Implications for equity and diversity of increasing international student numbers in European universities: Policies and practice in four national contexts

Jani Haapakoski,Karen Pashby

doi:10.1177/1478210317715794

Abstract

This paper examines the main rationales for and possible implications of the policy of increasing international student numbers in higher education (HE). Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we map key themes emerging from two sets of data—university strategy documents and interviews with staff—collected at eight universities in four national contexts in Europe as a part of a larger project focused on ethical internationalism in HE. In our analysis of the data, we apply social cartographic mapping to consider overlapping, competing and absent discourses related to the push to increase international student numbers by using a heuristic developed in the larger project. We found the imperative to increase international student numbers to be largely driven by economic rationales across different national contexts, reflective of a corporatization trend. Where more civic rationales are presented, these discourses are ultimately framed and mediated by neoliberalism. The findings contribute insight into the complicated discursive terrain of internationalising HE. The mapping makes visible what can be taken for granted or is left unexamined. It serves as a jumping-off point for reflection on the policy, practice and research of internationalisation in HE, promoting the formulation of key questions around the assumed benefits and ethics of internationalisation.

Highlights

This paper examines the main rationales for and possible implications of the policy of increasing international student numbers in higher education (HE)
This research draws on literature that points to three inter-related concerns: a) in the current climate of economic crises, democratic and social purposes of HE can be fused into economic imaginaries of internationalisation (Khoo, 2011); b) this normalized version of internationalisation can re-direct social and political values towards economic rationales that reproduce market expansionism (Rhoads and Szelényi, 2011); and c) this leads to a superficial and tokenistic approach to cultural diversity that steps over ethical questions around equity and denies the corresponding reproduction of global systems of inequities (Andreotti, 2009; Andreotti et al, 2009; Abdi and Shultz, 2008; Dower, 2003)
This theoretical grounding defines a key principle of ethical internationalisation among the project partners: working to make intelligible the potential reproduction of unequal power relations that are often hidden in taken-for-granted assumptions about who benefits from higher education and internationalisation and how

Summary

Data and Methodology

The research drawn on in this paper is part of the wider EIHE project which sought to illuminate how wider internationalisation policies are being translated at universities. Connecting the theoretical framework and the key themes emerging from the texts, the heuristic helps us to map visually the differences within and between the main discursive orientations underpinning how internationalisation and diversity are articulated in the data It helps to recognize how there may be multiple and contradicting discourses operating through a common goal of increasing and/or maintaining and/or diversifying student numbers. We will proceed to the analysis of our data Both the strategy documents and the interviews are analysed and mapped separately and the findings are compared in the discussion part at the end of the paper where we consider possible ethical implications of promoting a more diverse international student population in policy and practice

Internationalisation strategies in university documents

Internationalisation strategies in the interview data

Discussion