Cross Boarder Education - Report Example

RUNNNING HEAD: Internationalisation of Education Internationalization of education Tutor: College: Course: Date Table of content 1.0 Introduction 3 2.0 The educational system 3 3.0 Different forms of cross border education 5 4.0 Approaches to cross boarder education 5 5.0 Benefits of this program to the countries 7 6.0 Disadvantages of this program 8 7.0 Conclusion 8 References 9 1.0 Introduction In the recent research carried out by education experts, higher education has increasingly become international, since more students are making up their mind to go ahead and complete their studies abroad. To ensure that this process did not fail, the students have even been enrolled in registered and non-registered programs in the campaign for greater and better methods of acquiring quality education. These students have also found out that the use of the internet in attending online lessons; have really helped them to save on resources and time Internationalization can therefore be interpreted to encompass any aspect of the integration of higher education into a global environment (Beerkens 2003).This immense development, have been made possible through the combination of some driving forces. There has also been a common desire among the skilled labors to build a more skilled and educated work force in their individual home countries. This has been the issue since emerging economies are demanding higher education across borders (Altbach et al.2005) 2.0 The educational system The tertiary education system can be defined as the administrative structure at regional or National level which is responsible for implementing regional or national government policy with regard to higher education. Its functions are the allocation of funds to institutions, administration of regulations, coordination, monitoring and evaluation. The system is regarded as the collection of universities and colleges, private and public those comprise the higher education sector. At the system level, the concern is essentially with the budgetary consequences of programs and strategies for internationalization that education authorities might initiate, coordinate, implement or monitor in the tertiary education sector. The beneficiaries of this system are the students, institutions, and the general public. The system is mainly concerned with the most efficient way of achieving certain administrative ends within an overall policy framework (Dresch &Stephen 2007). There is therefore an emphasis here on administrative efficiency, and on regional or national fiscal policy, which addresses the raising of revenue and the allocation of expenditures to achieve agreed educational policy goals relating to foreign student movements. Most prestigious universities have become keener in setting up research centers for home students so that they can be exposed to the rapid changes that are occurring in the region. This same challenged has been facing independent campuses in trying to equip their students with great potential right in their home countries. Despite these efforts as of expanding domestic capacity, most students are going abroad for higher education. Some countries that seem to act as global magnets for the students are China, Singapore and Malaysia (Beerkens 2003). All these countries and others that are coming up aim at competing in the provision of the higher education in the growing global knowledge economy. Great concern about the economic dimension of higher education in most countries, has taken up a lot of interests since the government’s budget has been tightening every day and therefore, the financial performance of the institutions has also been questioned in the recent past. This same concern is also evident in some particular areas of internalization of the teaching and learning process. Most universities and colleges, have been contemplating about inventing their own strategies and due to this, they are paying greeter attention to their overall corporate planning. Their main focus is to enable their domestic students to be able to access the same kind of learning experience that they would have acquired in any other international campus (Hahn&Ryan2007). 3.0 Different forms of cross border education One form of cross-border education, is when a student decides to go abroad to take an extra course or advance what they have learned domestically. Due to current advancements, an increasing number of students are taking advantage of the new option of taking a degree or other post-secondary courses by a foreign university without leaving their home country. Students mobility is a very important binding factor, is this method of learning is going to work out The second form of this kind of education is the program mobility. Program and institution mobility has grown over the past decade and is likely to meet a growing demand in the future. It involves cross-border distance education, including e-learning. This education generally supplements by face-to-face teaching in local partner institutions, but mainly takes the form of traditional face-to-face teaching offered via a partner institution abroad. The relationships between foreign and local institutions are regulated under a variety of arrangements, from development assistance to for-profit arrangements. Under a franchise arrangement, a local provider is typically licensed by a foreign institution to offer whole or part of a foreign education (Altbach et al.2005). The students are taught the foreign syllabus and they carry out part of the course in their home country and complete it in the home country of the foreign institution. This form of cross-border education typically involves both student and program mobility. 