Courting Foreign Students

Internationalization is all the rage at universities these days. Europe’s never-ending Bologna process is to a substantial degree about encouraging a greater degree of student and faculty mobility. Excellence initiatives in Japan, Germany and France (not to mention Canada’s own International Research Chairs Initiative) are specifically about turning particular institutions into talent magnets.

Meanwhile, cross-border initiatives in education are rapidly expanding. No longer is it simply a matter, as it used to be, of attracting students from point A (often in the developing world) to point B (nearly always in the developed world). For one thing, developing countries themselves are rapidly expanding their higher education systems, both for their own students and also to become regional education hubs capable of attracting foreign students themselves. For another, institutions from wealthier countries have gone on a serious binge of constructing campuses abroad...