Student Mobility Across the World and India

Abstract

In this era of educational marketing, education has become a commodity to be purchased by a consumer in order to build a skill set to be used in the market place and no more is it only recognized as the assets of skills, attitudes and values required for citizenship and effective participation in today’s society. Moreover, with the globalization phenomenon, which was always reflected in the education sector especially in India from olden times, has lead to the mobility of the students to the foreign countries either for quality or affordable education. Educational marketing can be defined as a planned and systematic two-way process of communication between an educational institution and its stakeholders designed to build morale, goodwill, understanding and support for that organization. The outcomes are usually goodwill, positive attitudes, respect, understanding and basic support. A developing country like India can use educational marketing as per its requirements. Therefore, this paper deals with two aspects in higher education in India. It tries to build a case for the need of decreasing outward student mobility and for more foreign students to be attracted to Indian higher education. To meet this purpose, the present study focuses light on the scenario of the higher education system worldwide and how economic globalization of higher education is shaping new horizons in the education sector. The present study details the statistics of student mobility world-wide and in India. The present study will also compare the composition and trends of exports of higher educational services by selected universities in Delhi, the capital and one of the metrocities of India. The present study is based upon the data collected from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of HRD, WTO publications, University Annual Reports and various journals and books published by the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) and the University Grants Commission (UGC).The three universities under study are the University of Delhi (DU), Jamia MiliaI slamia (JMI) and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). These universities are involved in globalization by admitting foreign students. DU and JMI offer regular and distance education courses in India, therefore foreign students come to these universities and take admission and study, whereas IGNOU has a different modus operandi. It has the partner institutions (PIs) all over the world in different countries. Students from those countries get enrolled through the PIs and pursue courses from IGNOU as it offers only distance courses. These universities in New Delhi have been chosen as Delhi is the capital of India and has two functional universities acclaimed worldwide and one open university of international repute, in order to understand how the various modes attract the foreign students; and these being publicly funded universities, how much impetus has been put on internationalization of higher education despite all required infrastructure being available with them for conducting the courses effectively and efficiently.