DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen - Internationalisation : a Perspective

April 22, 2004

Internationalisation : a Perspective

Every important question should be tackled from two sides. I have two perspectives on internationalisation: one as a foreigner teaching abroad; the other as a former student of an internationalising university.

And, as always, there are two sides to the answer, both positive and negative.

To cut a long story short, while I was a student at Oxford, my college ran into financial problems. The college (Pembroke) had spent GBP 3,000,000 on a new hall of residence (dormitory building) but had unwisely chosen to construct it on contaminated ground.

The building was worthless; the accounts no longer balanced. So the college turned to America.

When I first started at the college in 1993, there were a handful of carefully selected foreign students, perhaps three out of 100 freshmen. All were highly successful students; for example, one of them, Michelle Peluso, is now CEO of Travelocity, a major international dot com company.

However, bringing in 30 US students, as the college did in 1995, was not a great success. It certainly brought in a large cash injection, but the students failed to integrate with the college. They did not perform as well at their studies and were unable or unwilling to socialise with the other students.

Finally, their frustrations boiled over and they made their point by badly damaging a dormitory common room.

While this may be an isolated case, I make the example to illustrate the idea that too much internationalisation is not necessarily a good thing. Having 3% foreign students worked well academically; 30% did not.

In the UK, internationalisation is on the increase. It's estimated that there are over 125,000 foreign students in the UK now – and of these 32,000 are Chinese.

That's twice as many as students as from the US (a rich, English speaking nation with close ties to the UK) and three times more than the Indians (the only country with a population comparable to China, but with far more tangible historical links to Britain and widespread English language).

British universities are certainly benefiting to the tune of GBP 875 million per year; GBP 250 million from the Chinese. Foreign students altogether provide 26.2% of UK universities' income.

This is set to increase even more dramatically in the next few years. (However, wiith tight visa restrictions after 11 September, US universities are actually decreasing the number of foreign students they take.)

So the financial gains are obvious, but what of the students themselves? The Guardian and The Independent newspapers have recently filed reports on foreign students in the UK and they make interesting reading.

(see The Guardian for general articles, some on Chinese students, and also The Independent)

It’s certainly beneficial for students to live and learn from different cultures; it's also beneficial for the 'home' students to meet and likewise learn from them. It certainly improves language skills. But styles of education are vastly different, and some might say incompatible.

It's well known among Chinese students that in other countries 'critical thinking' is more highly valued. There's less emphasis on learning knowledge and more on analysis and thinking skills.

I hope the JUP students will forgive me for saying this, but there is not one of them who would be able to cope linguistically or academically with the one-on-one tutorial system used at Oxford and Cambridge.

However, not all UK universities are Oxford or Cambridge. Whereas some of them do offer world-class teaching and research support, others do not.

At worst British universities are regarded as playgrounds; there can be minimal academic pressure. I know people who have obtained UK degrees with almost no effort at all, and who have subsequently turned out to have no knowledge either. Is this really value for money for a foreign student?

On the other hand, Western perceptions of Asian education are not favourable either. Westerners see Asian schools as places for 'rote-learning' and memorising vast quantities of information with little obvious benefit.

It's believed that just repeating back information without critical thinking is not really learning at all. The Western perception is that learning means understanding and that is something that few foreign teachers are confident occurs in Asian education.

When students have to learn so much to get that all-important grade, are they really learning or will they forget it the next day?

Thus, for universities like SHUFE to attract foreign students, it might have to undergo a vigorous marketing and public relations effort to assuage these fears.

Asian teaching methods are simply not attractive to foreign students. Few foreign students are going to want to sit in Chinese classes and learn the contents of textbooks and lectures. They expect to have input into their education. And the PR campaign may need to be done side-by-side with some fundamental reforms of the education system as a whole.

In my view, a true education lies somewhere in between the Western and the Asian systems; a combination of critical thinking and understanding with the teaching of real knowledge. It’s also important for universities not to regard foreign students as 'easy money' but to ensure that they are provided with a valuable and appropriate education and 'cultural experience'.

To conclude, for further internationalisation to take place, there has to be compromise. I would point to my former journalism college in Cardiff where courses specifically designed for foreign students (eg MA International Journalism) have proved very effective.

Academic life must also be balanced with cultural life, and it is the responsibility of universities to ensure that foreign students are able to integrate with home students so as to gain in their cultural experience too.

Universities everywhere should avoid the temptation to take huge numbers of foreign students just to make money. They must also adjust their academic programmes to be international too, so as to provide the best they can offer in a format that foreign students can actually benefit from.

Philip Sen
Pembroke College, Oxford University 1993-1996
Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff University 1999-2000
Foreign Expert, SHUFE, 2003-2004

Written on request of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics for paper on 'Internationalisation'

Posted by Sendover at April 22, 2004 01:00 PM | TrackBack

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