From my bookshelf, some recommendations
One of the things that’s shifted most in the years I’ve been covering international education is the volume of research on the field. Scholars are digging into fundamental questions: What forces encourage, or discourage, global mobility? How can colleges serve students in more culturally nuanced ways? Is neonationalism reshaping international research?
As a journalist, I’ve found the flourishing of such scholarship invaluable, and it’s expanded the horizons of my reporting. For the first newsletter of 2024, I wanted to do something a little different and share three international-education books from the past year that left an impression.
First up, Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways Between Berkeley and Seoul, by Stephanie K. Kim. Kim’s book caught my eye because of the focus on colleges as actors in international mobility, an oft-overlooked middle ground in higher-ed literature that frequently centers on students or government policymakers. In part that decision was practical, Kim, an associate professor of the practice at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, told me in an interview: When she began her research, she was working in an administrative-staff position at the University of California at Berkeley. Unable to go overseas for field work, she used her immediate surroundings as a research site.
As a writer, I also appreciated Kim’s human touch, bringing to life the students, professors, and administrators she spoke with — and even putting a bit of herself on the pages. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Universities have different priorities and needs that can affect international recruitment. How did you see those priorities influencing institutional approaches?
When I decided to focus on UC-Berkeley, I had to contextualize it as a university within a receiving country. Obviously, California is not a country, but it might feel like it sometimes. It’s the state with the largest international-student numbers. Profit is a strong motivation for these institutional actors. International students pay higher fees and make up for shrinking revenues. But at the same time, because these are public institutions, there’s also a strong public backlash against the perception that these institutions are seeking out profits at the expense of local students’ needs. That’s especially the case in California, where there’s this distinct discourse that’s emerged that international students are taking away seats from California students across the UC campuses. Because of that public backlash, you see regents putting in strict admissions quotas on how many international or how many non-California students they can take.
Even though those quotas are there, it doesn’t mean that the California higher-education system as a whole is not taking in international students. It’s just doing that in a more creative way, which is what the book explores. For example, California community colleges are now able to position and market themselves as transfer gateways into UC campuses that are not as accessible as they were before for international students. It’s also prestige-seeking because these colleges, which have been historically very much locally focused institutions, now have this global footing and are able to tap into global student markets.
In international-education circles, we focus primarily on China and India, and for good reason. But consistently for the last two decades, South Korea has been the third-largest sender of international students to the U.S. That’s amazing considering how relatively small the population is compared to a country like China or India. The question I was really interested in is how does a university in a sending country tap into global student markets as well? One way it does this is by retaining domestic students who might have otherwise studied abroad in the United States but now have an opportunity to pursue international education at home. And this is what Yonsei University did, in creating an American-style liberal-arts college, taught entirely in English, primarily by overseas recruited faculty members. On one hand, it’s definitely a profit-driven endeavor — the tuition for this college is double that of other parts of the university. But it’s also prestige-seeking because it aligns this Korean university with the prestige markers of a world-class university, with the American university model.
The international community-college transfer pathway is often underexplored. What did you discover?
It was fascinating talking to the Korean students because of how they would label themselves at Berkeley: “I’m a freshman student” or “I’m a transfer student.” Ironically, the label of transfer also implied rich international students, which is kind of funny when you think about what the purpose of community colleges has historically been. But the more accessible pathway into a community college was seen as an ability to pay to get in because there weren’t barriers to entry in terms of maintaining a certain GPA or getting certain test scores as for admission to Berkeley.
The wealthy international student is a common stereotype. When we talk about international students as a monolith, what are the implications?
When students are all painted as wealthy, privileged globetrotters, not only do they have to negotiate these stereotypes, but they’ve also internalized it. The very fact that students would describe themselves as freshman students or transfer students as meaningful markers that had class-laden stereotypes behind them was one example. Some international students would call other international students wealthy and privileged because it was a way that they could then deflect that label onto someone else. All of these things were a result of the way colleges have framed the increasing presence of international students for primarily financial reasons. That trickles down into the way students behave.
Do you think there are ways universities can break that stereotyping?
It would come down to reframing why colleges are bringing in international students in the first place, beyond the monetary reasons. Think of the rhetoric around the way the UC system considers international students — as a way to subsidize the tuition of California residents. It’s painted the picture that these students are there first and foremost for financial reasons and any other auxiliary benefits are secondary. It doesn’t mean that you can’t think of students as a form of revenue, but it has to go hand in hand with something much more fundamental and meaningful to the student experience.
But isn’t that framing a direct response to the critique that international students are taking away seats from Californians?
The assumption is that it’s a zero-sum game. That’s a false dichotomy to say that one group of students is taking away seats from the other. It’s scapegoating. If there is any shift in the percentage of California students, that really is an intentional state-policy decision.
Despite the way international students are often framed as financial resources, I think what can be done most immediately on a practitioner level is reprioritizing the needs of the students. Thinking through what are the needs of international students as opposed to what are the needs of the college as we bring in new students, I think that’s key to creating a healthier student experience.
Is this the book you set out to write?
Yes, in the sense that the actual crux of the argument itself didn’t change much as I was writing it. I think what changed was I put a lot more of myself in the book than I had originally intended to. If I’m interviewing a student, I actually put myself in the exchange or I talk about what I was reflecting on or my own thought process, almost like breaking the fourth wall. I didn’t intend to do that initially because it’s a scholarly book. But I thought to write an honest analysis, I have to put in the actual engagement, the reflective piece. Still, I didn’t want the book to be about me per se. I guess the whole beauty of writing my book is I can write it the way I want to write.
What about future projects? Is there another book percolating in you?
I’m doing something different, completely away from international students, but I’m engaging with similar questions about race and racism and xenophobia in higher education. I couldn’t ignore what’s just happening at the national-policy level on things like anti-China rhetoric and how that then trickles down into the way universities are funded and how they operate. I’m in the very beginning stages of a new project that looks at how xenophobia becomes operationalized in American higher education.
