Internationalisation of higher education and the Australian academic profession

Abstract

The term ‘international higher education’ is not easily defined. It means many things to different people, and is often confused with globalisation of higher education. According to Altbach (2002, p. 1), “globalisation refers to trends in higher education that have cross-national implications”, such as student markets, internet based technologies, the global knowledge economy, and massification of higher education, while internationalisation ‘refers to the specific policies and initiatives of countries and individual academic institutions or systems to deal with global trends’, such as international student recruitment. This paper is concerned primarily with international higher education, particularly the international higher education student market, and the role of government policy, rather than globalisation. However, it is recognised that it is impossible to keep the two phenomenon entirely separate.