Has there been a shift in the movement of international students in the past few years?
The most obvious shift has come from conservative governments in many Western nations, particularly Trump-era US, which has tightened immigration policies and even clamped down on international student movement from several countries. This became particularly troubling when the Trump government sought to restrict international student presence to participation in online classes during the height of the pandemic, which US institutions, led by Harvard and MIT, had to sue to stop eventually. We saw this trend in Europe too, in a different form—the general trend was that of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the tightening of employment prospects following education, which was crucial for many international students paying high fees.
Education expert Rahul Choudaha has summed up the patterns of 21st-century global student mobility in three waves: “Wave I from 2001 to 2008 shaped by the 9/11 attacks; Wave II from 2008 to 2016 shaped by the global recession; and Wave III from 2016 onwards, influenced by the new political order of anti-immigration rhetoric, the resultant rise of Canada, Australia and Asia, as well as socio-economic shifts changing the patterns of mobility from countries like China, India, Nigeria and Vietnam.” The fourth wave, Choudaha has predicted, will be one of “digital disruption”, where technology will become the most important determinant of patterns of affordability, access and diversity in international education. The widespread use of educational technology and distant-learning platforms necessitated by the pandemic has already begun to mark the beginning of this “fourth wave”.
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How has the pandemic affected the trajectory of these changes?
A crucial factor is the post-pandemic economic recovery process in the countries from which international students come. Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at the University of Oxford, predicted last year that international student mobility would take at least five years to return to some semblance of normalcy. The deep economic blow suffered by the global middle class in the post-pandemic economic depression, especially in the developing nations of sub-Saharan Africa and South-Asia, will severely shrink the movement of international students to Western universities. As international education becomes “a buyer’s market”, where universities scramble for “scarce international students”, health security will “for a long time become a major element in the decision-making of families and students about where they go for education”. Marginson also argued that East Asia was likely to recover quicker than other regions both in terms of the pandemic and in terms of resuming on-campus instruction. Consequently, a significant part of the student traffic traditionally headed to North America, western Europe and the UK will shift to locations in East Asia. However, now in the middle of 2021, situations seem to have improved considerably in both the US and the UK, and their universities are also doing their best to get their act together.
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What are the prospects in the Western higher education destinations most popular with Indian students now and in the immediate future?
All universities, be it in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, or other countries popular with Indian students, depend significantly on international students for revenue, particularly because they usually pay at a higher rate than local students. This becomes all the more crucial as their domestic enrolments continue to fall, for a range of reasons, ranging from rising tuition costs to falling birth rates in these countries. The US has been the only post-industrial nation with a steady birth rate, particularly due to a vibrant flow of immigrant populations, but even in the US birth rates have been declining for a while. It has been predicted that 2025 will be a watershed year in US higher education, after which there will be a steady and serious shrinkage of college-eligible high-school graduates in the country. And now there are predictions of an ever-greater bust in birth rates due to the pandemic and its economic fallout. This means demand for international students will continue to be high, which is good news for applicants from India. Conditions might look particularly favourable for applicants to American undergraduate colleges after 2025, which is when domestic applications there are predicted to drop sharply.
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However, what needs to be remembered is that applications to the top colleges there, such as those in the Ivy-league, have been skyrocketing for a while now, leading to smaller and smaller percentages of acceptance. This is due to the common application process, which allows applicants to apply to multiple colleges at the same time, which in turn has led to a higher concentration of applications to the top-ranked colleges and hence greater rejection rates. It’s a kind of best or bust attitude. This trend may continue past the predicted enrolment slumps, which means that while many colleges will be actively seeking international students, admission to the top colleges will continue to be just as competitive as before, if not more.
What should Indian students look out for when seeking admission to colleges and universities abroad in the post-pandemic world?
As nations begin to recover, the demand for international students will only continue to rise. There are many financial problems troubling Western universities these days, including weaker and weaker state support, leading to higher tuition, which in turn drives down domestic enrolment. Universities in the West will welcome Indian students who can pay full or a significant part of the fees. Students must plan their applications wisely and stagger them across different kinds of institutions. The top universities are now more competitive than ever before due to the common application method, with smaller and smaller percentages of acceptance. What many students don’t know is that the quality of education offered in the top liberal arts and science colleges in the US is not significantly different from those offered by the Ivy-league colleges. Harvard or Princeton are great, but there is absolutely to no need to be unhappy if you get into Kenyon or Williams or Oberlin—they offer very similar educational experiences, and the costs are pretty similar, if not a bit lower. Same goes for the great American public universities, or the Canadian universities, which are all public institutions and hence less expensive. They don’t offer the intimate, small-class environment of the top private universities and liberal arts colleges, and you will be part of a much larger student body, but this may, on the other hand, offer a wider range of social experience.
