December 29, 2021
By Scape Solutions
The excitement for living and studying overseas has waned significantly in recent months, owing to a variety of factors such as:
- The emerging COVID-19 variants
- Key travel constraints
- The continuing mass vaccination drives
- Prolonged visa postponements
These are for many of the world’s six million international university students, over one million of whom study in the United States.
These obstacles have not only lowered excitement, but have also shifted student priorities, impacted family support, and influenced university choice selections.
As colleges ‘digitalized’ a large portion of their education in 2020, we observed firsthand how vital on-campus and the full-time college experience is for a comprehensive and residential college batch of youth, teachers, and establishments.
A New Wake for Studying Overseas
As a result, Australia and Canada immediately enacted considerable measures to assist institutions that have lost overseas students due to the “pandemic effect,” while also enhancing demographic diversity. Nonetheless, several colleges are actively preventing students from studying abroad.
While the United States remains sanguine about the future appeal of the immigrant as well as domestic students, especially at highly particular and financially strong institutions that maintain an annual average of international enrollments of 20% or more, declining enrollments in 2020 has harmed small and more flimsy universities and communities.
Unfortunately, some of them have had to put a limit on their past, their heritage, and their mission. Meanwhile, in the UK, several private high schools are facing financial challenges with the recent drop in student numbers from China, France, and the US and some universities are sharing the cost of travel and ‘accommodation to avoid the risk of decreasing the income stream of “international schooling“.
However, one unintended consequence of the epidemic of foreign enrollment is that students are now applying to more universities than ever before. In the context of the Bologna Process, which strives to bring greater uniformity to higher education institutions throughout Europe.
There is expected to be a rise in applications to regional centers like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Students that apply to colleges in their geographical areas have a shared
- History
- Culture
- Customs
- Beliefs
- Language
- Ability to pursue higher education at a lower cost
Science and knowledge are international components of human production in and of themselves. They serve as an intellectual portal through which curriculums in all disciplines might adopt an internationalized perspective. This enables educators:
- To identify common ground across institutions
- Regardless of nationality
- To include teachers, students, and staff equally.
This is perhaps a healthier and more successful means of keeping internationalization alive in these uncertain times of regional and national isolation; a way of ensuring institutions practice internationalization for all students, including those who stay at home and those who travel abroad.
Hopefully, the epidemic will shed light on innovative approaches to worldwide higher education. When tackling the accessibility of students, teachers, and staff to globalization, universities should shift from a transactional and credit-bearing paradigm to a relational and social model.
They must be able to coordinate not just resources, energy, and efforts, but also ideas and concepts to consolidate transcultural knowledge, human immersion, and long-term experiences abroad.
