News

The St. Petersburg State University, together with the Baltic Sea Region University Network (BSRUN), invited a number of experts to discuss new Trends and Strategies in the Internationalisation of Higher Education in the context of a International Conference held on the 4th and 5th of October. Hans de Wit, who will also be a speaker on the upcoming Campus Europae seminar at the European Parliament, analysed the development of Internationalisation in Higher Education during the last century, during which he set forth the new key components for internationalisation (powerpoint presentation available here).

Jane Knight from the University of Toronto discussed the so call “1st generation of cross-border education” and shared insightful statistics from the IAU 3rd Global Report “Internationalisation of Higher education: Global Trends, Regional Perspectives”, as well as from her own research. Her analysis focused on the pace at which branch campuses are currently being established, as this movement seems to epitomize the “2nd generation of cross-border education”. The IAU noted the existence of 24 of such branch campuses in 2002, but seven years later this number had increased to 162, more than two thirds of which being branches of Anglophone institutions. The majority of the host countries are located in Asia and the Middle East, and the regional or national impact of these “branches” seems to be more diminutive.

Branch campuses are paving the way for the 3rd generation of cross-border education: the “Education Hubs”. While a precise definition of what education hubs are some common characteristics of these “education/international academic cities” are the way they leverage financial and infrastructure incentives to attract international HEIs, knowledge industries, research centres and fee paying students, whose presence in turn elevates the competitiveness and the geo-political status of the concerned region. Jane Knight last question was: “do these new realities and their unintended consequences suggest that internationalisation trends are what we would like them to be?”.