system (Bradshaw, 2014).

From a political point-of-view, foreign students reduce cash outlays to universities, but they also reduce the national competitive advantage that countries enjoy from having built and maintained a high-quality higher education system. Educators are likewise caught in the middle, with the need to balance the budget and simultaneous loyalties to providing a high-quality education to all, but for public universities (state schools, or almost all schools in other nations) there is also a mandate specifically to provide an education for domestic students.

It is my contention that while private schools are free to set their own mandates, publicly-funded schools should maintain a focus on preparing domestic students, and therefore should not display any trade-off of foreign student for domestic one. Places for foreign students should come with expansion of facilities, which ultimately benefits everybody. The Core Case At the heart of the argument is that publicly-funded schools a) have an obligation to those who provide the funding and b) play a role in national competitive advantage.

On the first point, a school naturally has a duty of care to any student who pays tuition. That responsibility is accepted by all, as part of the contractual agreement between student and educational institution. However, in many countries, and at state schools, universities also receive taxpayer funding. This makes the taxpayer a stakeholder in the higher education system. Taxpayers have children, and wish for their children to do well in life.

There is a direct correlation between a university education and higher income, so it stands to reason that a parent of a student who intellectually and in terms of discipline is capable of earning a four-year degree would want their child to have that opportunity. This view is not necessarily a strictly economic one -- access to education need not be an economic argument in this view. Access to education is, however, something desirable, and that makes it a commodity.

It is also a commodity in which the world's major English-speaking nations have a distinct competitive advantage. The neoliberalism that drives globalization inevitably seeks to create opportunities for mobility of students, for knowledge transfer, and for opportunities for talented people to live, study and eventually work abroad.

Vaira (2004) argues that the institutions that are the lead promoters of globalization, bodies such as the World Bank or the World Trade Organization, have sought to structure the global education system in their own image, striving to defund it in the form of scaling down the social welfare system. This view is further supported by Kwiek (2001), who notes that globalization has come with the restructuring and reframing of higher education as a whole. Unwinding public education is part of the process of unwinding the nation-state itself.

Higher education's role has shifted to readying people for the work world, rather than teaching them how to think. The university as a job training institution has been attributed to globalization in a couple of ways. First, it is argued that higher education must prepare people for a globalized economy. If, this argument posits, we are competing against the world, there can be no room in higher education for non-economic learning.

This leads down a path to education as a commodity, where its merit is determined solely by its economic value. The second is that globalization undermines the ability of the state to finance education, and therefore leads schools to seek out revenues elsewhere. Because schools can set their own prices for foreign students, and because improving economies around the world mean that for many foreign students there is low price elasticity of demand for higher education abroad, there are significant revenue opportunities available for universities in the West.

Alderman (2010) notes that a neoliberal free market approach to education means that higher education should be a global industry. The issue, of course, is that for many in the West, there are no opportunities overseas because emerging markets simply do not have the capacity, and they then see the capacity that was built with their tax dollars go to foreign students instead of their own.

When supply is constrained, a fully free market system will invariably squeeze some buyers out of the market, which in the case of higher education is very much to their detriment as there are limited reasonable substitution options for most. National Interest With demand for higher education growing rapidly around the world, and supply constrained by the lack of funding in most emerging markets, and the reality that it takes time to build out supply in higher education, some students will lose out on their opportunity for higher education.

Jurisdictions that had supply problems twenty years ago are completely unable to deal with the demand situation today. The problem comes when domestic students are the ones who are denied opportunities to enter university. They either scramble to find some other form of higher education -- for-profit online schools, community colleges, etc. -- or they are forced to delay their entry into higher education.

Advocates of the market system would argue that such any student who wishes to gain entry should be prepared to work as hard as those who are presently given entry -- spots in universities should be based on merit, and merit allows for greater economic efficiency (Odin & Manicas, 2004). If this approach weakens competitive advantage, that is just as well, as the nation-state is entering into obsolescence. The neoliberal view holds the nation-state as anachronistic, regardless of how the majority of the people in the world see it.

