International student mobility & transnational education: new geographical imaginaries post-

Brexit

Johanna L. Waters

Twitter: @johannalwaters

Email: johanna.waters@ouce.ox.ac.uk

Higher Education Policy Network event

Academic Mobility and Brexit

16 October 2017

John Berger: ‘it is now space rather

than time that hides consequences

from us’ (quoted in Massey, 2004).

Source: UK Council for International Student Affairs

All non-UK domicile in HE 2015 – 2016 FT PT Total

Higher degree (research) 41,825 5,300 47,130Higher degree (taught) 127,355 14,530 141,880Postgraduate other 4,990 5,725 10,720First degree 215,995 5,130 221,120Other undergraduate 7,365 9,790 17,160Total non-UK 397,530 40,475 438,010

UKCISA (2017)

In January 2017, Chief Executive of UK Council for International Student Affairs commented: ‘Figures for 2015/16 (which always come out reliably but frustratingly late) appear largely to confirm what other sources (such as informal reports and Home Office visa figures) have been saying for some time. That compared with many other countries our non EU recruitment is virtually stagnant – with first year arrivals decreasing, countries like India nosediving but fortunately China keeping the totals as high as they are.

Whilst they accord with official Home Office statistics (as HESA note), ministers often attempt to give a far more positive figure by merely quoting the number of visa applicants to Russell Group universities which they say are on the increase. But all this shows – and without doubt as a direct result of visa restrictions – the picture for the whole of the UK HE sector is far from rosy and certainly not the time for the government to consider the sort of further measures suggested in October by the Home Secretary’

TNE = formal academic programmes ‘in which learners are

located in a country other than the one in which the awarding

institution is based’ (McBurnie and Ziguras, 2007, p. 21).

Some interesting facts about UK TNE

• There are only 15 countries where UK does not offer any TNE.

• International enrolment in UK was flat between 2013/14 and 2014/15. In contrast, enrolment in TNE delivered by UK HEIs grew by 13% over the same period.

• 4/5 British institutions intend to expand their TNE over next 3 years.

• Expansion of TNE marked by increasing flexibility in terms of mode of delivery, and also by a greater emphasis on collaborations with local partners.

• Most popular subjects: business and management (40%) followed by medicine and related studies, then arts & humanities.

Source: HE Global Report (2016)& ICEF Monitor (2016)

Many ‘ethical’ questions have still yet to be addressed.

Overview of project

• Funded jointly by the ESRC (UK) and the RGC (Hong Kong). Led by Johanna Waters in the UK and Maggi Leung in Hong Kong.

• Qualitative study of ‘non-local’ degrees offered by UK HEIs in Hong Kong.

• Sample includes : 70 interviews with current students and recent graduates (40/30); 18 interviews with UK ‘providers’; 9 interviews with ‘recruiters’ in Hong Kong.

Have developed as part of the expansion of ‘continuing education’ in Hong Kong (the ‘democratisation’ of access to HE), particularly over the last 20 years.

‘These programmes [are] for the bunch of people who did not perform too well in HKCEE [an examination taken at the age of 15], or their results might not take them to [a] local university directly...’ (Peter Chan, age 27, attained a Higher Diploma and then completed a British degree in 1.5 years in Hong Kong. He now works repairing photocopying machines).

‘My results did not meet the local universities’ requirements. Therefore, all I could choose was to study the top-up degree or to work.’(Tom Tai, aged 23, completed an Associate Degree and then a UK BA attached to HKU SPACE. He now works in a bank as a teller).

• Predefined pass rate a lot of ‘failures’

• The govt has expanded CE a means of dealing with this – the new ‘Associate Degree’ can be ‘topped up’ to a ‘full’ (British) degree over 1 –2 years

• However…..

Nobody in Hong Kong recognises

top-up degrees as degree

qualifications.

Although they are identical (on

paper) to degrees obtained in the

UK.

Differential treatment

‘There was a feeling of hierarchy…. local students would borrow 10 books from the library, but we could only borrow 5 books; local students could borrow for 20 days, we could only borrow for 10 days...The resources they gave us were obviously less than the local degree students...We were not even allowed to use the sports facilities.’

JW: ‘What is the reason for the ‘reduced privileges’ of students on top-up degrees, if it is not a fee thing...’

