Only the educated are free
Understanding ‘the international’ in studies of international student mobility
This paper analyses the way in which ‘international’ is mobilised in relation to international student mobility (ISM), focusing on three areas in particular: its role in motivating students to undertake ISM; how it shapes experiences of ISM; and, finally, how conceptions of the international influence the impacts of ISM (in terms of students’ identities and labour market outcomes – the dominant themes within the extant literature). It argues that particular ideas of ‘the international’ determine where students choose to study and how those destinations are framed and positioned hierarchically.
Extracts from article written by Rachel brooks and Johanna Waters. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03054985.2022.2055536?src=recsys
It argues that particular ideas of ‘the international’ determine where students choose to study and how those destinations are framed and positioned hierarchically. Similar ideas also underpin students’ experiences of ISM, with social class and family background playing an important additional role. The impacts of ISM are also related to conceptions of ‘the international’: students’ post-study identities were seen as ‘international’ but also ‘transnational’, ethnic, religious or racially constructed. Finally, we show how an ‘international’ degree is seen as a valuable commodity in many labour markets, but that the literature paints a more nuanced picture, where such qualifications are valued in particular employment sectors, attached to particular countries and not, as might be assumed, universally valorised. Furthermore, conceptions of an ‘international career’ are predictably limited and proxy for Anglophone countries located in the Global North.
Over the past two decades, research within the social sciences on ISM has burgeoned (Brooks & Waters, Citation2011; Waters & Brooks, Citation2021) just as the number of internationally mobile students at tertiary levelFootnote1 has, conterminously, continued to increase year-on-year (to over 5.5 million; OECD, Citation2020). Research in this area increasingly reflects the fact that international student mobility has become a pressing policy issue for many governments around the world concerned with bolstering a knowledge-based economy (Robertson, Citation2013; Yang, Citation2016). It has also sought to understand how students experience international mobility, in terms of their shifting identities, for example (Ghosh & Wang, Citation2003) – and what the implications of international mobility are for students and their families (Ginnerskov-Dahlberg, Citation2022). Interestingly, however, relatively little time has been spent analysing the meanings and implications of the specifically international nature of this mobility.
The term ‘international’ within ISM is usually taken for granted and assumed to speak for itself – its meaning intuited. However, and as we argue in this paper, ‘the international’ does not have one, straightforward and universally understood meaning. Rather, it is mobilised within the literature in different ways: for example, as we go on to show, the international can indicate engagement with a rather narrow and circumscribed set of countries or ‘destinations’.
Some researchers have suggested that the ‘international’ represents more complex ideas of home or evokes the transformative potential of student mobilities in fostering a sense of a ‘wider world’ (existing in spaces located above and transcending the national frame) (Murphy-Lejeune, Citation2002). Madge et al. (Citation2015), for example, have argued for the ‘re-spatialisation’ of international higher education, that emphasises the ‘multiple geographies’ of international study. Their subsequent ‘deconstruction’ of ‘the international’ leads them to argue for:
‘a more distributed, unsettled and decentred view … that starts to develop multicentred, multi-scalar spatial imaginations … We can [then] start to reveal an expanded notion of the international, moving from (largely unmarked) European-American-Australian centres towards a version that explicitly resituates itself as coming out of multiple locations’ (p. 684, emphasis added).
As they suggest, ‘the international’ within ISM has habitually valorised particular parts of the world as centres in the production of knowledge, at the expense of others. Europe, North America and Australasia are assumed to represent ‘international’ spaces, not least because of the pre-eminent role of English as ‘lingua Franca’. The ‘ambivalence’ of English (and how it becomes equated with ‘international’) is described eloquently by Saarinen and Ennser-Kananen (Citation2020):
Academic communities … use English in settings that are often labelled ‘international’ … A research meeting with seven colleagues, originally coming from four different countries, with four different first languages, can be labelled as ‘international’ and ‘local’ at the same time … .The paradox of internationalisation … is that it can lead both to an increased diversity of perspectives and a narrowing Westernisation and Anglicisation of higher education at the same time. (p. 117)
Thus, describing something as ‘international’ in the context of student mobility can have competing connotations, representing both a ‘narrowing’ geographical scope (around particular countries and regions) and, at the same time, indicating a potential diversifying of perspectives (such as the involvement of individuals emanating from multiple nation-states).
