Capitalism and the internationalization of post-secondary education

IntroductionThis essay is inspired by work I did before I (recently) became a communist: researching and implementing support services models for international students. I first got into such work when I noticed how economically exploited these students were and how little academic and social support they received. While I did draw upon Marxist thinkers like Vygotsky and Freire in my previous research for educational modeling it was idealist work, as I wanted to use their ideas to mold a support program that could salvage the ideal of equality within the current education system (as we became increasingly privatized). Needless to say I was also blind to the vast populations of the global south who did not even have the opportunity to be access our education system.Since the globalized post-secondary education system is part and parcel of global capital, I know now that concessions in the form of support services are helpless against the system that continually creates such a dire need for them. I obviously don't think that we should stop helping students in need, but I do think that student support does not address the primary contradiction. Anyhow, now that I am more informed I wanted to come back to my old work and analyze internationalization through a more critical lens. I won't be analyzing why students need support, but more or less giving a material analysis for why internationalization happened and what it means.The rise of neoliberalism in the global north has coincided with an explosion of internationalization in the post-secondary education sector; a trend, often measured by the rate of international students choosing to study abroad for all or part of their schooling, that has accelerated through the first few decades of the 21st century. I would like to highlight this trend and provide clues as to why internationalized post-secondary education is an economically-exploitative, politically-motivated, knowledge-conforming tool wielded by the global north that cannot be separated from wider imperialist ambitions. I recognize that these may not be bold claims to make; what I seek to do here is expand upon them and provide some insight.After giving a brief introduction into internationalization I will provide on one hand a localized look into the political economy of internationalizing education, and on the other an attempt at theorizing the underpinnings which presuppose the need for an internationalized education system. To ensure the scope of this post is not too broad, nor too lengthy, my analysis will admittedly be a bit shallow. I hope to gain some feedback and direction from the community here as this may be a topic I'd like to cover in the future in much greater depth. The essay is a bit messy and disjointed at times but I hope I've made some inroads into analyzing internationalization from a Marxist perspective.A Brief History of InternationalizationIn the most general and neutral terms, the internationalization of higher education refers to "the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions and delivery of post-secondary education". Higher education has always incorporated implicit and fragmented international dimensions, but the term "internationalization" specifically refers to the reform agenda of the past 30 years as university organizations, national governments, the UN, the EU and the World Bank etc. have been seeking a more strategic approach to post-secondary schooling due in part to the increasing globalization of economies and societies post-Cold War. It is, therefore, a new phenonmenon in the higher education industry rooted in global neoliberal mechanisms. Hence, higher education has become even more entangled with politics, immigration and economy, and national governments have shifted, generally speaking, from funding their institutions to marketing them and making them more attractive to the growing pool of internationally mobile students (~7 million projected international students in 2030, up from 2 million in 2000).Indeed, higher education has become an internationally-competitive industry within which reputation, mobility, branding, ranking, and revenue are competed for on global scale. This competition has heretofor been dominated by western, Anglo and English-speaking universities and nations like the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and France. About half of the ~5.3 million international students in 2017 attended post-secondary schooling in one of these 5 countries, the majority of them originating from global south countries like China and India. As the only country in the top 10 destination countries from the global south, if we exclude China (~440,000 inbound international students in 2017) from the data, the regional flow becomes even more apparent. Simply put: the numbers show a flow of international students and scholars from the global south to the global north. This is a "brain drain" of skilled and affluent future workers whom the state does not have to pay to educate; a class leaving their unskilled compatriots, whose international mobility is surpressed by strict immigration law, behind to labour.Prospective students of the global south must be sold the product of a global north education, and to maintain and expand the consmer base, the product is also advertised to any other possible consumers and benefactors. Governments and institutional stakeholders across the global north have marketed the benefits of internationalization to different agents as follows: a) students of the global north can increase their cultural capital in a multicultural environment, abroad or at home, through individual cosmopolitanism, thus improving their socioeconomic mobility in the globalizing market; b) citizens of the global south can migrate to global north education institutions and