‘It is not a fee thing. It is who they are! They are not university students! They are not enrolled in university. So you can’t change it. But we actually feel that they don’t get a bad deal’ (Lilly Ho, head administrator for 42 UK top-up degrees at the continuing education arm of a local (Hong Kong) HEI)

Lack of government recognition

Disclaimer: ‘It is a matter of discretion for individual employers to recognise any qualification to which these courses may lead’ (HK Education Bureau Website, 2016)

‘For some civil service jobs, they need you to hold a degree. Then, they would not treat you as a degree holder. They would treat it as the previous study before your top-up degree. So, in my case it would be a higher diploma...So, if I was going to apply for government jobs, I could only use my higher diploma. I could not use my degree identity to apply.’

Lack of social recognition?

‘Somebody aged 50 plus, like our parents, they do not recognise these are degrees. They would only think local universities are real … Even now, my parents do not think that I have completed a degree course… In their eyes it’s not a degree… My parents thought I lied to them about studying a degree.’ (Monica Shaw, successfully completed a 1 year British degree course in 2008)

Response of UK HEIs?

• Not great.

• How do UK HEIs imagine their overseas students?

• How do they deal with questions of ethics and responsibility vis-à-vis their overseas students?

Reimagining spaces of International Education

I want to discuss how international education post-Brexit could involve a reimagining of space in terms of:

1) Relationality (after Massey, 2004) and associated ethics and responsibility;

2) Geo-social relations

2) Post-colonial and de-colonial imaginaries

‘If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (so called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing’ (Massey, 2004).

Implications for notions of ethics, care and responsibility:

“There are, then, many reasons for that territorial, locally centred, Russian doll geography of care and responsibility. None the less, it seems to me, it is crucially reinforced by the persistence of the refrain that posits local place as the seat of genuine meaning and global space as in consequence without meaning, as the abstract outside.” (Massey, 2004)

Geo-social understandings of international education

‘geopolitical [and geoeconomic] significance of education and concomitant power geometries populating the transnational circulation of knowledge’ (Ho, 2017, p. 16).

Mitchell and Kallio (2017) highlight ‘the theoretical value of the geosocial as a way of conceptualising the contemporary constitution of subjects and spaces within transnational relations’ (p. 1).

Postcolonial ethics in International Education

• Madge, Clare, Parvati Raghuram, and Patricia Noxolo. "Engaged pedagogy and responsibility: A postcolonial analysis of international students." Geoforum 40, no. 1 (2009): 34-45.

• Noxolo, Pat, Parvati Raghuram, and Clare Madge. "Unsettling responsibility: postcolonial interventions." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no. 3 (2012): 418-429.

Madge et al. (2009):

• Do UK HEIs eschew discourses ‘that seek to present the internationalization of UKHE as a ‘neutral experience’ within normalizing conceptions of internationalization’…instead moving ‘towards a more ‘layered’ understanding that highlights the connections between the geographical, historical, political, economic and cultural spheres in order for an ‘engaged pedagogy’ to emerge.’ ?

• Could they?

• The UK government is committed to increasing education exports from £18 billion in 2012 to £30 billion by 2020 (Jo Johnson, UK Minister of State for Universities & Science);

• TNE has the potential to ‘rebalanc[e] the global higher education market, allowing more students to study in their own countries and reducing the costs to developing countries in terms of foreign exchange and ‘brain drain’. It can build capacity both at home and overseas, a key driver for universities offering TNE and partners and countries hosting TNE alike’ (HE Global – British Council and Universities UK, 2016, p. 9).

• Does it?

• Postcolonial ethics and responsibility (e.g. Noxolo et al., 2012). The relations that TNE produce suggest a complicated rendering of ‘global responsibility’. What does it mean to undertake TNE responsibly and ethically?

• The ‘multi-sited, multi-scalar character of international study challenges simplistic dichotomies of here /there and unsettles the spatial imagination away from thinking about ‘the international’ and about pedagogy solely in relation to (largely unmarked) European-American-Australian centres, and instead explicitly locates itself as coming out of, and to, multiple locations’ (Madge et al., 2014, p. 692) – what does this mean in practice?

Conclusion

• Post-Brexit – how UK HE sees itself in/of the world.

• It is unacceptable to deny:

– A sense of responsibility for (international) students.

– A sense of responsibility for the spaces with which UK HEIs are intimately connected through internationalisation.