In this paper, we explore such competing connotations of ‘the international’. Our argument is based on a critical reading of the extant academic literature (drawing largely from our own and cognate disciplines of sociology, education and human geography) and is structured around three main foci: student/familial decision-making vis-a-vis international mobility; students’ experiences whilst abroad; and, finally, the impacts of international study. We chose these foci as they represent three of the key topics addressed by the extant literature – as well as three important elements of international students’ experiences. (We acknowledge, however, that not all literature will be covered by this approach – for example, that which has focussed more on the perspectives of policy actors and teaching staff.) For each theme, we will analyse how ideas relating to ‘the international’, specifically, emerge from and help shape debates within the academic literature as well as the function that ‘international’ plays in different contexts.
Various ‘circuits’ can be identified, with some students choosing within a largely local group of universities, others deciding between institutions in the same region, and others looking further afield and making their choices within a national frame. various ‘circuits’ can be identified, with some students choosing within a largely local group of universities, others deciding between institutions in the same region, and others looking further afield and making their choices within a national frame. And there is now evidence that some students are choosing within an international circuit.
Motivations
One of the key ways in which ISM has been theorised is in terms of social and cultural reproduction, that is the processes through which privileged groups in society have taken action to protect their advantage and ensure it is passed on to the next generation. There is now some indication of the ‘opening up’ of spaces of ISM to a wider group of students. Mobility is increasingly undertaken not only by those from the upper middle classes; students from lower middle class and even working class backgrounds sometimes pursue an overseas education.
This has been facilitated by changes in both supply- and demand-side factors. With respect to the former, many universities spend considerable resources marketing themselves (sometimes quite aggressively) to prospective students (Findlay et al., Citation2017), in some cases using in-country agents to reach larger and more socially diverse populations (Beech, Citation2018). In various nations, migration policies have also been influential – in encouraging the mobility of lower-skilled individuals to pursue vocational courses to fill particular labour market gaps (Robertson, Citation2013) or tightening up non-education-related migration routes and thus encouraging a wider group of people to consider study abroad as a first step towards immigration (Luthra & Platt, Citation2016). Demand has also increased as more middle- and lower-income families have come to see international student mobility as a means of achieving or solidifying social mobility (e.g. Sancho, Citation2017). Moreover, international travel has become cheaper, and it is now easier for students to stay in close contact with families whilst abroad (through social media and online conferencing) (Lee, Citation2020).
The changing demographics of mobile students have been evident, for example, in the profile of UK students taking part in the European Union’s Erasmus scheme – to some extent as a result of the introduction of paid work placements (for higher education students) alongside traditional study opportunities (Deakin, Citation2014).
Although the international space, with regard to ISM, can be seen as increasingly open to students from a wider range of social backgrounds, it is also an increasingly socially stratified space.
Construction of a ‘home’ and ‘international’ binary
A substantial body of work has shown how, for many students, being categorised as ‘international’ often serves to mark difference, separating them from ‘domestic’ students and justifying differential treatment. International students are often, for example, housed in separate accommodation blocks – which can make it more difficult for them to get to know ‘home’ students, as well as reinforce their sense of ‘otherness’ on campus (Fincher & Shaw, Citation2009). The charging of differential fees is also justified on the basis of the distinction of the two groups. Although international and home students typically sit in the same classroom, follow the same curriculum and have the same resources spent on them by their university, the former often pay significantly more for the experience. While such differentials are perhaps most marked in countries where relatively high fees are paid by all students (in the UK, international students can often pay at least £10,000 per year more than home students), they are also evident in other nations. Indeed, Plamper and Jauhiainen (Citation2021) have argued that in Finland, where fees are payable only by international students, not their domestic counterparts, fee-paying is associated with feeling like a ‘second class citizen’ in the classroom, with international students frequently positioning themselves as ‘restricted participants’. While such fee differentials are common across the world (but by no means universal), the inequities they represent are rarely discussed (Raghuram et al., Citation2020). Indeed, in the UK, the National Union of Students has campaigned on the behalf of international students – not for the removal of fee differentials – but merely for an end to the practice of increasing international fees during a course of study (Tannock, Citation2018). Alongside fee differentials, international students are also sometimes subject to very different practices within their higher education institutions. In the UK, for example, because of immigration requirements, international students have had to be monitored – to check that they are attending classes on a regular basis and are thus bona fide students – in ways not required of ‘home students’ (Yuval Davis et al., Citation2019; see also, O’Connor (Citation2018) with respect to Ireland). Yuval Davis et al. (Citation2019) consider this to be part of broader processes of ‘everyday bordering’ that have been rolled out across the country and which have required a wide variety of individuals, including HE staff, to take on responsibility for securing the UK national border.
