Prof. Drummond Bone has been asked to look at international issues in higher education.
The UK continues to be very successful in attracting international students but looking forward to the next 15-20 years we can expect increasing challenges to this success.
Prof. Bone has now delivered his report: Internationalisation of HE: A Ten-Year View [PDF 169kb] which is publicly available for you to comment on.
You can join the continuing discussion on the issues and recommendations by posting your views on any aspect of Prof. Bone’s report on this blog.
Comments made on this page will be brought to the attention of the respective policy handlers for this issue on a weekly basis.
We look forward to hearing from you.
(Comments posted on this topic earlier in the higher education debate process are still available in the archive for you to consult should you wish.)
An incredibly substantial and impressive report. The core argument, namely that the selling model of international marketing employed widely to date by UK universities is unsustainable and needs to be superseded by a more long-term and holistic approach, is well backed up. The richness of intelligence of the global HE marketplace is pretty much invaluable, and takes nothing for granted. For Talis, with a learning technology perspective, the attention that the report devotes to open access educational content is extremely useful and is a potential harbinger of fundamental disruption in the delivery of HE.
A more complete version of my review of this report can be found at
http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/
To the authors of the report, then, thank-you very very much. We have no disagreement with any of the points made so rigorously and clearly.
Just to add to this, looking at the report, I see it has highlighted a point of how recruitment of postgraduate research students is closely linked to research success. This by all means cannot be ignored and in the light of the abolition of the ORS, this is one of the key areas in which UK higher education is facing its own economic downturn. Competition is now looming and since the nature of UK research students (PGR) not being employees and at the same time struggling to gain scholarships our numbers are dwindling as would possibly be expected on a national scale.
It was noted that in STEM in particular this will suffer hard and something has to be done to counteract this or we will lose our PGR students to other countries yet the UK doctorate has something uique to offer.
I would therefore call to see this is one of our top priorities in international issues with work between the British Council, DUIS as well as the national student forum (in particular the National Postgraduate Committee) since international PGR students are a highly endangered speecies.