Introduction
Young people are today prepared to travel far and wide in order to acquire higher education. A select few benefit from scholarships, but many students pay for their tuition themselves or with help from their families. They all dream of a better future and regard higher education as a necessary step in the desired direction. Some of them return to their home country to make a career and perhaps participate in building their nation, while some stay in their new country or move elsewhere with freshly acquired credentials. Their skills are highly desired in most of these places, and in many others where skilled workers are highly sought after. Students dream, imagine, and travel so there are many related questions that can be asked: What are their dreams and imaginings? How does their travel affect their identities and their dreams of the future? How does the experience of living in a foreign country correspond to and contribute to their imaginings of identity, home, and belonging? How are cultural and political visions of the knowledge society/economy affecting their own dreams?
Higher education institutions (HEIs) are today becoming increasingly dependent on these incoming foreign students who provide necessary economic input in a time of reduced governmental support. Universities place the education they provide within the framework of a global market for services and relate these to regional and national goals centered on the prospects of forming a knowledge society (KS) and a knowledge economy (KE).1 Universities are the link between national and regional guidelines and the students. How are the universities perceiving incoming students? How are they acting to expand their student body and in what ways are these strategies corresponding to ideological frameworks provided by governments, transnational bodies, and markets? How are universities changing because of their global missions? How do nations and regions formulate their imaginings and what role do higher education and knowledge formation play in their visions?
As indicated, students, mobility, and higher education raise many general questions and interferences across various scales, scapes, and flows: from the individuals and their peers, to institutions and governments at national and regional levels. This book examines the transnational scapes and flows of higher education. It is about students, mobility , higher education, and the knowledge society in the contemporary global context and focuses on the motives and incentives for mobility from the perspective of both individuals and institutions at various levels and scales (regions, nations, and institutions). Mobility in the global context, for purposes of education, research, and knowledge formation, tends to be presented in educational discourses as something that is beneficial for all those involved. This discourse often feeds on a general but also naïve enthusiasm that celebrates globalization, knowledge , mobility, and technology.
The key argument advocated in this book is that the vision of a knowledge society/economy, maintained both by individuals and by institutions, needs to be put into perspective beyond the taken-for-granted conditions and meanings. We wish to take the readers further than the standard understanding of a knowledge society/economy as a techno-political fix in a relatively neutral sense, and to show it as culturally embedded (through practice) as well as its ideological underpinnings (theory).
Based on an analysis of the ideologies of knowledge inherent in strategies put forward by the European Union (EU) and the European Council in the Lisbon Protocol for instance, the political logics of the knowledge society will be explored at a regional level. At the national level, Sweden will exemplify how the uptake and implementation of regional educational policy plays out. At the institutional level, the narrative of a private higher education provider, Hult International Business School, will be told from its rapid development during the last decade beginning with the acquisition of a defunct corporate business school in the USA to occupying five global campuses today. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews in Malaysia , India , Sweden, Norway, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the anthropologies of knowledge inherent in global higher education will be explored in subsequent chapters. In particular, the individuals and their idiosyncratic travels into the Western world will be explored through interviews. In general, this book will attempt to show both how institutional actors in the West strive to cope with the global situation and how individuals in other parts of the world (mainly Asia but also Africa) cope with the dreams, promises, and pitfalls of globalization. Eduscape (short for educational landscape) is the central notion that we employ in order to center the discussion in its spatial as well as ideological dimensions.
While not being averse to the phenomenon of educational mobility per se (from which both authors have benefited), nor unaware of potential constructive dimensions of globalization, we analyze this complex cluster in a critical way in order to show how the ideology and practices of mobility for the purposes of education, as well as the desire for higher education as a step toward social mobility , correspond to the ideological framework of a global knowledge society/economy that is often used in various policy contexts to characterize the current epoch and proximal future. This critique suggests an intervention into contemporary debates in which the values of educational assets and biographical cultural capital generally seem to be both accepted and increasing. The lived experience of higher education in a global context contributes to the accumulation of mobility capital that is certainly valuable for the individual, but that also helps to reinforce power asymmetries. We carry out this analysis in order to problematize the naïve endorsement and reproduction of globalization as the paradigmatic, but much too simplified, nirvana of win-win, all while taking care not to fall into the trap of endorsing economic nationalism. This book addresses a phenomenon that is today most visible for those who are engaged in higher education and that will probably attract increasing attention in the future. Our argument constitutes a counterpoint in the general debate about knowledge, migration, and mobility , which tends to be surrounded by the tensions between humanitarian concerns and the economy. In these discourses , skilled migration is highly prioritized, as distinct from other forms and incentives for migration and mobility which are not.
Mobility and migration for the purposes of higher education is not a new phenomenon. Historical and cross-cultural examples of educational mobility or peregrination are plenty, showing how centers of learning attract young people, generally men, to spend time for study, contemplation, and socialization into guilds, orders, and professions (Haskin 1923; Rashdall 1968, Ben-David 1992; Ridder-Symoens 2003a, b; Rüegg 2004, 2011). In the West, Christian monasteries were early examples, followed by emerging universities in Italy and France. A main reason for educational mobility in other historical eras has been the scarcity of centers of learning and that students were recruited from regions where such possibilities were lacking. For instance, the early universities in Italy and France attracted students from European countries where universities were not yet established or developed to sufficient levels. Another reason for educational mobility was that these centers of learning often maintained the function of educating an administrative or ideological elite who subsequently sustained the established order, fiefdom, kingdom, or empire.
Granted that, the phenomenon of educational migration is not historically unique. We are currently witnessing a numerical increase of student mobility especially over the last 20 years; a fact that is often reiterated in higher education policy and research. We are also witnessing an increasing concern among HEIs to attract students from distant regions and/or to establish centers for learning in proximity to high demand for higher education, most visibly in China , South East Asia , and the Gulf states. The mobility of students and, in general, the mobility of professionals (researchers, technicians, economists, creative professionals, etc.), committed to knowledge formation and knowledge production, constitute the circulation of a skilled workforce that is today highly regarded. In nations and regions which pay tribute to the idea of knowledge society/economy, the idea and practice of mobility for the purposes of study, work and for the benefit of economic dynamism is of high value. Generally, mobility among students and professionals is regarded as something being both desirable and worthwhile. Students compete for scholarships abroad or are prepared to pay large sums for education with the corresponding hopes of social mobility , employability , and economic prosperity. Researchers, as well, compete for scholarships and awards associated with travel and mobility , whic...