International student mobility: Experiences at an Argentinean university and their goals of socio-economic development and sustainability, from a long-term perspective

• In Event: Highlighted session: Higher education, development, and sustainability in Latin America

Proposal

The linkages between globalization and international student mobility have been widely explored (de Witt, 2001; King, 2009; Postiglione & Altbach, 2013). In the last 15 years, a growing scholarship has studied the role of international student dynamics and the relationship with higher education internationalization, market-oriented university reform policies, and higher education growth (King, 2009; Liu, 2012), focusing on the last three decades, in national-wide contexts and globalization. However, the reasons for the development of internationalization policies and programs and their goals of socio-economic growth for students, from the perspective of individual universities and, more specifically schools, have been analyzed less frequently. In addition, there are few studies that trace the development of those policies from a long-term perspective. Research about international student mobility focuses on the in-put and out-put models, or on the analysis of the specific career outcomes on individual student achievement (Roy et al., 2018; Liu, 2012). The purpose of this study is to use the theoretical lenses of “policy legacy” (Pribble, 2006) for the study of international student mobility within a university in Argentina, from the 1960s to the current decade, considering the phenomenon from an institutional standpoint and from the perspective of the socio-economic impacts of it. This qualitative research focuses on the ways in which, within an Argentinean university, one of the schools (School of Chemical Engineering) has focused on international programs that allowed connecting with businesses and industries through student international mobility throughout five decades. The examination of institutional policy documents, programs regulations, school regulations and documents, and different school’s news media outlets allows identifying the goals of different international student mobility experiences at this school, within the university, throughout the decades, and in connection with sustainability and socio-economic development. Additionally, interviews were conducted to examine the ways in which international student mobility has been conceptualized from different institutional actors from the 1960s through this decade. The analysis of these different data using the lens of policy legacy, permits to identify aspects and concepts that sustain the endurance of the international student experiences within this school and university.

References
Roy, A., A. Newman, T Ellenberger, and A. Pyman. (2018). “Outcomes of international student mobility programs: a systematic review and agenda for future research.” Studies in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2018.1458222
de Wit, J. W. M. (2001). Internationalisation of higher education in the United States of America and Europe. (doctoral dissertation). Amsterdam: in eigen beheer.
King, R. (2009). Governing universities globally: Organizations, rankings and regulation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Liu, X. (2012). A study of internationalization of Minnesota’s higher education from the perspective of international student mobility (doctoral dissertation).

Postiglione, G., and P. Altbach. (2013). “Professors: The key to internationalization.” International Higher Education, 73(11-12). Retrieved from: https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ihe/article/view/6086/5331.
Pribble, J. (2006). Women and welfare: the politics of coping with new social risks in Chile and Uruguay. Latin American Research Review. 41(2), 84-111. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3874670?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

Author

• Gabriela Judith Silvestre, University of Pittsburgh