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Asian universities gear up for global competition
No longer need you assume that the overseas education you want has to be in the USA, Europe or Australasia, for the universities of Asia are internationalising fast and providing programmes geared to regional demand. Tony Martin profiles four Asian countries blazing the trail in international postgraduate provision.
Statisticians monitoring the movements of international students drink a lot of coffee. They have to. They need to stay constantly vigilant for the next global phenomenon to change a dearth to a glut, or a glut to a dearth – sometimes almost overnight. Iraqis, Iranians and Libyans once topped the lists of international students in UK and US institutions because of the massive rise in oil prices in the seventies. Then came Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollahs’ revolution and Colonel Gaddafi – and the flow abruptly ceased.
‘The fast-evolving phenomenon is that more and more of your counterparts are ‘voting with their feet’ by travelling to other Asian countries for their graduate studies.’
The Asian economic boom of the eighties quickly enabled thousands of Malaysian, Singaporean and Hong Kong students to get the kind of university education their own countries were not yet able to offer, so they shot to the top of the statistical tables. Yet when British Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, hiked the UK universities' overseas student fee, Malaysia's PM, Dr Mahathir, said “No dice, Mrs T” (or words to that effect) and promptly cancelled the public funding of Malaysian students at British universities. Their numbers were promptly decimated.
International reaction to the tragic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 triggered a fast drop in departing Asian students and, just when numbers were building up again nicely, the 1997 Asian economic crash and currency devaluations brought them tumbling down again. In the last few years, the vast growth in private and government wealth of the PRC led to a quadrupling of Chinese mainland students studying in the UK and Australia. But as I write, reports are trickling in that visa restrictions and other factors have caused a significant reversal of that rapid upward trend.
What does this mean to you as an Asian graduate, potentially embarking upon an expensive and important masters or PhD programme in a foreign country? For one thing, it shows that you are somewhat vulnerable to political and economic events that you cannot control. Not that you are at special risk to your personal safety by going overseas, but that your source of funding – or the value of the money in your own pocket – may not be as secure as you would wish.
More constructively, however, it means you should look at the major statistical changes of what is happening to international student mobility on your own doorstep. The fast-evolving phenomenon is that more and more of your counterparts are ‘voting with their feet’ by travelling to other Asian countries for their graduate studies. No longer need you assume that the advanced education you want has to be in the USA, Europe or Australasia for the universities of Asia are internationalising fast and providing programmes geared to regional demand.
Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea have all reported major increases in the numbers of foreign students coming to their universities. Last year (2003), the Japanese government’s target of 100,000 foreign students was met for the first time. This is the same number as Australia’s much feted success in attracting international students to its exotic shores. Numbers have almost tripled in a decade. Of these 100,000, 27% are following graduate courses. Little Singapore already boasts 60,000 international students and is now targeting 100,000. (Not bad for a country with just three universities – more of that elsewhere.)
Malaysia estimates that it now has 36,000 incoming students, many of whom are enrolled on masters and PhD programs in its public universities. Students from China, Indonesia, India and Thailand make up the highest numbers. Rapidly emerging from the shadow of its local political difficulties, South Korea has shot from just 1,989 overseas students in 1992 to 12,314 in 2003, over half of whom were studying engineering or a science subject. China itself has become a major host country for foreign students. According to one report, no less than 35,000 South Koreans are studying there, the largest group of foreign students in the PRC and a number that has doubled in just four years.
