Internationalize and privatize for national public purposes: Transnational higher education and the State. A first look at the French case.

• In Event: Poster session 2

Proposal

Higher education is perhaps the educational level which has more visibly been affected by the process of commodification and privatization. The increase in the demand for higher education, often accompanied by insufficient public funding, has contributed significantly not only to the emergence of private providers, but also to “endogenous privatization” (Ball and Youdell, 2008) of the higher education sector, as well as the diffusion of public-private partnerships (Robertson and Verger, 2012). The commercialization of higher education is strictly linked to internationalization, which is often motivated by the search for new "markets" and new "customers".

In these dynamics, it is interesting to observe how the State is often a decisive actor that assumes logics of market and competitiveness which are typical of the private sector. For many countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, higher education has become a real "export product" (Martens and Starke, 2006), not only through the attraction of international students, but also through the provision of educational services directly abroad through transnational education. At the same time, the search for foreign investment continues to motivate an increasing number of countries to offer favorable conditions for the establishment of foreign universities in their territory in order to constitute real international educational hubs. Finally, the export and import of higher education is frequently considered by countries as a way of spreading a positive image of oneself at the international level (Metz, 2002) and of setting up "place-branding" strategies (Papadopoulos, 2004).

Although the logic of the private sector is present in the phenomenon of transnational higher education, as already highlight by Lane and Kinser (2014), it should be noted how countries often use it to achieve public goals. Countries that open the doors of their educational market to foreign suppliers, for example, generally do so to satisfy a demand for higher education that national institutions are not able to meet or to improve their human resource capacity-building potential (McBurnie and Ziguras, 2007). In the same way, transnational higher education also meets national objectives for exporting countries. These goals are often linked to cooperation to development, soft power and cultural diplomacy, or to the attraction and retention of foreign talent to address the aging problems of their populations (Ziguras and McBurnie, 2015).

Recently, remarkable efforts have been made to explore the public nature of transnational higher education in some national contexts (Lane and Kinser 2014, Raev 2016), but this field of research is still in its preliminary phase.

This piece of research investigates and problematizes the concepts of commodification and internationalization in the case of transnational higher education. With the help of maps, it then identifies and visualizes different national models, more or less politicized vis-à-vis transnational higher education. A special focus on France, a country whose educational establishments are particularly active internationally but on which very little is known, is provided.

Author

• Antonina Levatino, Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)