Equity initiatives help drive India’s HE enrolment to 45m
What does meaningful internationalisation in higher education look like today?
A recent University World News article by Betty Leask, Giorgio Marinoni and Hilligje van’t Land makes a compelling case for moving beyond a narrow understanding of internationalisation centred primarily on student mobility.
Mobility remains important. But it reaches only a small proportion of students globally. Fair and inclusive internationalisation also means asking who participates, who benefits, what institutions learn from one another, and how international perspectives can become part of teaching, research and campus life even for students who never cross a border.
The article highlights approaches such as Internationalisation at Home, virtual exchange and COIL, while also asking universities to think critically about whether their international partnerships are genuinely diverse, reciprocal and mutually beneficial.
These are questions that resonate strongly with the work of the Nordic Centre in India.
At NCI, mobility is one important part of what we do — from semester and short-term study opportunities to practice placements and academic visits. But our work increasingly extends beyond mobility: supporting institutional partnerships, connecting researchers and academic communities, creating opportunities for collaborative education, facilitating dialogue between Nordic and Indian higher education institutions, and helping institutions understand the academic and societal contexts in which their partners operate.
This can mean a Nordic student spending a semester or undertaking a practice placement in India, but equally a researcher finding a new collaborator, a faculty member developing a shared teaching initiative, or institutions building relationships that continue long after an individual mobility experience has ended.
For us, Nordic–India higher education cooperation is strongest when it is not simply about moving students from one country to another, but about building relationships that allow knowledge, perspectives and ideas to move in both directions.
That also means creating different points of entry into internationalisation — through classrooms, research collaborations, institutional networks, virtual engagement and sustained partnerships — so that international cooperation can reach more people and create value on both sides.
As universities reconsider what internationalisation should achieve in a rapidly changing world, perhaps the question is no longer simply:
“How internationally mobile are we?”
It is also:
“How much of our institution has genuinely become international?”
A timely reflection on what fair and inclusive internationalisation can — and perhaps should — look like in practice.
Read the full University World News article here:
https://lnkd.in/dg7WZSwj
#NordicIndia #HigherEducation #Internationalisation #AcademicCooperation #ResearchCollaboration #StudentMobility
