Internationalization and Globalization in Higher Education

Abstract

The core ideas developed in this is chapter were stimulated by two studies in which the authors explored how globalization is affecting higher education in the USA. The first was a study of how globalization has been transforming the faculty labor market in two-year community colleges (Mitchell, Nielsen & Batie, 2011). That study clarifies why these colleges have dramatically expanded their reliance on a part-time and task-contingent faculty workforce. The second study was a qualitative assessment of how faculty, students and administrators in a four-year research intensive public university computer science department are interpreting the globalization of intellectual, employment and student recruitment aspects of their work (Nielsen, 2011). This study documented ways in which research universities aggressively pursue internationalization of intellectual and organizational dimensions of their work while remaining largely unconscious of the extent to which these changes are related to political, social and economic globalization of the larger culture in which they are embedded. With these studies as background, the body of this chapter examines the differences between internationalization and globalization in the contemporary development of higher education. Internationalization is seen as something higher education institutions do while globalization is something that is happening to them.