Study South Africa

[Extract from article by Ms Merle Hodges]: A recent article points to the feeling of alienation that students feel when studying away from home. It seeks to address the problem by establishing a range of fora where foreign students can feel more ‘at home’. It encourages host students to be more willing to accommodate these ‘outsiders’ in order to boost the reputation of the institution. Most of these initiatives are slightly patronising, but obviously well-meant. The overriding sense behind the article is that international students, within higher education institutions, are a benevolent burden. International students should be looked after, because universities are generally maternal (they are someone’s alma mater after all), places of kindness (they literally give away knowledge) and generally care for others (community outreach is fundamental to most universities). More importantly, international students – in places like the USA and UK – generate additional funding in an environment where government and federal funding is drying up. But what if four out of every ten students in the world who graduated were from China and India? In the next eight years? That genial inconvenience now becomes an imperative. These are the predictions by such august organisations as The British Council and the education branch of the OECD. It is also anticipated that these countries will not be in a position to educate this number of students internally. Which, in turn, suggests that there will be mass outflows at the undergraduate level and, by sheer dint of numbers, also means that internationalisation is heading towards a compounding acceleration in numbers. Where then does internationalisation stand? It will no longer be an altruistic add-on, but core business to the lifeblood of the universities across the globe. As far back as 1994, Jane Knight understood internationalisation as a phenomenon that would have a profound impact on the functions and structures of the university. “Internationalization,” she points out, “is the process of integrating an international, intercultural, global outlook into the major functions of a university – teaching, SRC, and service functions.” Over the past year arguments have been made that suggest that global shifts in student demographics are not the ‘province’ of South African higher education and that our obligation is to focus internally, on poverty alleviation and job creation. This argument misses the point. The free flow of academics and students – especially the large number of postgraduate students from other countries already at our institutions – are working with our academics on solving exactly these kinds of problems. IEASA is no longer only about the 60 000 students who migrate to our shores annually. It’s about what they learn and the diverse experiences that they will go through; experiences that will change them for life and will inevitably bring them to a different understanding of the world that we, collectively, are presently fashioning.12th Editio