If a student thinks of all the possibilities and spreads out their applications accordingly, the future holds great promise for them. Given the situation with universities in the West, the prospect of success for international applicants can only get better and better. The only caveat to this is political and governmental attitude. The US has come out of the Trump era of hostility towards international students. But any time right-wing nationalism becomes ascendant in any of these countries, the policies will start to go against international students, and more crucially, training and employment conditions following the completion of studies.
What about postgraduate and research students?
Postgraduate and research students should get universities to pay them as much as possible, and try as much as possible not to pay them anything. A research student is an apprentice and is contributing knowledge, even if it is not fully professionalised yet. Of course, that is not possible with several taught postgraduate courses, which are meant to earn revenue for institutions. Taught postgraduate courses in professional fields, such as MBAs, justify their high costs with the promise of high-paying jobs afterwards. All students of literature and the arts, including creative writing, should go for postgraduate positions that require no tuition and pay a stipend, often for teaching or research assistance. While the humanities open many career options in the long run and allow you to reinvent yourself multiple times career wise should you wish to, they rarely come with immediate job prospects attached to them as the professional and vocational fields do, outside of academia. The real value of postgraduate study in these fields is the experience of immersion in them, and students must construct this as valuable time funded by institutions, which have many immediate and long-term, tangible and intangible investments in such student experience.
Also, for postgraduate study, pay careful attention to the national culture of research. For instance, for a humanities student seeking a doctorate abroad, it is important to remember that in the UK the time to degree is shorter as you get to working on your thesis right away. In North America, you spend time doing coursework (their model is a 4-year UG + Ph.D, not necessarily with a Masters in between), and hence takes at least five years, usually longer. Your personal level of preparedness, plus your career plans ahead, will decide first which country you want to do to—and then what kind of institution there. The natural sciences will also depend on the state’s history of providing funding to research, while research projects in the social sciences and humanities will depend on other aspects of national and regional culture.
What about institutional collaboration, student and faculty exchange etc shaping up in the post-pandemic world?
The pandemic has radically affected and reshaped institutional collaboration across national boundaries. Quite a bit of this change is likely to be permanent, and some of it is good news. Zoom talks, webinars, collaborative courses across continents, no matter how strange or disembodying their experiences, have added much to our lives through this pandemic, and they are unlikely to go away even when we can all resume travel on a regular basis. Last fall, I taught a large first-year course at Ashoka University in collaboration with a professor at Wellesley College, and we delivered lectures for each other’s class, though through the asynchronous mode of recorded talks as the class times were difficult to coordinate. In any case, travel is going to be tricky for a while, and college enrolments trickier with full-dose vaccine requirements. Whatever can be done remotely, such as initial orientation sessions, even campus tours, will have significant remote elements supplementing the face-to-face experience. The pandemic, now in its second year, has pushed the world technologically ahead by 10 years, and this progress won’t be abandoned when normal interactions resume across national boundaries.
Of course, an international education is not just about acquiring educational content but also the experience of another culture, and the benefits of relationships and networks, especially when it comes to business and professional education. This cannot be done online.
Finally, what is the future of international education?
Higher education follows youth population. The decline of traditional college-age population in the US has pushed American universities into a crisis and has, most recently, led to the creation of the phenomenon called “mega-universities”, such as Liberty, Grand Canyon and Western Governors universities, which seek massive enrolments by extending opportunities of remote and online learning to people beyond the traditional college age. Internationally, it is clear that some of the major developments will be in Asia—all the way from Japan to the Middle-East—where we have seen most of the overseas campuses of Western universities come up, almost always with local financial investment. These will also offer interesting venues of international education.
Even though crucial aspects of the modern university originated in the West—whether the German research university or the British college system, and their coming together in the US in the 20th century—declining population in these countries is leading to a relocation of key stakes outside it, notably Asia. The pandemic has only accelerated already existing patterns of change in international higher education.
The writer is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. views are personal.
