Internationalization and Institutional Stratification

• In Event: Internationalizing U.S. Higher Education Through Student and Scholar Mobility

Abstract

Questions about how mobility may relate to system stratification are not common in the literature but may be appropriate because internationally mobile students and scholars are not distributed throughout the system. The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of theoretically informed propositions about the ways in which international academic mobility may reflect and/or contribute to patterns of institutional stratification in the U.S. The paper is informed conceptually by Marginson and Rhoade’s (2002) glonacal agency heuristic. From this conceptual base I draw on insights gleaned from my research on the social and economic dimensions of internationalization including studies on global competition in higher education, the demand for and role of international doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, and the market for international undergraduate students. In addition to a synthesis of my own research, I further draw upon publically available data from IIE, NSF, NCES, and the OECD as well as other recent secondary scholarship in order to develop the following set of propositions, which will be discussed in the presentation.

P1: Inbound undergraduate mobility is a meaningful source of revenue for prestigious intuitions that are outside of the ultra-elite.
P1a: Ultra-elite institutions will generally not pursue intentional students for financial gain and less-prestigious intuitions cannot attract large numbers of these students.
P1b: The international student market has three segments: 1) an elite segment with strong demand but only limited non-commercial supply; 2) a semi-elite segment with strong demand and robust supply provision with commercial tendencies; 3) a non-elite segment with softer demand so that monetizing supply is difficult.

P2: Among research universities, inbound mobility of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows reflects funding patterns.
P2a: Federal R&D funding is the most significant source.
P2b: When universities attract additional federal funding they utilize PhD students and postdocs from abroad to perform a growing volume of research.
P2c: Because private research universities enjoy, on average, higher levels of per capita federal funding their graduate training and research operations are more internationalized.

Author

• Brendan Cantwell, Michigan State University