This post is co-authored by Robert Burroughs, HESA Research Associate. 

A few years ago, when the Government of Canada released its “Strategy for International Education”, I gave the document a lot of stick because it wasn’t really a strategy, possessed no serious logic model and generally didn’t link resources to expected outcomes.  It was more of a laundry list of things attached to a relatively arbitrary target more than anything else.

Having recently had occasion to read a few other countries’ international strategies, I think I need to take some of that back – or at least put it in context.  Because it turns out Canada’s not that much of an outlier.  With the exception of New Zealand, pretty much every country’s strategy is terrible.

Of course, part of the problem is that there’s no little hubris involved in trying to come up with a national strategy.  Strategies, fundamentally, are narratives about how an organization (a business, an army, a nation) can achieve a set of goals efficiently and effectively. But “international education” is a sector, not an organization.  Broadly speaking, they consist of institutions on one side and governments on the other. The interests of these factions do not necessarily coincide, nor are they necessarily internally consistent.

On the government side, multiple ministries—such as education or advanced/tertiary/higher education (in many of the countries studied, these two are not joined in a single ministry), or trade, foreign affairs, and various central agencies—may be involved in the drafting of strategy documents. Such is the case in Australia. In other cases, such as in France, a single entity (France Stratégie, the central planning bureau within the Prime Minister’s office) was solely responsible for the development of the strategy, though the foreign and higher education ministries are responsible for its implementation. Additionally, some government-funded organisations or agencies outside the ministerial structure (e.g. Education New Zealand is a Crown corporation; the German Academic Exchange Service [DAAD] and the Dutch Nuffic are publicly-funded independent organisations; and the British Council is a state-owned enterprise) may have their own activities and strategies, which may not wholly align with the rest of government. On the other side, institutions may speak individually, or through peak representative groups (for example, the equivalent of Universities Canada, Universities Australia, was heavily involved in the government’s strategy), or through specific representative bodies which specialize in international education (CBIE and its equivalents).

Complicated?  Yeah.  And not all these stakeholders share aims or means.  An actual strategy would require a lot of painstaking work to mediate between priorities, outlooks, resources, etc, and that’s complicated.  Who has time for that?  So what usually happens is that one of the players – usually but not always a government ministry – comes up with a strategy on its own.  And that strategy usually only addresses the areas under its own competence, not the entire range of activities necessary to really promote internationalization.  In a few cases, a country might have multiple documents which embody elements of an international education strategy because different bodies cover different aspects of the problem.  For instance, in the UK, the Department for Science and Universities has a strategic plan, but so does the British Council.  They don’t contradict one another, but they don’t necessarily complement each other all that well either.  The Netherlands actually has three documents: an organizational strategic plan from Nuffic (a body which is kind of a cross between CBIE and DAAD), a policy statement from the Minister which took the form of a letter to Parliament, and an overarching “strategy” document which seems to come from the Dutch equivalent of the Barton Committee.  The only unifying theme, really, is “yeah, let’s be more international!”

What most of these documents end up being is simply a “to do” list (speed up visa processing, improve quality assurance, or make universities more “welcoming” to international students, whatever that means).  Occasionally, they are not even a list but rather a re-cap of policies that governments have already undertaken to support MOAR INTERNATIONAL.  This is all well and good – government needs to complete lists to keep moving forward – but, I cannot stress this enough, it’s not strategy in any meaningful sense of the word.

The trick in all of this is not to get star-struck by national target numbers, the way the higher ed press tends to do.  The fact that Canada wants to double the number of international students but Malaysia (or whoever) wants to triple it is not a meaningful basis of comparison. International students are going to come (or not) regardless of what target is adopted.   Focus instead on what governments (it is usually governments) are committing to do in terms of regulation and financial support.    That’s the heart of the matter.

In any case: I take back some of my snark about Canada’s 2014 plan.  The weaknesses I harped on are apparently features of national strategic plans for international education, not bugs, and Canada is by no means an outlier.    It’s just the nature of this particular literary form.