Internationalization of Higher Education, Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Decade (original) (raw)

Internationalization has evolved in higher education over the past 30 to 40 years from a marginal aspect to a key aspect of the reform agenda. It also has evolved in different directions and, in that process, some previous values have got lost, and past priorities have been replaced by others. Economic rationales have become more dominant, but as the society is facing extreme challenges, summarized in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, internationalization needs to respond to these challenges and goals. Some of the papers in this section address the sustainability and quality of the current state of internationalization, others look ahead and analyse whether new initiatives such as the European Universities initiative (EUI) are an answer, or how internationalization can address the need for higher education of refugees. It is important to place the papers in perspective of the evolution of internationalization as a basis for the next decade. 1 Internationalization in Perspective Universities have always had international dimensions in their research, teaching and service to society, but those dimensions were, in general, more ad hoc, fragmented and implicit, rather than explicit (de Wit and Merkx 2012). Comprehensive strategies are a rather recent development of the past three decades. In the last decade of the previous century, the increasing globalization and regionalization of economies and societies, combined with the requirements of the knowledge economy and the end of the Cold War, created a context for a