It’s time for fresh thinking on international higher education and global science

Over the last year, there has been considerable praise for scientific collaboration. Over 100 countries have been involved in research on Covid-19 (Lee and Haupt 2020). Our successes today are due to the fact that our knowledge and innovation processes have become more dispersed, more openly accessible and more collaborative. The cross-border movement of people and ideas which form the vital knowledge value chains have become indispensable to our way of life. The world’s increasing interconnectedness means that countries, people and issues which were previously unfamiliar or distant can become immediate and challenging in ways we were previously able to ignore. As Sebastian Conrad has written, thinking about the way in which ‘the world has evolved more and more into a single political, economic, and cultural entity’ enables us to understand how ‘local events are increasingly shaped by a global context that can be understood structurally or even systemically’ (Conrad 2016, 11). Today, there are 250 million students worldwide, and this is estimated to reach 660 million by 2040. Over 5.3 million students are pursuing their higher education abroad (OECD 2019, 230). An estimated 272 million people are living in a country other than their country of birth (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division 2019, 3), and almost 25–30% of the world’s migrants are tertiary educated (Kone and Özden 2017, 3, 6). More than 40 countries are involved in global science (Leydesdorff et al. 2013). The spirit of internationalisation and scientific exchangehas been intrinsic to universities and the spread of ideas and the discourses around them. Travelling scholars became common, journeying great distances and establishing connections between European, Asian and North African centres of learning. Oxford welcomed its first international student in 1190. By the nineteenth century, networks were becoming a normal part of scientific endeavour. But academic and research collaboration does not just happen. They depend upon agreed frameworks, systems and practices which have developed and been nurtured over time.