Student Mobility as a Form of Education Internationalization: A Systems Approach to Management

Abstract

According to the analysis of the existing internationalization strategies it is demonstrated that its main source is an international students’ mobility, which is based on ability, willingness and common interest in cooperation of three following subjects: countries importing education, education-exporting countries, higher educational institution of the exporting country, which provides its educational services for the citizens of the country importing education. The success of this process depends on a certain set of factor indicators in politics, economics, sociology and technology, which are peculiar to each of three participants. The authors propose common to all the participants list of criteria, which evaluate indicators of the stated factors according to the integrated scale: political (administrative) stability, degree of participants’ cooperation, legislation in educational sphere, mutual amiability of the subjects, level of administrative barriers, peculiarities of demographic situation, economic performance, demand for majors of training, logistic accessibility, the number of graduate students, language attraction of training programs, level of career-oriented activities, correspondence between the level of applicants’ acquirements and requirements of the education-exporting country, competition on the educational services market, accessibility of distance educational technologies, development level and dynamics of innovations. The article gives an integral estimation of the efficiency forecast for the work of exporting higher educational institution with the population of a particular education-importing country. This estimation is carried out by means of the analysis of the formed multi-level hierarchical structure. The convolution of hierarchical elements on each level of the hierarchical structure is done using a generalised f-mean, proposed by Kolmogorov – Nagumo. There are given examples of the proposed methodology implication for quantitative and comparative assessment of the potential of education-importing countries. Due to this, international services of the university determine the most attractive countries in terms of international students’ mobility organization and therefore concentration of administrative and financial resources in the chosen direction, in order to make decision on the university brand promotion on the foreign market of educational services. The model can be easily modified by adding the relevant or excluding irrelevant parameters for a given university.