“Internationalize or perish”: unpacking the impetus to internationalize at universities around the world

• In Event: The internationalization of higher education: conceptualizations, strategies, and consequences

Proposal

As universities worldwide clamor to set up international offices, global exchange programs, off-shore campuses, or simply increase the number of international students, faculty and staff on their campuses, we ask whether the drive to “internationalize” has become a necessity or a luxury in global higher education. Furthermore, is internationalization dependent on the local context (country/region), or primarily driven by the prestige, aspirations and institutional profile of individual universities? To answer these questions, we recorded the presence of formal internationalization structures (offices as well as personnel) for a constructed sample of universities from 140+ countries, in conjunction with documents, images, and statements scraped from those universities’ webpages. The goal was to map out the variations in the way “internationalization” is conceptualized and implemented by universities around the world, based on the specific types of offices and initiatives observed in the cross-national sample. One of the key findings emerging from this exploratory study is that lesser known universities and universities in the developing world are just as likely, if not more so, to embrace internationalization strategies as a way of gaining international recognition and potentially ensuring the financial viability of their institutions.

Authors

• S. Gabriela Gavrila, Stanford University

• Seungah Lee, Stanford University