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伦敦大学学院毕业照展示
据《今日扎曼》报道，土耳其高等教育委员会（YK）正在制定措施，使土耳其的高等教育体系更加吸引来自国外的伦敦大学学院的大学生。
其中一项措施是鼓励私立伦敦大学学院降低外国伦敦大学学院的大学生的学费，另一项措施是要求州立伦敦大学学院提高外国伦敦大学学院的大学生的录取率。
YK还初步计划改变外国伦敦大学学院的大学生考试，这是外国伦敦大学学院的大学生必须参加的考试。
为了获得土耳其伦敦大学学院的录取分数很高，很多人都说这太难了。
YK指出，保加利亚高等教育机构的学费已降至每年2600美元左右。
大约10年后，我们可能会丧失所有的竞争力。
我们必须努力确保在高等教育市场占有一席之地。
Internationalisation is higher than ever on the agendas of universities and national governments in Latin America.
Over the past year I have had the opportunity to visit ministries of education, accreditation and other agencies and universities in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
It is impressive to see how much interest, initiative and action universities and public and private entities are developing in these countries.
In particular Colombia shows a strong joint effort of universities and government to increase the international reputation and attractiveness of higher education and opportunities for cooperation.
Now that political stability and economic development are showing positive signs of improvement, there are joint initiatives to promote the sector abroad between the university sector – private and public – the Ministry of National Education, the government research agency Colciencias, the Institute for Education Credit and Technical Studies Abroad or ICETEX, and the investment and tourism portal Proexport.
The National Accreditation Agency has included internationalisation as one of its main planks.
The OECD review of the higher education sector of 2012 included an extensive review of the internationalisation of Colombian higher education, and its recommendations provided further stimulus for universities and government to move forward.
But in other countries there are also signs of joint efforts by universities and governments in promoting higher education and stimulating cooperation.
Big scholarship schemes like ‘Becas Chile’ and ‘Science without Borders’ in Brazil are illustrations of this new phase of internationalising higher education.
In addition to these two big national programmes, other smaller and more focused funds from national agencies such as CONACYT in Mexico, ICETEX in Colombia, CAPES in Brazil and CONICET in Argentina, to mention just a few, offer more opportunities than ever before for study abroad and research collaboration.
Economic developmentInternational education associations like FAUBAI in Brazil, AMPEI in Mexico and RCI in Colombia are seeing affiliations growing and are attracting more and more participants from outside their countries to their annual conferences.
Whereas in the past the main driver of internationalisation in the region was capacity building by European and American donor organisations, these funds are no longer coming in, given the economic development that the region has gone through.
American and in particular European organisations – such as the British Council from the United Kingdom, DAAD from Germany and Nuffic from the Netherlands – are active in the region.
But their role is no longer mainly to provide scholarships and capacity building, but to recruit talented students from Latin America to come to study and stay in their countries.
In particular Chile, Brazil and Colombia have become attractive recruitment sources for European agencies.
The latest conference of the Brazilian Association for International Education, FAUBAI, in Joinville last April attracted more non-Brazilian participants than ever, mainly from Europe.
The increased interest is due mainly to the ‘Science without Borders’ programme run by the Brazilian government to provide 100,000 Brazilian students with an international experience.
The programme has resulted in a strong increase in delegations proposing partnerships, but this “is due almost exclusively to the need for fundraising”, and is not about equal partnerships, as FAUBAI itself has stated.
Although the interest in Brazil is more commercial than cooperative, in itself this opening up of the higher education sector and international education associations is a positive development.
The Ministry of Education is preparing a broader strategy, also including other aspects of internationalisation.
Another positive sign in the discourse on international education in Latin America is increasing interest in ‘internationalisation at home’.
Universities are becoming aware of the fact that a too dominant focus on exchange and study abroad will have a very limited impact and serve only a small elite of talent and children from rich families.
A very large majority of 98% of students will not have access to these opportunities so internationalisation of the curriculum and the use of new innovative ways like online international learning are needed.
