I really enjoyed talking to Jason E. Lane as part of Experiences of International Education. Jason, Professor of International Education and special advisor to the President at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and co-founder of the Cross Border Education Research Team (C-BERT), tells us how he entered into the international education space through an initial interest in international affairs when he was back in high school and took part of the Model United Nations.
As an academic his initial focus on the governance of higher education in US led him to look at branch campus overseas and the associated geopolitics. Jason shares his concerns about the current shifting geopolitical dynamics, associated with a realignment of states and a move away from cooperation and open borders. He reflects on the consequences of anti-immigration policies for the financial viability of higher education providers in the US, and how this might incentivise a growth in US TNE, like we are seeing for the UK and Australia. We reflect on the US predominant approach to TNE, based on branch campuses and study abroad activity, and on how more countries are opening up to TNE, either receiving or sending countries and we share similar experiences of getting lost on the way back from The University of Nottingham Ningbo China,… and Jason recall his memorable experiences of setting up the CBERT with Kevin Kinser and joining as a young academic the OECD - OCDE International Management in Higher Education programme in Paris.
'I was really focused on issues in the U. S. of state governance and governance oversight of higher education until I came across these things called international branch campuses. And I began to wonder, why would these public entities be setting up a campus overseas?...then I became much more engaged in geopolitics'
'international education for largely the last 20 years, it's been a place where there has been pretty open borders and we've been able to see flows of students and scholars and faculty and knowledge across borders, regardless of governmental orientation. And today... we're seeing this realignment of states'
'in the U. S. we're, like many countries, in a period of enrollment decline...Where have we gone historically to make up some of those enrollments?... to international students, obviously... we've also seen it become harder for international students to come into the U. S. because of various government regimes happening...Will this force more institutions to think about TNE opportunities?'
Thanks Jason for sharing your experiences and insights with us. https://lnkd.in/eigNvpPU
Later this week we will hear from Daniel Palm who will share his experience of establishing US TNE and his view of how establishing TNE operations is strictly linked to global citizenship diplomacy.
