Across the world, 3.3 million students study outside their country of citizenship
each year (OECD 2010: 315).1 Almost half of them move from Asia and Africa
into English-speaking education systems. Another quarter move between countries
in the European Higher Education Area. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand
international education is a large and growing commercial export industry (Bashir
2007). In the United States international students contribute to the national
knowledge economy and American foreign relations. Both the nation of education
and the educated international student appear to gain from the exchange. But
for international students in general, and more so for non-white students from
emerging nations, the exchange is premised on less than equal respect and
treatment. Most people in the country of education give this little thought. If it
is difficult for international students, the thinking runs, why do ‘they’ come?
Clearly ‘our education’ is superior to what ‘they’ have at home. And being
supplicants, as it were, ‘they’ ought to ‘adjust’ to the country of education to the
degree necessary to absorb its bounty.
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