Student and faculty exchanges primarily build "bridges" between people of different nationalities and cultures. The capacity to change people through visits to another country was eloquently expressed by the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Over the last two years, many students - mostly those in developing countries without ready access to the internet - missed out on formal education for an extended period of time due to COVID-19.
Formal in-class education was not the only area in which students and those involved in academics missed, there were other areas, too: peer-to-peer learning, extracurricular learning and – the topic of this article – learning through student and faculty exchanges between institutions across international borders. Now that the world is slowly reopening, it is the right time to bring up this topic in recognition of their long-term contribution towards filling up the well of knowledge, solving global problems and improving international relations.
At present most of the student exchanges in the world have the global north as the destination, and mostly involve English speaking countries. In 2017, Project Atlas, a global research initiative on student mobility, reported that: "English-speaking countries are among the largest hosts of international students, with the United States enrolling about one-quarter of all the world's international students, almost double the number of international students enrolled in the UK, which is the next largest host of international students." It further added that, "Taken together, 50 percent of the world's international students enroll in five English-speaking countries."
What that means is that there is still a large untapped market for mobility from: global north to global south; global south to global south, and between non-English speaking countries. And that is the future of student and faculty exchanges we should be creating and supporting.
There are many tangible and intangible benefits of fostering student and faculty exchanges. Consider their power to unify people around the world. Many forces in the world - such as popular cultures, internet-based platforms and communication technologies - are bringing people together, even during COV- ID-19 travel restrictions.
But, at the same time, certain forces - especially political ones - have tried to pull people apart, by pitting citizens of their own country against those of other countries. One of the primary reasons for student and faculty exchanges, in view of our shared humanity, is to control, mitigate and ultimately remove this second set of forces, and let the first ones flourish.
Student and faculty exchanges primarily build "bridges" between people of different nationalities and cultures. The capacity to change people through visits to another country was eloquently expressed by the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749- 1832): "Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones."
The other generally accepted benefits of such exchanges are that they: provide participants the necessarily cultural skills needed to work in an increasingly globalised world; help certain host countries, such as Japan where the proportion of young to old population is decreasing, maintain their knowledge leadership and workforce; let more students from countries with high living and educational costs get access to more affordable academic degrees in countries where the costs are lower; contribute to the growth of the general body of knowledge; and help bring together the necessary resources to solve some of the common and greatest challenges to humanity, such as climate change.
International and regional organisations, down to the individual student, can find their own niche roles to support and promote the exchanges. For instance, regional bodies such as SAARC could help member countries formulate policies that will make it easy for exchange participants to travel, study and work within the region. The first amongst those policies could be to push for the promulgation of a common visa category that specifically facilitates educational exchange.
Educational institutions could support that process by entering into partnerships with other institutions to offer accommodation facilities, and give access to local libraries and research resources. They could additionally: lobby their own governments and charitable organisations for grants to support exchanges; participate in common marketing; make it easy to transfer course credits; and collect data on educational exchange trends (encompassing, for example, places of origin and destination, popular fields of study, gender-segregated participant data etc.) to further improve exchange programmes.
Tourism promotion boards in the respective countries could bring in tourism-related industries to add entertaining and knowledge generating activities, such as homestays and cultural travel packages, as additional incentives.
At the individual level, exchange programme participants could expand the circle of learning by including their family members, by bringing them to the host country during the exchange period.
Ensuring quality as the volume of participants increases will continue to be a matter of concern. The educational institutions on their part can ensure quality and keep the numbers manageable by putting in place a rigorous selection process. For example, only faculty who have an h-index, a single figure that indicates the level of publication and citation of a scholar, in double digits and students who are in the top 10 per cent of their class can be made eligible at initial stages to participate in subsidised exchanges.
There is a saying – Vasudeva Kutumbakam – in the ancient Sanskrit language, which means: the world is a family. In view of the value of student and faculty exchanges, it is time that we added another statement: "Vasudeva Vidhyalayam, the world is a school."
Rajbhandary is the Associate Dean at The British College in Kathmandu, Nepal
A version of this article appears in the print on September 14, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
