An International Student Pipeline in California

• In Event: Future Directions for Equity-Driven International Student Research in Post/Crisis Times

Abstract

The global university is often understood in terms of its ability to attract students from all over the world. Commonly explored questions have centered on how affluent and mobile students move from one country to another in pursuit of higher learning, and how their cross-border movements shape the relative prestige of universities. In short, students’ mobile trajectories are often treated as the given context against which universities must respond and adapt. Yet at a time when governments are tightening borders and restricting movement, universities are now forced to pursue creative new measures of student recruitment. The purpose of this paper is to delve into the inverse question amid rising nationalistic sentiments: namely, in what ways are universities themselves creating and shaping new forms of student mobility in their pursuit of global student markets?

In particular, I introduce the concept of the flexible university (Ortiga, 2017; 2018) as a way to reframe student mobility not as solely an individual pursuit but as inextricably linked with institutional opportunities and constraints. Previous scholarship has thoroughly discussed the flexible strategies that students and their families undertake to pursue cross-border higher education. Less examined are the organizational structures that create the conditions for movement in the first place and how such conditions then shape the mobile trajectories of students, who become not just customers (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009) but commodities for universities to augment their place in the global pecking order of higher education (Cantwell & Kauppinen, 2014).

I show this concept in action through the research that I conducted on the California higher education system as part of my forthcoming book. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the UC system began accepting significantly more international students, but not without domestic pushback that ultimately limited access through strict quotas. But California Community Colleges have positioned themselves as accessible transfer gateways into the UC institutions exactly because the UCs have become more restrictive. I examine how budget cuts and legislative changes have led to the emergence of the community college transfer system as a novel admissions pathway into UC Berkeley for international students. The end result is that the California higher education system as a whole has repurposed this transfer pathway once squarely designed for domestic students into an unexpected international student pipeline.

Such flexible strategies undertaken by universities in the wake of a previous crisis has implications for how we might understand higher education reform amid Covid-19. I ultimately push for a different methodological approach on international student mobility scholarship that shifts focus away from the students themselves and places more emphasis on the infrastructural arrangements of higher education as mechanisms that can constrain or advance equity.

Author

• Stephanie Kim, Georgetown University