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CHINA STIRS
The mass of Chinese students going abroad changes the coordinates of Western higher education policy
| Dino Motti (Milano). “It is clear that international mobility is not necessarily a drain on human resources, as it may provide benefits for both supplier and recipient countries.” This sentence in the Third European Report on Science & Technology Indicators opens the chapter regarding foreign students.
Italy with a share of 1.4% is the last country in Europe for number of foreign students. If you compare this data with UK’s 15% and Belgium’s 11%, you can easily realize that the Italian tertiary education system did not stand the test and is today losing the opportunities coming from being a destination of student’s international mobility.
On average, 6.6% of the students in the EU are foreigners. The largest group (2.4%) comes from EU member states and this, together with a 1% of students coming from other European countries, still adds up to an higher number than the 1.7% of students from Asia and Oceania. But these proportions might soon be affected by a radical change in Europe’s foreign student’s population. This revolution could be spurred by China. In fact Chinese students already are one of the biggest groups of international students in US Universities and they represent an increasing share also in the UK. China’s size and population together with its ongoing process of liberalization and modernization are giving us a hint of what might become the main “exporter” of students worldwide.
This panorama would not be complete without saying that the war on terror and more stringent policies over immigration have caused a downward flexion, by as much as 20%, in the number of Chinese studying in the US. This steep and generalized decline in foreign student enrollment in American universities comes after years of steady growth and it totals a decrease of 2.5% below 2002/03 of all foreign enrollments (while it reaches 5-6% if we consider just undergraduate students). Alongside comes an 8.5% increase in the number of US students studying abroad, two thirds of which chose Europe. The interesting question is where has this 2.5% decided to enroll, admitted that they still went abroad, and where is it now the 20% of Chinese undergraduates who used to go to the US. What if Europe were able to attract them? It could become an asset in human resources for the EU similar to the one represented by the European students and scientists who set sail to the US after WWII.
In this scenario Europe may be at an advantage and must reassess in order to meet the demand and overcome the competition of today’s most attractive countries. Enrolling into our universities foreign students (and in particular Chinese and Indian) is an objective that European countries must meet if they want to reach the goal of becoming a competitive knowledge market, while raising the bar on science and innovation standards, improving quality and attaining international recognition.
As stated in the Report on S&T: “Reducing the gap between the EU and the US, or even shifting the main direction of migration from the US towards Europe, could become an ambitious future objective of the EU and its Member States.”
Italy again comes in as the taillight of Europe, with its mere 600 Chinese students, and compared to the tens of thousands in other European countries, is even dwarfed by Portugal that hosts more than 2000. The Italian government is now trying to boost the scientific relations between the two countries literally by importing students and scientists under a series of diplomatic agreements. Many of Italy’s main universities have already been asked to receive higher numbers of Chinese students over a period of three years. The Statale University of Milan that is hosting a few students every year will welcome by next year some 60 students per year as part of the agreement. Far from being decisive, with just a few hundreds students hosted every year in Italy, this approach may work as a sort of primer that will pave the way for future developments. Buying Chinese students by the bunch will definitely not solve the problems that afflict Italian universities and that make them the least desirable place in Europe to study.
The shortage of lodging and its high prices, the absence of tutoring, a dispersed university of 65.000 students of which many must commute for hours daily, the lack of information, no funding for research, no classes taught in English, overcrowded lessons, obscure bureaucratic procedures have clearly kept international students away from Milan’s University and Italian public education in general.
What the administrators all over Italy are now realizing, forced to face the preoccupying statistics and stressed by the competition, is that these “orders” of students provided by the government will not mean much if we do not start redefining our offer. Next to the just listed problems we will soon have to take care of the more complex issue of building a thriving society in our universities. No surprise foreigners have deserted a place that closes its doors at 6pm, that does not offer any extracurricular activities, no sports, no cultural nor social events, that allows no space for student organizations, and where students are often seen as mere consumers.
Italy remains without question a country that can attract tourists, but it should soon wake up as part of Europe, enter a challenge that the EU must face as a whole, and understand that foreign students do not necessarily want to study in a leaning tower kind of university...