The increasing importance of Spanish as an international language of communication helps to stimulate these developments.
ChallengesThese are the positive sides of increased interest in internationalisation in higher education in Latin America.
There are big challenges to address as well.
The main focus is still on the outside world, not on cooperation and exchange within the region.
Latin America and the Caribbean keep mentioning Europe and North America as their priority areas in the International Association of Universities’ Global Surveys, including the fourth one of 2014, while other regions mention their own region first.
In my view this is one of the two main challenges: there is still far too little initiative for intra-regional cooperation and exchange.
A Peruvian university in the Amazon region understandably considers the environment as a key research and learning topic, but instead of looking more at collaboration and funding from Europe it should look at joint research and joint degree programmes with universities in neighbouring countries first.
A Latin American and Caribbean Higher Education Area only exists in words but not in reality and this is the other main challenge.
The main obstacles are: differences in academic terms within the region; differences in admissions criteria; great variations in grades; variations in regulation of the sector; differences in migratory policies and in recognition of professional qualifications; and the public-private divide, with different regulations in different countries.
Little movement is seen in addressing these issues.
The 2013 Tuning report on the basic principles and procedures leading to the establishment of a Latin American Reference Credit – CLAR – system, which attempted to solve the fact that there is no academic credit system shared by the Latin American countries, is a good first step in this direction.
But leadership at the regional level is required to make this and other necessary steps happen, and that kind of leadership is not visible due to political differences in the region.
As far as initiatives for intra-regional cooperation and exchange exist, they are mainly bilateral and at the sub-regional level, in particular the trade bloc Mercosur, and those carried out by universities themselves.
One positive example of sub-regional university cooperation is the University Association of the Montevideo Group, or AUGM, in which public universities in the Mercosur region work together and exchange students and staff and stimulate other forms of cooperation.
But even universities in this group, when they are planning to establish joint or double degree programmes, look for partners in Europe because of the attraction of funds like Erasmus Mundus, now called Erasmus+, and support from DAAD – the German Academic Exchange Service – and CampusFrance, instead of looking among partners in AUGM.
In this way the focus and dependence on European funding will continue to dominate the sector in the region.
The new president of the AUGM, the rector of Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Sante Fe in Argentina, Professor Albor Cantard, and his international relations secretary Julio Theiler, have transformed their own university over the years into a leading internationally oriented institution.
They recognise the problem and an important part of their action plan is to stimulate more joint and double degree programmes with other AUGM partners.
Attempts to create a Latin American equivalent of the European Association for International Education, or EAIE, are not moving very fast.
With support from the Colombian government for four years running, an annual Latin American and the Caribbean Higher Education Conference on Internationalisation – LACHEC – has been organised in Colombia, but it appears difficult to make it a real regional event which moves around to different countries.
It is in competition with the biennial Conference of the Americas on International Education or CAIE, organised by the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education with its headquarters in Montreal.
Both conferences in themselves are important events to discuss and enhance the internationalisation of higher education in the region, but one can only wonder if two conferences are not too many at the current time.
Looking outwardsIf Latin American higher education wants to take another big step forward in its quality, reputation and internationalisation, it has to focus more on intra-regional cooperation and exchange as a strong basis for its outward vision.
In that respect it is illustrative that Latin American universities are not yet included as study destinations in the Brazilian ‘Science without Borders’ programme.
It also has to bridge the divide between public and private universities, in many countries still seen as two different streams that do not communicate and are even less likely to cooperate with each other.
And the sector has to broaden its rather exclusive links to Europe and North America to embrace Africa and Asia, building on initiatives already in place, for instance, in Brazil and Argentina.
As the experiences in Europe with European initiatives like Erasmus, research programmes and the Bologna process have shown, a strong intra-regional agenda and plan form the basis for an inter-regional approach, not the other way around.
* Hans de Wit is director of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, or CHEI, at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, professor of internationalisation of higher education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, and research associate at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
E-mail: J.
w.
m.
de.
wit@hva.
nl.