4.0 Approaches to cross boarder education There are mainly four different, but not mutually exclusive, approaches to cross-border higher education. The first Three are skilled migration, revenue generation, capacity building –have a strong economic drive and have emerged in the 1990s while the fourth, mutual understanding, has a longer history. The mutual understanding approach encompasses political, cultural, academic and development aid goals. It allows and encourages mobility of domestic as well as foreign students and staff through scholarship. It also allows for and academic exchange programs and supports academic partnerships between educational institutions. This approach does not generally involve any strong push to recruit international students. Examples of countries using this approach so far are Japan, Mexico, Korea, or Spain. The approach generally involves the student and teacher exchanges, networking of faculties and institutions across Europe and joint development of study programs (Beerkens 2003). The skilled migration approach shares the goals of the mutual understanding approach but gives stronger emphasis to the recruitment of selected international students and aims to attract talented students to work in the host country’s knowledge economy, or render its higher education and research sectors more competitive. Scholarship programs may remain a major policy instrument in this approach but they are supplemented by active promotion of a country’s higher education sector abroad, combined with an easing of the relevant visa or immigration regulations. Sometimes, specific services are designed to help international Students in their studies and their stay abroad and more teaching takes place in English. This approach can have a variety of targets, such as students from certain areas, post-graduates or research students rather than undergraduates, or students in a specific field (Dresch &Stephen 2007) .This approach generally results in a rise in the number of international students. Examples of countries having adopted this approach are Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. The revenue-generating approach shares the concepts of the mutual understanding and skilled migration approaches, but offers higher education services on less full-fee basis, without public subsidies. Compared to domestic students, foreign students generate additional income for institutions which are encouraged to become entrepreneurial in the international education market. Under this strategy, governments tend to grant institutions considerable autonomy and seek to secure the reputation of their higher education sector and protect international students, for example through quality assurance arrangements (Altbach et al 2005). This may be complemented by an active policy to lower the barriers to cross-border education activities through trade negations. The capacity-building approach encourages cross border higher education. However it is delivered, as a relatively quick way to build an emerging country’s capacity. A scholarship program supports the outward mobility of domestic civil servants, teachers, academics and students as important policy instruments (Schoormann 1999). This move encourages foreign institutions, programs and academic staff to come and operate for profit ventures, generally under a government regulation which ensures their compatibility with the country’s nation and economy building agendas. Arrangements and partnerships with local providers are encouraged and sometimes are even made compulsory in order to facilitate knowledge transfers between foreign and local institutions. In conclusion, this approach results in large numbers of outgoing students and of foreign revenue-generating educational programs and institutions (Dresch &Stephen 2007). Examples of this approach are mostly found in South-East and North Asia. 5.0 Benefits of this program to the countries In regard to the net benefits the immediate effects of foreign students, the revenues of the students are the major items. In addition, the presence of more numbers of students in the institution may enable scale economies in service provision, lowering average costs across all students, and could lead to economies of scope if a wider product range can be offered. The university may benefit from the contribution that graduate research students make to the research output of the university. There are also some potential external benefits accruing to the institution, its staff and its student body from the presence of foreign students on the campus. This is mainly from the Positive outcomes from the social and cultural interaction between foreign students and host institutions (Beerkens 2003). When students return home after studying abroad, they bring with them the additional human capital that they have acquired while they have been away. It is likely that their stock of personal capital will have been increased not only through the formal education they have received but also in countless ways through cultural, intellectual, social, personal and other sorts of experiences they have undergone. 6.0 Disadvantages of this program In some circumstances these external and cross border learning, could be negative. With more students passing out from schools, demand for higher education has been on the rise. There is an urgent need for well-educated and trained people in all sectors of the economy (Hahn&Ryan2007). There continues to be a critical shortage of professionals such as engineers, technicians, administrators, accountants, agriculturists, and business leaders, to meet the needs of reconstruction, growth and poverty reduction. 7.0 Conclusion Finally, an obvious and important conclusion to be drawn from this work is that it is important for any country to be equipped to measure benefits than costs. The assessment of costs is a vital step in understanding the economic implications of foreign students at the various levels of analysis. Due to this reason, most developing countries have found it very challenging to provide the foreign educational programs in the local institutions to avoid having to lose most of their students as they attend higher learning in the more advanced countries. There are so many benefits to all stakeholders arising from foreign study, in particular the longer-term career benefits to students from internationalization of higher education. References Altbach, Philip G, Levy, Daniel C. (ed.). (2005). Private Higher Education: A Global Revolution. Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Beerkens, E. (2003). Globalization and higher education research. Journal of Studies in International Education, 7(2), 128-148. Dresch, Stephen P., (2007) the Economics of Foreign Students, New York: Institute of International Education. Hahn, Ryan. (2007). the Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance. Global Center on Private Financing of Higher Education. Institute for Higher Education Policy IHEP. August 2007 Schoormann, D. (1999). The pedagogical implications of diverse conceptualizations of internationalization: A U.S.-based case study. Journal of Studies in International Education, 3(2), 19-46. Read More