Such examples feed into wider critiques that, through the binary established between international students and their peers, the former group are ‘othered’. In this way, ‘international’ comes to be understood as ‘less than national’. While national students frequently have means of seeking redress for poor treatment, not least through the electoral system, this is not an option for international students. Moreover, equality measures, within the higher education sector and elsewhere, tend to be framed in relation to the participation of ‘home’ students only – with targets relating to increasing the participation of those from lower-income families and minority ethnic backgrounds, for example, focussing primarily on those with citizenship of the nation-state in question (Brown & Tannock, Citation2009; Naidoo, Citation2003). International students thus often end up as not fully protected as citizens by either their country of origin (as they are no longer living there) or the country in which they are studying (Marginson, Citation2012).
Hierarchical positioning of international students
It is, however, not always the case that international students are homogenised in the ways discussed above. Indeed, there is evidence that in policy, practice and also, sometimes, in academic scholarship, distinctions are drawn between, on the one hand, ‘good’ and desirable international students and, on the other hand, those who are in some ways considered to be problematic and thus less desirable. Lomer (Citation2017) argues that international students are represented in a range of ways within UK policy: as ambassadors (related to assertions that they often exercise ‘soft power’, to the UK’s benefit, on return home, and concerns about decline in the nation’s global influence); as educational resources (in terms of the diversity that they bring to UK higher education classrooms); as in cultural deficit (referring to, for example, their supposed passivity in classrooms); as financial resources (for ensuring the feasibility of courses that tend to be unpopular among UK nationals, and for shoring up UK HEIs more generally); and as migrants (related to a broader UK context in which immigration is seen by many as a serious social problem) (see also, Brooks, Citation2018; Findlay et al., Citation2017). More generally, Tannock (Citation2018) argues that international students are commonly positioned as either ‘academic elites’ (similar to the concept of a ‘model minority’ (Nguyen et al., Citation2019)) or ‘struggling foreigners’. Both are unhelpful. The former can erase the experiences of those whose attainment is less impressive and may need considerable support with their learning. The latter can lead to assumptions that there is little point discussing international students as part of debates about equality of attainment levels, ‘because we already know that, of course, international students are destined to have lower levels of attainment than home students, precisely because they are foreign students’ (Tannock, Citation2018, p. 193), and also to discriminatory attitudes towards individual students. Indeed, one of the participants in Tannock’s research observed that ‘The ridiculousness of the whole treatment of international students is that your intellectual ability is constantly challenged…. Because the presumption is that you’re just dumb, right? You’re not English speaking, you’re dumb’ (p. 194). The ‘struggling foreigner’ discourse is not, however, applied to all international students equally, and tends to be associated primarily with those from East Asian countries, and often linked to the perceived problems they experience with respect to citation, oral participation and critical thinking (Song, Citation2016; Song & Mccarthy, Citation2018).
This differentiation of international students by country of origin has been documented in many different parts of the world. For example, drawing on her work in Ireland, O’Connor (Citation2018) demonstrates how university staff perceived the on-campus ‘clustering’ of only certain national groups as problematic. They tended to be very critical of such behaviour from students from China and Malaysia, but did not extend the same critique to international students from Western nations who, O’Connor argues, were equally likely to stick to national groups rather than mix with the local population. She explains this difference in terms of racism, arguing that: ‘This is an example of how the categorisation of students by the university can reinforce a distinctly racialised discourse that problematises the presence of Malaysians as a group whose relations with others set them apart and require active management, while White Western students are free to make their own choices of who[m] to socialise or live with’ (p. 348).
