Global overview of the latest literature on internationalisation of higher education from a geographical perspective

Elements of internationalisation of higher education were already present at universities of the ancient times and the Middle Ages, but in the modern sense we can only speak about it in merits since the 1960s. In the beginning, internationalisation was not global in nature, it was concentrated only in certain countries and regions, primarily the United States, Western Europe and the Far East. We can speak about a global process since the 1990s, since a planet-wide circle of sending and receiving countries has been established by now.

In the latter category, the United States and Western Europe remained at top, however Australia has also emerged on the market, and some Asian countries with a traditionally sending role (China, India) increasingly want to become receiving countries as well.

Furthermore, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe have also joined the international student mobility, primarily in Europe. Some countries of Africa and Latin America have also an increasingly strong presence on the global market.

As with the massification of higher education, the processes of internationalisation grew stronger, so began the representatives of different disciplines to deal more and more with the subject. The most interested disciplines to the present day are economics, sociology and geography. In the latter, the process affects mostly the geography of education, which is a quite new discipline within human geography. The most significant literature related to the geography of education may be the book of Peter Meusburger titled

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„Bildungsgeographie” (Meusburger 1998). The volume explains the theoretical basics of the geography of education, the different interpretations of knowledge and its spatial relations, and presents the discipline’s development from the beginnings through the processes of institutionalisation up to the millennium. However, the author pays little attention to the internationalisation of higher education, because only one chapter is about higher education in the first place. In turn, there is word about university catchment areas, mainly in German relations. The introduction of the geography of education in Hungary is linked to the name of M. Zsuzsa Császár. Her comprehensive work, in addition to definition-making, examines education as a region forming factor, inserted in social-economic environment (M. Császár 2004).

A significant part of the literature about internationlisation of higher education is limited to a specific country, and only a relatively small proportion is dealing with complex, global processes. In the present study we summarize the newest trends of internationalisation based on papers which are examining primarily from the prespective of geographies of education. Concerning the future of Hungarian higher education, analysing what roles do the diffenent determinants have in the international students’ choice of location can be especially interesing. Based on an OECD database consisting of international students migrated from 180 countries of origin to 13 OECD destination countries it can be stated that the „network effect” plays a key role in the in the students’ choice of location: The presence of country nationals at destination tends to act as a magnet for international students.

Interestingly, this effect is found to increase with the level of education of the network at destination. The higher the level of education of migrants already present in the host country, the higher the flow of students of the same nationality. This network effect is equivalent to a reduction in living costs in the host countries between 40% and 55%. Living costs and quality of universities are also important, however the tuition fees are not so (Beine et al. 2014).

Since just like the other elements of globalisation the international student mobility also shows spatial disparities, and so the sending and destination countries strongly differ from each other. Though the quality of universities can be considered as central to the shaping of student mobility, however, expected income in the destination country is a much more important factor, along with the colonial ties between countries, common language, and the pre-existing migrant stock of the same nationality. The results show that while there are many similarities in the determinants of student mobilities across space, there are also important differences. There are important differences between developed and developing countries, however, more interesting are the differences within the group of developing economies. In particular, the spatial choices of students from newly industrialising economies would appear to be more strongly influenced by university quality in destination countries, and therefore shaped by capital-enhancing opportunities elsewhere. The mobilities of students from the least developed countries are more likely to be influenced by

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physical distance, linguistic differences and income differentials (Perkins – Neumayer 2013).

An interesting study from Findlay, A. et.al. explores the motivations and meanings of international student mobility. It is based on the results of a large questionnaire survey and associated in-depth interviews with UK students enrolled in universities in six countries from around the world (the United States, Australia, Republic of Ireland, Germany, France and Czech Republic). The results suggest, first, that several different dimensions of social and cultural capital are accrued through study abroad. It is argued that the search for

„world class” education has taken on a new significance. Internationalisation of higher education has bought many changes in the social and cultural relations of the world. First, it has argued that class seeks to reproduce itself through educational advantage, since pupils from private schools are more likely to gain access to university education in other countries. Furthermore, globalisation of student flows cannot be isolated from wider mobility trajectories both before and after study. It appears that a „”world-class” education for some is embedded in a mobility culture that attaches symbolic capital to the performance of international living and that aspires to engage in international career trajectories.

International student mobility is therefore not only about gaining the kinds of formal knowledges that can be imparted through high-quality university training (that could arguably be offered by a leading national university in a student’s home country), but also about other social and cultural competencies and knowledges. So, above all, international student migration was seen to be about symbolic capital. One of the uses of this symbolic capital was to represent international study as a distinguishing identity marker. Students believed that their international experience could be deployed advantageously in their future career trajectories, instead of taking a job at their country of origin (Findlay et al.

2012).

Finally, a study of Jöns, H. and Hoyler, M. deals with the geography of higher education from the world university rankings’ point of view. The production of these world university rankings (namely the Shanghai ranking and the THE-QS ranking) in the early 21st century has been shaped by a new era of globalization and neoliberalization in higher education.

Geographies of higher education is characterised by unevenness that emerged from the highly expensive technosciences that facilitated American dominance in the second half of the 20th century and are seen as drivers of economic growth. The resulting geographies display striking disparities between the global North and South as well as between the economically prospering regions in North America, Europe, East Asia and Australia and large parts of South America, Africa and Asia that are either economically disadvantaged and/or dominated by other languages than English. The world university rankings are also influenced by these geographical disparities. The two main methodological differences between the Shanghai and the THE-QS ranking data are their differing emphasis on research performance and research reputation and their diverging time-reference,

193 comprising the whole 20th century in one (Shanghai ranking) and only the past 5 years in the other (THE-QS) ranking. So, established knowledge centers in Europe and in the US perform better in the Shanghai ranking, while emerging knowledge hubs in East and Southeast Asia are more dominant in the THE-QS ranking. The question arises whether East Asia will take the leading position from American and Western European universities in the near future (Jöns – Hoyler 2013).