Portuguese universities look to diversify international links

Long an outward-looking country, Portugal’s government and universities are tweaking their internationalisation approaches to augment their historic links.

Last month, Portugal’s minister for science and universities, Elvira Fortunato, told local media that institutions had “more than space” to accommodate additional international students. The main country of origin is Brazil, with 19,000 enrolling this year.

Professor Fortunato, who took up her post after a stint as vice‐rector at Nova University in Lisbon, said extra international students could help Portuguese universities as demographic shifts reduce domestic demand.

A few months earlier she told the Expresso newspaper that three longstanding research agreements with Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin were “under evaluation”. Portuguese rectors reportedly asked for them to be stopped.

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Growing international student shares and freshening up research agreements were both a question of diversification, Paulo Jorge Ferreira, the rector of the University of Aveiro, told Times Higher Education.

Portuguese-speaking countries have long been the natural partners for many universities, said Professor Ferreira, who also leads on internationalisation for the Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities.

While French universities host more international students from Africa and Spanish universities take more from South America, Portugal is unique in taking large shares from both at the same time, he said, adding that they were “emerging markets for all of us”.

Both Professor Ferreira and Professor Fortunato said Portugal’s future internationalisation strategy must make use of the European Union-funded university alliances that its institutions have keenly embraced, taking part in 11 of them.

Professor Ferreira said he had not been directly involved in the US partnerships, but that they represented an old era for the country.

“When those partnerships were created the international outlook of the Portuguese universities was very different. There were no European universities and internationalisation was at a different stage of development, so they could make a different sense and play a different role then than they do now,” he said.

“We have broad international links – what we need now are partnerships that are more symmetrical, that look at training, but also research and collaboration. We should not depend on a very small set of partners; we should try to bring diversity.”

While many universities in continental Europe choose to offer English-language tuition on programmes geared for an international intake, Professor Ferreira said, his experiences at Aveiro showed that was “not necessary”.

China is one of the top-five sending countries for Aveiro, he said, with Portuguese-language programmes a popular choice.

China has long been Brazil’s main trading partner and the two have recently signed a raft of cooperation agreements. “Learning Portuguese is part of this trend too,” said Professor Ferreira.

“The natural market would be Portuguese-speaking countries, but we need to move beyond that, and of course the European direction is one of them. But then [there is] the rest of the world – Africa, but also Asia-Pacific.”