access our "superior knowledge and future economic opportunities"; c) academics can cooperate on the global scale and thus conduct specialized and broad research with diverse thinkers; d) institutions can use international tuition revenue to subsidize the shrinking government-funded revenue pool.These premises, save for the last, begin to break down as soon as they are critically examined. Briefly: a) the migration of international students is incredibly one-directional, and those few students from the global north who do go abroad typically choose (and benefit from) courses taught in English; b) the absurd tuition and immigration requirements for international students only allow the most privileged of the global south to attend and (perhaps) be funneled into the domestic labour market; c) we may be paying more attention to academics outside of our EuroAmerican bubble, but only when they write articles in English for high-ranking English journals in a heightened competition for economic and symbolic capital; d) institutions abuse the international tuition system to an absurd extent that goes beyond subsidy.To uncover internationalization in greater detail, paying particular attention to students and the state, we turn to numbers and ideology.The Political Economy of Internationalized Education in Canada: The numbersOn the policy-making end of things, federal and provincial governments and consultants play a decisive role in shaping education policy; international education strategies, based on statistical reports and surveys, are the fruits of their labour. What is measured - enrolment figures, economic impact etc. - is indicative of the desired outcomes of such policies. There is heavy emphasis on ensuring a consistent stream of inbound students from diverse locations, ensuring that many inbound students choose to become working Canadians, and ensuring that more Canadians study abroad and form political and economic ties. Some of the money put towards these ends is freed up by slashing public funding of the institutions themselves, causing an increased reliance on the private sector and turning universities into profit-measured institutions.International students foot much of the bill. There is no shorter way to say it: internationalized education is a political cash cow for Canada for which international students get fleeced. According to data from Statistics Canada, international undergraduate students pay, on average, 4.6x more in tuition than their domestic counterparts per year; a number (averaging $30,000 in 2019/2020, a 7.6% increase YOY) which does not take into consideration the extra amount of money they have to cough up in order to study in a foreign country (extra immigration and administration fees etc). Further, for-profit English for Academic Purposes programs have sprung up around the country and affiliated themselves with universities in response to the threat that language entry requirements pose to the capitalist necessity of widening the stream of international admission. These EAP centres take up to an additional 2 years of tuition fees from international students depending on how the student fares on the mandatory placement test.While Canadian post-secondary institutions increasingly rely upon international student tuition for revenue, so too does the government. The nation of Canada as a whole saw $21.6 billion added to the GDP by 721,000 international students (all ages) by spending alone in 2018, sustaining about 170,000 jobs in the Canadian economy. On top of this, 54,000 former international students became permanent residents the same year; thus becoming long-term members of the domestic labour pool. Following this, the government predicts that immigrants, including but not limited to those shiny objects that are international students, are to make up 100% of net growth in the workforce within the next decade. The importance of bringing (affluent) international students and workers into the Canadian sphere of influence could not be overstated. When the government saw increasing competition in the international education market, they pledged tens of millions of dollars towards marketing in untapped global south markets (like Latin America) and exporting "Made in Canada" education models globally - a diversification strategy meant to ensure the continued extraction of profit.No agent is free from being assessed for their economic productivity, therefore the low number of domestic Canadian students who have studied abroad (11%) present an additional political and economic problem for Canada. That number is not good for business:"Encouraging these students to study in less traditional study-abroad locations—particularly in Asia and Latin America—will foster specialized knowledge and new economic ties with these regions to the Canadian workforce. In particular, Asia represents a significant strategic opportunity for Canada: with strong projections for future growth and important cultural and business ties in the region, it’s essential that an increasing number of Canadians pursue work and study opportunities there." - Gov. CanadaIndeed, every aspect of international education is subjected to its own political-economic heft which, in combination with neoliberalism's allergy of "unprofitable" public spending, places a large burden on its agents. There is no easy task accomplished for the international student without paying a substantial sum of money, even post-graduation. Indeed, as the most popular stream to permanent residency requires a sponsored-employment period post-graduation, some international students pay local "brokers" substantial sums of money to a) place them in terrible jobs, unrelated to their degree and with little pay and long hours (trucking, food industry and tourism agencies are some common ones) where they do not speak up against their exploitation due to the fear of