Internationalizing Higher Education: Reset ahead?

The inclusion of higher education in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 1995 was a major step towards the commodification of university education. As universities in North America, Europe and elsewhere confront current pressures stemming from what is now called politicization of the university (which often originate in the “economization” of education in policymakers’ minds), it is difficult to resist the temptation to see in the GATS treaty universities’ pandora moment. At the time, the treaty opened the doors for Western universities to expand to foreign “markets” by facilitating the establishment of branded campuses in other countries. Writing recently in University World News (26 May, 2026), an HE consultant noted that “This was not a neutral facilitation of knowledge exchange; it was market expansion under rules largely written by the dominant players.”

Market expansion – “internationalization” – was an element of the increasing competition among universities as well as among national university systems. Another feature of internationalization is that it has generally followed global lines of dominance in a world of hegemons, poles, and post-colonial patterns. Thirdly, for most university systems the game has been played according to technocratic rules: ignore politics; evaluate goal achievement quantitatively; discount qualitative values; subordinate education to national economies and in so doing beg the question “what are universities for?”.

Lastly, the backdrop: decision makers’ efforts to instrumentalize the university jibe with the neo-liberal approach to public regulation in general. Instead of traditional public regulatory frameworks that aim to reduce abuse, corruption and unfairness, national and multilateral regulation tends to standardize products and procedures and to cull independent initiatives and mavericks. The goal is not to level the field but to clear it of obstacles to what the rule writers see as progress. Significantly, the GATS predecessor, the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), which begat the World Trade Organization, reinterprets consumer protection legislation as commercial protectionism. Some would say that the field of higher education has suffered some losses of quality when neo-liberal-type rules first of all impose a market logic on education and then practice lowest-common-denominator regulation to favor dominant actors. When an intellectual of renown recently walked away from his endowed chair at a university of renown he gave as a reason that “the university is now managed like a hedge fund”.

For higher education in the dominant North, the internationalization arms race is starting to look like a forever war, with no clear victors. Economic results fail to convince; both populist as well as technocratic visions of power care little about universities per se but seize them as either battlegrounds or instruments; the geopolitical context is changing in front of our eyes and – for many decision-makers – beyond recognition; disillusioned partners in the global South are turning elsewhere as international enrollments in universities in the West are hostage to domestic ideological turmoil.

In Europe, good universities have been for some time forced to maintain their reputation by acquiescing to a rating game structured by the Shanghai ratings in tandem with the Science Citation Index and highly skewed to maintain dominance, reward docile players and punish institutional and even in some cases individual innovation. Four faculty members of the French university system published a paper in the online journal A.O.C. (June 7, 2026) describing and analyzing the deleterious effect of research policy on research “when research becomes a key factor of international economic competition. ...Research is subjugated to a logic that has nothing to do with the work of research... and researchers find more and more frequently that they are restricted from pursuing their projects and ideas."

In France, the latest step in the process of bringing universities to the market’s heel takes the form of proposed legislation ostensibly to regulate private institutions of higher learning, such as business schools. Defenders of the French public university are vocal about the real implications of the bill, which they say would proceed toward such regulation by defining a market for higher education and then requiring public institutions to submit to it, out of “fairness”. The headline in Mediapart, 30 June, 2026 reads “The Ministry of Education considers the whole of higher education to be a market”.

Another point of submission in France is the recent – and hotly contested  – directive raising university tuition significantly for international students originating outside of the EU – in a stated goal of improving the reception and performance of students from abroad  – at the same time as doing away with their housing stipends leaving these students in precarious, vulnerable situations. In this case, domestic political agendas (anti-immigration, nationalism) and market-mindedness collide with other international goals (inter-cultural benefits) and weaken what many see as the equal-access pillar of the Republic. An op-ed signed by dozens of MPs, civil society organizations and university unions published in Le Monde, 26 May, 2026 and entitled “France has benefited from opening its doors, it will lose out if it closes them” cites alternative policies in neighboring countries that have borne positive results. International exchange also now comes under scrutiny by those worried about intellectual property. In addition, European universities or their members are increasingly subject to ideological pressures to cancel speakers and even seminars, courses or programs. In France, resisting these pressures can mean running afoul of regional governments, which contribute significantly, but often on a discretionary basis, to financing a region’s public universities. A bio-ecologist published a paper in A.O.C. analyzing how geopolitics is inevitably part of the context in which research and teaching happen. (June 2, 2026, on “the impossibility of ignoring geopolitical realities”)

In short, dominant university systems in Europe have for some time signed on to an international, neo-liberal-inspired program of competitiveness (“excellence”) which is becoming difficult to maintain abroad while both demand pressures and ideological pressures at home are increasing. Commodified internationalization and the press of ideology are probably not unrelated; as an institution’s independence is sacrificed for the former, it becomes prey to the latter and is led to cancel that seminar on Palestinian history. It’s tempting to see an illustration of concurrent sources of pressure in the recent cancellation of a thesis defense in the French university system – an extremely rare event – purportedly due to the theme of the research which was digital de-growth, research carried out be a student in a leading informatics laboratory (Reporterre, June 2, 2026) and in a university with lucrative high-tech defense contracts.

Proposed solutions can be heard (including ones that may sound like what the French call “false good ideas”). One such solution type is found in calls for institutional neutrality. Similarly to the new version of ‘regulation’ which leads to less public regulation, policies and directives forcing universities to quash dissent in the name of neutrality do not appear to be born neutral.

Another avenue of response comes from two European IHE leaders who in the pages of University World News (June 10, 2026) refute any ideas of public disaffection with higher education and instead suggest that societal demand for learning is higher than ever but for new formats. They urge the building of public/private higher education “ecosystems” to encourage flexibility and support innovations such as lifelong learning. After agreeing that education is neither a commodity nor a transaction, curiously the authors then assign to private actors in the ecosystem the role of innovator although private sector innovation is normally limited to products or processes, as opposed to non-commodifiable objects like educational missions. Overall this proposal illustrates well the technocrat’s version of neutrality which is to set aside conceptual matters or questions (what? why?) in favor of the how of delivery systems.

A certain reading of these various trends might lead to the conclusion that universities and university systems would do well to compete less and cooperate more, as well as to abandon supposed neutrality and aim instead at being – in the best sense of the term – political. Patterns of international cooperation are changing and not necessarily any longer centered on Western institutions (China is the 800 lb panda in every room.) Forms of internationalization that emphasize multipolarity and multi-cultural knowledge might well bring a breath of fresh air into the hothouse of economic competition and replication of patterns of global domination. One possible such breath appears in EurekAlert, the newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reporting on a new EU initiative to develop “a clearer shared understanding of the principles and values that guide scientific cooperation [which] can help ease the strain of geopolitical rivalry, uneven access to scientific resources, and research security concerns, which often constrain productive collaboration”, through a three-year cycle of fact-finding seminars on five continents (italics added).

At the same time, international education in the form of study abroad might benefit students more if more explicitly contextualized in the real, multi-polar geo-political environment. Study abroad as in situ critical thinking could go a ways towarde reducing the cognitive dissonance experienced when a typical study abroad catalog is read against the international pages of a major daily. It would also go a ways toward liberating universities tangled up in neo-liberal, hegemonic, technocratic or nationalistic agenda setting.