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Session Submission Summary

Making the internationalization of higher education more equitable: What do we know from the literature post-pandemic?

Sun, February 19, 9:45 to 11:15am EST (9:45 to 11:15am EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Constitution Level (3B), Latrobe

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Despite the many challenges and disruptions that higher education internationalization has faced as a result of the pandemic, many had conceptualized the period of time since the beginning of the pandemic as an opportunity to reimagine internationalization with a focus on its impact on society and in more sustainable ways. Internationalization involves the inclusion of global, international, or intercultural dimensions to all the activities of higher education for its improvement and for a greater impact on society (de Wit et al., 2018). Despite these high aspirations, internationalization of higher education involves power (George Mwangi & Yao, 2021), and if it is to result in more equitable outcomes, significant changes are needed to how the concept is understood. This paper session explores whether and to what extent internationalization of higher education, as reflected in the academic and professional literature of the field, has undergone a process of transformation for more equitable outcomes.

The three papers that comprise this session have a shared conceptual framework and methodology. The shared framework synthesizes and expands such models as the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) Strategic Internationalization Framework, the American Council for Education’s (ACE) Model for Comprehensive Internationalization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Approaches to Internationalisation and their Implications for Strategic Management and Institutional Practice, and the European Commission’s Indicators Project on Internationalisation. The shared framework takes into consideration supra-national factors, the national context, and institutional internationalization activities.

The shared methodology across the three papers followed the steps for a rigorous review of the literature (Oketch et al., 2014). Given the multinational composition of the research team, the sources included in this review were not limited to English. Given the increasing fragmentation of academic systems into geopolitical blocs, we considered the need to include sources in Chinese, English, French, German, Georgian, Greek, Russian, and Spanish. To keep track of and code selected articles, we used EPPI-Reviewer Web, an online software tool created and maintained by the Social Science Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London. Being part of a larger, multi-year project, the papers in this panel report on the results from the rigorous review from March 1, 2020 and July 31, 2022.

A set of themes comes across the three papers, which represent different facets of the project. These themes include: (a) student enrollment and recruitment, (b) student experience and attitudes, (c) funding and revenue, (d) health and wellbeing, (e) diversity, racism, and discrimination, (f) faculty and staff experiences, (g) calls to rethink internationalization, and (h) intercultural understanding. These themes, and the relative number of studies focused on each of them, provide an overview of the main considerations for higher education internationalization after COVID-19. Taken together, the papers in this panel illustrate a field of actions in transition, but not the seismic changes that some analysts had predicted. This reality calls for more intentional changes if indeed internationalization is to advance in a more equitable direction.

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