losing their sponsorship, and b) do all the paperwork for them as they are afraid of making a mis-step. The language barrier and inability of many new immigrants/international students to make domestic connections is undoubtedly correlated with their exploitation, yet to fix these inabilities often requires more money for classes or consulting.By the same token, those foreign nationals who are not affluent enough to surmount the massive economic barriers of an international education or immigration to Canada are not even on the table. They stay in their home country where they have the chance to be employed (exploited) via the outsourcing of labour. It is the responsibility of our new "cosmopolitan" class - either Canadians educated abroad or internationals educated in Canada - to bridge the gap between nations and ensure that our business interests and their resources, human or natural, stay connected. Perhaps some of these graduates will occupy leadership positions in the global-value chain and make it much easier for Canadian capital to access the labour forces and resources of the global south. I believe the government is banking upon this.In the final analysis, the migration of students and academics/scientists from the global south to the global north, for international education and job opportunities, is a brain drain and a value leakage from their nations to ours. The cited amount of wealth funneled into our economy by international students must be put into greater context: not only does it cover but one year of wealth contribution, the data only covers money spent through tuition, accommodation and discretionary spending; the surplus value extracted from these students over the long term, should they choose Canadian employment (or foreign employment which directly or indirectly services the Canadian economy), and the taxes reaped from that surplus value, would surely dwarf the original yearly sum.Thus, although higher education institutions have, through austerity and privitization measures over the past 30 years, seen their public funding take a nosedive, it would be foolish to assume that they act separately from the aims of the capitalist state.Theoretical underpinnings & the knowledge economy: The ideologyI claim that internationalized higher education institutions are ideological state apparatuses, acting as arms of the imperialist state through their internationalization. There is a bit to unpack here.I am aware of the criticisms of those who theorized about ideology. The study of ideology, morphing into a study of knowledge and power in its most popular 20th century form, often distanced itself from scientific Marxist thought through its prominent thinkers; however, the idea of the bourgeoisie holding the ideological ability to set the rules of society, to reinforce class relations, is a relevant one. Gramsci maintained that the ruling class ruled more by the consent of the subordinate classes to their ideas and values than by direct coercion; developing a hegemonic culture through the ideology of its cultural institutions, including the education system. Althusser held that the education system is the most dominant "ideological state apparatus" which enforces conformity to the relations of production. Yet as I understand it, Gramsci, Althusser and other thinkers who studied similar phenomenon of "cultural domination" or "power" - Bourdieu and Foucault, for example - either repudiated Marxist laws of history or rejected Marxism altogether (Gramsci and Althusser placing ideology first, Foucault choosing Nietzsche over Marx, and Bourdieu distancing himself from Marxism).Unfortunately most writing that covers imperialism or neocolonialism in international education also leaves out Marx. I believe, however, that historical materialism remains primary in analyzing the global educational context. Undoubtedly I will be ridiculed for trying to make the connection, as I do not have enough space or examples (yet) to do it justice. Yet it is not hard to link the global education system to the material conditions of our modern world. There are thousands of English-language centres in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America, built to prepare students and young adults for entry into the English-dominant world market, yet very few Chinese, Russian, or Indian language centres (Spanish being an outlier as a language of colonisation) in the global north. Where schools for these languages do exist, for example the Confucius Institutes, they are mostly at the post-secondary level and serve political/cultural aims; swaths of Canadians do not pay to have their children take Chinese classes. It is the material conditions of our world - the dominance of English-speaking nations and their gatekeeping of the market - that lead to the proliferation of ESL schools into Asia and elsewhere.The need to internationalize higher education institutions was born of the same material conditions. In the globalized market, the need for capital to constantly expand and for its production processes to continually refine themselves presupposes the existence of schools which, by educating the privileged of the global south, enables global north capital to enter their markets through its newly-educated brokers and access their resources: ie reproducing the imperial relations of production. Is it pure coincidence that these English schools and the general internationalization of education exploded onto the scene in the era of global labour arbitrage? Absolutely not.Gramsci said that the enlargement of the state's sphere of ideological domination coincided with Europe's colonial expansion; this was necessary as the mechanisms of the state became more complex through expansion, and greater and more diverse populations came under rule. In the modern day a further ideological expansion is needed to reproduce imperial relations