But for those who do not subscribe to the neoliberal, free-market point-of-view, higher education is one of the means by which national competitive advantage derives. Given how difficult it is to build out a high-quality system of higher education, it can be a source of sustainable competitive advantage. In the knowledge economy, having a high level of knowledge is definitely a competitive advantage.

Scandinavian countries have long been aware of this, and provide higher education for free to their citizens, knowing that high-value jobs today require a high level of intellectual capability and education. National competitive advantage today almost entirely rests on the education level a country has. Regardless of one's views on educating the citizens of other countries -- it is actually hard to argue that this is a bad thing -- educating one's own citizens is a key element of maintaining national advantage. Having foreign students is actually useful for countries.

Neoliberal thinking is correct in promoting the value of intellectual exchange. Knowledge and culture are transferable, and overseas students can have significant benefits to the host country whether they migrate permanently or simply return home with a high level of knowledge about the host country and its culture. Altbach and Knight note that knowledge and language acquisition, and the structural changes that higher education makes with respect to the internationalization of curriculum are generally positive things in higher education.

Alderman (2010) advocate for the removal of barriers to international students for similar reasons. Further, taxpayers are not just an oblique stakeholder in the sense that they have some ill-defined national interest; they are directly financing public universities. The neoliberal model may wish to see such taxpayer support done away with, but until that happens, taxpayers are stakeholders, and they want to see that the playing field is equal.

Nobody wants to perceive that their child is disadvantaged for being local, but that perception is growing, or this would not be a debate. Politicians in particular have an interest in ensuring that taxpayers are happy with state-funded education systems because the politicians are answerable. This reality creates incentive to ensure that there are sufficient spaces for domestic students. That said, the objectives of having foreign students participate in Western academic life and ensuring that the nation's needs are met are not incompatible.

It is perfectly reasonable to pursue increasing numbers of foreign students with compromising access for domestic students, or even without compromising the quality of the education on offer. Infrastructure will surely need to expand, and this expansion implies investment. It is not sufficient to expect a university to finance such expansion through added fees, unless they have the ability to tap capital markets themselves.

Governments essentially create the situation whereby they are unwilling to finance expansion but wish for schools to be profitable, and to admit a certain percentage of domestic students. In other words, there is always going to be some sort of trade-off. Government, by virtue of its financial position, sets the framework by which that trade-off occurs. For education administrators, that implies not only the need to strike a delicate balancing act, but also to play a greater political role, to stem the tide of education cuts that necessitate trade-offs.

Access to financing, for example, would allow universities to build out their infrastructure in a manner that can be paid off over several years -- but if they are forced to operate on a cash basis year-over-year then they have a much more difficult time juggling the needs of the different stakeholders. Objections As noted, there are different threads of objection. First, the neoliberal argument holds in favor of foreign students, and even avoiding placing caps on how many there are.

Universities would not be publicly-funded anyway, and the market would over time increase the supply of spaces in good schools. The current situation mainly stems from a misalignment of supply and demand, because demand has increased very quickly in the past twenty years while supply has not. As supply comes on board, the market will revert naturally to an equilibrium position. Our domestic students will either have bigger domestic schools to meet their needs, or they will have enhanced access to foreign schools.

A challenge to this model is that government control immigration, and thus the number of student visas that they will issue in a year. Without policies to specifically open up foreign markets for higher education, there will be on way to relieve the supply shortage in the short run. Furthermore, this argument essentially ignores the issue of national advantage, mainly because the neoliberal view downplays the role of the nation-state.

Yet, as long as we live in a world of nation-states, we should view our education system as being a domestic matter, and should still formulate policy based on the idea that we need to cultivate national advantages in order to compete globally. There is also the opposing view that there is something inherently wrong with setting limits on foreign students, and promoting domestic ones.