The Case for Treating International Students Fairly

In an increasingly globalized educational landscape, colleges that enroll large numbers of international students often serve them poorly, says Stuart Tannock, a senior lecturer in education at University College London.

His Educational Equality and International Students: Justice Across Borders? (Palgrave Macmillan) is a call to educators and education policy makers to assess how well they are adhering to the principle of treating all students equally.

“There’s a weird disconnect,” he said in an interview. “Virtually every institution will talk about how it’s a global university and about its commitment to foster global citizens.” But institutions seem to make such claims in proportion to “the inequalities in how domestic and international students are treated.”

Tannock’s book relates primarily to Britain, but, he says, many studies show that the issues he documents are common to other Western countries participating in the lucrative market for foreign-student enrollments.

Though many individual faculty and staff members on British campuses try to serve their international students well, he found, inequities abound. Institutions are, for example, increasingly ghettoizing international students in programs and on branch and satellite campuses, and often in preparatory courses run profitably by cooperating private companies.

Domestic students may avoid contact with international students and resist techniques designed to foster internationalization in the classroom, like being asked to include them in “intercultural group work.”

Because international students “do not have citizenship or permanent residency rights, protections, or entitlements,” he writes, they can’t easily object that, for example, Eurocentric curriculums aren’t adjusted to overcome their colonialist perspective. Some foreign students in Britain did just that when they joined a Why Is My Curriculum White? campaign that sprang up in 2014.

Historically, the concept of educational equality has applied within state borders and within national education systems, paying little heed to those who come from elsewhere, he says. As a result, “there is considerable ambivalence, uncertainty, and contradiction among many professional and academic staff” when they are asked if they treat international students equitably.

Tannock contends that some blatantly inequitable practices are so common that they are taken for granted and rarely challenged. Among those, he says, is charging international students far more in tuition fees than domestic students are, in an attempt to ease tight higher-education budgets. However natural British and American institutions may consider that practice, it is not universal, as several European countries demonstrate by not embracing the practice, he says. International students find themselves “stuck betwixt and between, with no clear protections and also this normalization that it’s OK to treat them separately,” he says.

In effect, “international education has been ‘repositioned’ as a ‘global commodity’ outside of national social welfare considerations,” he writes in his book. At best, he suggests, international students may find protection in the concept of consumer rights. But that avenue does not properly deal with issues of educational equality, he says.

Nor does it respond to one of the baldest injustices, he says: that tuition costs, immigration restrictions, and other policies result in many students being excluded from foreign study altogether. “Because those absent students from lower-income backgrounds, or countries seen as being risky in some way, are absent, that kind of injustice and those kinds of voices easily tend to get lost.”