of production. While I am not yet ready to fully grasp it, I believe that this newest expansion extends itself over the global south and sells the lie that anyone can access the wealth of the global market by becoming willing partners in the global value chain. Those of the global south who choose an internationalized education do so of their own "freedom", when in reality it is the freedom to consent to and collaborate with global capital, and a freedom that is only gifted to those who can afford it. It appears that, semantically, the international education project started by violently educating the "noble savage" in times of colonialism and has now reached the modern neoliberal goal of creating "business partners". This is capital's adaptation to the modern material conditions; if a nation rejects the education and refuses to be a "partner" at any time the military and financial institutions can still get involved, of course (this is not to assume the order in which they appear in foreign countries).At home (and abroad) neoliberal multiculturalism persuades us to think globally, yet in the smallest instances where we are taught embrace diversity, for instance in the classroom, we learn that diversities are only acceptable if they do not challenge the hegemony. Conformity is enforced by classifying what the "right" and "wrong" way of behaving and learning in the multicultural classroom is. Existing power relations are reinforced by treating unwanted cultural differences as a student's failings; for example, a Native-American child's communication style which clashes with the speaking rules of a EuroAmerican classroom, causes them to get in trouble and fall behind in class. In this sense, even if a student is not objectively "wrong", per say, but is acting upon their own cultural knowledge base, one which clashes with the rules of the classroom, they will fall behind academically and be continually subordinated to those teachers and peers who conform to the hegemonic structure. The irony of the multicultural classroom is in wanting the students to speak and think in a way that erases their cultural diversities while it pretends to celebrate them: obedience to authority, conceptions of time including the work/rest split, and political opinions are all measured by a student's grades.The hegemony - the ideas of the ruling class - extend from the classroom to the home, from the workplace to the church. As Marx said:"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." - The German IdeologyWe must remember whose educational model is being internationalized here, and who "regulate(s) the production and distribution of the ideas of their age". The language of the global north is exported through ESL schools, and its classrooms could be said to follow the "banking model of education". Post-secondary institutions are a bit tougher to pin down, but even wearing the guise of multiculturalism, equal opportunity, reputation and socioeconomic mobility they present but one political and economic framework of thought for those who are privileged enough to attend classes: capitalism and "democracy" (indeed, even when Marx is taught through "Marxist Economics" he is neutered and treated as theoretically equal to neoclassical economics). Multiculturalism, in its co-opted form, is the idea of the ruling class; taught to reinforce the relations of imperialist production. Those who return home, or stay on in their country of schooling, are likely to carry forward that framework of understanding; after all, it's "common sense", and success in the capitalist world necessitates it!ConclusionsModern internationalized educational institutions are non-violent arms of the imperialist nation-state. Their existence was predetermined by the need for capital to continually expand, and hastened along by the new global relations of production. Western nations thinly veil this by espousing multiculturalism while struggling to reconcile their high opinions of their own educational models: the Government of Canada, for example, wary of increasing competition in the global education market as more institutions in Europe and Asia "switch to English instruction", seeks to export their own education models to new countries and recruit students in untapped markets like Latin America. Canada already competes with other developed nations like the USA, UK, Australia and France for market share, and so must seek other markets to expand into.As for the students: it is necessary for them to embrace the "common sense" they learn abroad in order for them to reinforce the imperialist relations of production; for accepting the ruling class ideology, submitting oneself to the international bourgeoisie and oppressing the global south workers below you is required for the global market to function, and is the precondition for allowing the privileged of the global south to entrance into the capitalist world market. The reinforcement of this "common sense" can take the form of rejecting unwanted cultural differences and celebrating conforming ones. For those who do not study abroad, some way or another our educational model will find its way to their countries (as long as it remains profitable to do so). This much the government of Canada makes clear.In future I would like to analyze the global transfer of wealth through international student/scholar migration in all its forms, particularly in comparison to the suppression of the international mobility of unskilled workers. I would also like to study the institutions themselves and get a better grasp on the ideological side of things. Obviously it is a huge topic to cover and so I could not write too much here (although I realize this is a long post) but I hope many of you read it, perhaps find something interesting, and give me feedback on how and where to go next. Thanks! via /r/communism https://ift.tt/2BXTPsM