Jon’s (Citation2012) research in South Korea shows similarly the impact of national background – in this case, with respect to interactions between students themselves. She demonstrates how international students from Western Europe typically had higher status in South Korean university classrooms than the ‘home’ students. In contrast, however, those from other Asian countries were viewed much less positively, and often had lower status within the student population than both those from Western countries and from South Korea itself. This hierarchical positioning is underpinned, Jon suggests, by rankings of countries on the basis of their perceived degree of ‘development’ and also in terms of language – the Korean students in her research had a preference for international students who spoke English (a language associated primarily with the ‘West’). She argues that these behaviours should be understood as a form of neo-racism, where discrimination operates on the basis of nationality and culture rather than physical difference alone. In these various accounts, there is strong evidence that, across different national contexts, international students are hierarchically positioned – by higher education staff as well as, in some cases, by fellow students. Moreover, the type of differentiated ‘global imaginary’ described by Stein and de Andreotti (Citation2015) appears to underpin this positioning, in which the West is understood to be at the top of a global hierarchy ‘with the rest of the world trailing behind’ (p. 226).
International students are positioned hierarchically, not only however by their country of origin. Social class and family background are also significant. Indeed, Courtois’ (Citation2018) analysis of the experiences of Irish students undertaking credit mobility shows how those from less privileged social groups were less likely than their peers to have accessed programmes of high academic quality – where there was a good match between the courses in their ‘home’ institution and those they were studying abroad, and frequent contact with academic staff from the home institution was maintained. Instead, she asserts that they were more likely to be found in programmes with more of a ‘gap year’ format – with relatively little integration with their degree course. Similar points are made with respect to whole degree mobility in Yang’s (Citation2018) comparative study of student mobility from India to China and from China to Singapore. Focussing on the Indian students in particular, he argues that, while the profile of mobile individuals has shifted to include those from less wealthy families, such students are typically found on less rigorous courses with poorer employment outcomes.
As well as educational experience being patterned by social class, research has also outlined the ways in which the everyday encounters of international students are frequently differentiated along similar lines. For example, writing with respect to Australia, Robertson (Citation2013) shows how when the profile of international students became more socially diverse – because of national policies instigated in 2004–05 to open up more vocational courses to mobile students, with the intention of addressing particular shortages within the labour market – the treatment of them changed. While previously, students following more academically-focussed courses were typically seen as ‘ideal neoliberal subjects’, students who came to study vocational programmes – typically from lower social class backgrounds – were often subject to racism and other forms of discrimination. In some cases, this led to violence and even death (see also, Baas, Citation2014).
Thus, the literature on the experiences of mobile students, whilst abroad, also points to the hierarchical nature of the ‘international space’ and the hierarchical positioning of those who move within it, in ways similar to those articulated in the previous section on decision-making processes and destinations.
Identites among the internationals
It is not simply interactions during a student’s time abroad that dictate identity formation, but also the context within which they have been socialised – only when these are favourable towards European integration does structural identification with this supranational entity take place.
Favouring internationals at job market of sending country
A particular notion of the ‘international’ can be advantageous when it comes to students’ subsequent careers. Having an ‘international degree’ or ‘international qualification’ (not to mention international experience) can undoubtedly open doors for recent graduates seeking employment. Furthermore, some students educated abroad can be seen to aspire to an ‘international career’ (Findlay et al., Citation2012; Lee, Citation2021). Here, we consider what international means in the context of job-seeking and employment outcomes.
For example, in the context of Hong Kong, employers in private sector industries (especially banking) elevated ‘overseas-educated’ graduates in their recruitment process. They were said to value ‘international’ attributes like language proficiency (English) and a more open and confident communication style (Waters, Citation2005).
On the other hand, the value attributed to international qualifications can be overstated: these are often sector-dependent (such as public versus private) and can vary by national and geographical context. For example, Brooks et al. (Citation2012) found that in many cases UK students with an ‘international’ degree qualification felt that their time overseas had actually impeded their ability to secure a desirable job. In part, this was attributed to the ignorance of UK employers who were assumed not to understand the value of a period spent studying abroad nor the meanings of various international qualifications.
