Overseas students a ‘get out of jail free card’ for hard-up West

Western universities capitalise on the mismatched aspirations of their Global South “partners” to compensate for the “shameful underfunding” of higher education by home governments, a Kuala Lumpur forum has heard.

Self-described “internationalist” Laurie Pearcey said top-shelf universities used international students’ tuition fees as a “get out of jail free card” to save themselves from “fading into insignificance” against “the backdrop of a rising Asia”.

Their approach to transnational education was transactional and elitist, he said. Prestigious Western universities were only prepared to “marry down” if it guaranteed them a quick sugar hit of fee-paying students.

Emerging universities of the Global South typically wanted collaborative research, reciprocal student exchanges and doctoral education for their academics. Their highly ranked partners were more interested in opportunities to “leverage” grant funding and generate revenue to “feed” the home campus.

“The dominance of the English language as the lingua franca in our sector exacerbates inequality,” Mr Pearcey told the THE Campus Live SE Asia event held by Universiti Teknologi Petronas. “The process [is] continually rewarding nations in the Global North, often at the expense of skills and talent in the developing world.”

Mr Pearcey is adviser to the president at CUHK-Shenzhen, a 10-year-old offshoot campus of his previous employer, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was also pro vice-chancellor (international) at UNSW Sydney in his native Australia.

In an intentionally “provocative” presentation, he told the summit that the transformational promise of international education was being compromised. University leaders were using the internationalisation agenda to “buy their way into” the top 100 of global rankings while governments used it to “absolve their responsibilities to fund universities properly”.

Meanwhile, internationalisation acted as a “steroid” for the “divisive politics of immigration” and the “dark angels of xenophobia”. The results were perverse and sometimes “preposterous”, Mr Pearcey said.

“Students from the Global South – in many cases students from former British colonies – are funding the university educations of the British middle class because Westminster refuses to invest properly in its higher education system,” he said.

The situation was even more bizarre in Australia, where overseas students – particularly from China – were “picking up the bill” for research including projects associated with Australia’s programme to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

“Chinese middle-class families, through their investment in Australian higher education, are potentially indirectly subsidising research to help propel the US-allied military industrial complex and its emerging focus on containing the rise of China,” he said.

Mr Pearcey said “commodification” of international higher education was the inevitable outcome of systemic underinvestment. But the goal should be “inclusive and meaningful educational experiences” rather than profit. “The aspirations of students from the Global South [should be] met with respect and integrity, rather than exploitation.”

He said the sector’s “almost universal embrace” of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals offered a way to “level things up”.

“There is nothing like a rankings framework where institutions such as Malaysia’s Universiti Sains and Thailand’s Mahidol displace the likes of Oxbridge and the Ivy League.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com