Governing Asian International Mobility in Australia

Xianlin Song, Greg McCarthy

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030241698
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030241704
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the governance of Asian student and academic mobility, which has transformed the higher education landscape. While campuses are experiencing an unprecedented level of diversity, knowledge creation remains explicitly Eurocentric and dominated by the Global North. The authors advocate for a new educational paradigm that takes into account the transcultural flow of knowledge on campus as a public good, capitalises on Asian students and academics' multilingual competencies, and offers them equal access to creating quality-orientated education. The book argues that international higher education must be grounded in both a plurality of knowledges and the ethics of cognitive justice, and that the governing policies should facilitate the higher education sector to build a platform of internationalising affect and effect on campus.

© The Author(s) 2020

X. Song, G. McCarthyGoverning Asian International Mobility in AustraliaMobility & Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24170-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Transformed Australian Eduscape: The Mobility of Asian International Students and Academics

Xianlin Song¹ and Greg McCarthy¹

(1)

University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

Xianlin Song (Corresponding author)

Greg McCarthy

Abstract

International students’ mobility has transformed the Australian higher education landscape over the past three decades, effecting two significant changes: reconfiguration of the funding structure and the diversification of campus population. Though the Australian university system is open to the inflow of students and academics from the Global South, its governing policies remain shaped by the hegemonic ideology of the Global North. Asian international students are attracted into the system as “cash cows”, but at the same time they continue to be regarded as the “inadequate” Other under the neoliberal management in terms of curriculum design; some, as is the case with Chinese international students, are deemed a “security threat” by the state. This chapter confronts the conceptual challenges of Asian mobility in Australia; it argues for a new ontology as well as a new epistemology that recognises the “internationalising” effect of international students, which in turn obliges a global cognitive justice ethos and asserts the need to build an international constituency for the public good of international student mobility.

Keywords

EduscapeHigher educationAsian mobilityGovernanceRace and the Global South

End Abstract

Globalisation over the past three decades has enabled cross border flows of peoples, knowledge, ideas and capital in an unprecedented manner, which has transformed the landscape of many industries, institutions and organisations. Caught in the torrents of transnational flows of globalisation , international higher education has become part of the multiple scapes (Appadurai 1990) that are challenging the purpose, meaning and knowledge production of universities. These scapes are subjected to forms of global governance via constant comparisons and rankings with international research knowledge networking and information flows of global referencing, which reinforce a hierarchy of Western institutions. The positioning of these Western universities is bolstered by a range of factors: the social imaginary of their global prestige, their monetary power to recruit global scholars, the support received by research metrics, inflected by the political economy of Western publishing outlets and English language as the lingua franca of knowledge production and consumption (Connell 2017). International mobility as a critical part of these scapes is notable for people movements, especially those flows of overseas students and academics between the Global South/North, as well as the East/West. Such border crossings have differing national and institutional effects as student and academic mobility is open to national regulation through visa laws, migration regimes and international protocols that govern movements, such as the Erasmus system and nation to nation education and trade agreements. Nation-state governance is integrated with higher education institutions both directly and via government regulatory agencies that audit universities in such matters as language entry scores, degree approvals, fee regimes and certification.

Global education mobility is dominated by international students studying in higher education institutions outside of their place of birth and academics engaged in transcultural , transnational research projects and career pathways. In a time-space compression, knowledge is produced and exchanged, which anticipates a telecommunicational global village of homogeneity (Harvey 1989). Though the Anglosphere university system has been open to the inflow of students and academics from the Global South, its governing policies and practices remain shaped by the hegemonic ideology of the Global North through a combination of three interlocking elements: neoliberalism , university corporatisation and state-regulatory power, all positioning Asian mobility in racialised connections with Eurocentric ontology and epistemology. Asian international students are attracted into the system as “cash cows” but continue to be regarded as the “inadequate” Other, while Asian academics, many trained in Western higher institutions, often face racialised structural and cultural barriers to full acceptance. Global higher education expresses a neoliberal and state form of governance at the same time obfuscating the racial character of this educational economy and policing. In the global eduscape where education has become a marketable product, race is a constitutive character of governance by forms of insider-outsider, civilised-non-civilised, modern-premodern, white and coloured that exude a hierarchy of educational superiority. As Robinson argues, race and capitalism are historically and contemporarily inseparable in the flow of peoples, notably from Europe to the periphery (Robinson 1981, 2000). The massive flow of international students into Australia brings to the fore this underlying racial governance perspective as it is played out in the social imagination of the nation and in government policies.

This chapter maps out the eduscape of global mobility in higher education. Using Australia as a glocal example, it examines the transformed higher education landscape through the lens of international students’ mobility . The reconfiguration of the funding structure and the diversification of campus population over the past three decades have posed serious conceptual challenges for higher education as the racialised governance of Asian students and academics constrains the internationalising effects of international mobility. Together with the following five chapters, it argues for the need to fight for global cognitive justice in higher education and to build an international constituency for the public good of international student mobility.

Mapping the Educational Scape

With more than five million students on the move annually, global mobility has become a central component of international higher education. The sheer magnitude of this mobility has triggered academic debates of global significance over the meaning, reasons and consequences of student mobility. According to UNESCO data of 2018, there were 5,085,179 million students studying away from their country of birth. On the broad scale, the map of international mobility is historically a movement from South to North, or East to West, with a large proportion of students moving from developing countries to the developed Western countries (the North), concentrated in the Anglosphere . The OECD data (2017) shows that the largest host countries are the Northern English-speaking nations. The United States hosts 30 per cent of international students, the United Kingdom 14 per cent and Australia 10 per cent (OECD 2017, 268). Currently , most mobile students come from China, constituting 20 per cent of the global flow, followed by India at 7 per cent and then Germany at 4 per cent (OECD 2017, 268). As the figures below show, the concentration of international student movement is into the Anglophone countries of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. However, there is the beginning of what is perceived as a counter-flow of overseas students within South to South flows and a flow from North to South. There is a notable rise of overseas students studying in China (UNESCO 2018), and the development of South African universities as mobility hubs (Gunter and Raghuram 2018), along with China’s Belt and Road partner countries (Van der Wende 2019). According to UNESCO data (2016) (which uses actual enrolment figures instead of visa approvals), in 2016 there were 869,000 Chinese students studying overseas, with 309,387 in the United States; 112,329 in Australia and 89,318 in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, UNESCO (2016) estimates there were 157,108 inward bound students studying in China. In contrast, using a broad definition of international inbound students (including non-degree and short-term study) China’s Ministry of Education (2017) announced that in 2016 there were 440,000 inbound students making China the third most popular overseas student destination. Gao and de Wit (2017) estimate that approximately half of the international students studying in China ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Transformed Australian Eduscape: The Mobility of Asian International Students and Academics
• 2. Theorising the Eduscape I: The Neoliberal, the Managerial and the Regulatory State
• 3. Theorising the Eduscape II: Contesting “Modernity”, the Global South and Alternative Framing
• 4. Asian International Students on Australian Campus
• 5. Asian Academic Mobility in Australia
• 6. Mobility and Governance: Towards an Internationalised Higher Education?
• Back Matter