Testing elite transnational education and contesting orders of worth in the face of a pandemic

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a test that has disrupted the flow of a particular type of social and physical mobility. It takes pathways embarked upon by students from Asian countries to “prestigious” anglophone universities as its focal point of analysis, considering how the residential, consecratory experience of attending elite institutions has been disrupted when universities go virtual or as students are prevented from travelling to their university’s country destination. Building theoretically on the sociology of conventions and testing, I analyse public institutional responses at the commencement of the outbreak from elite universities in the US and the UK, which have hosted large numbers of students from Asian countries in past decades. This paper focuses on how these universities responded to international students under conditions of uncertainty, examining how they justify their role, purpose and operations, while canvassing for continued support from this student segment. The findings highlight contesting orders of worth between states and institutions, as clashes between market, civic and domestic regimes exert significant pressures on organisational efforts to coordinate and cope during this critical moment, thereby raising questions about how prevailing logics of elite transnational education have been altered in the face of a pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Student mobility
• pandemic
• institutional responses
• elite universities
• orders of worth
• sociology of conventions and testing

Acknowledgments

This paper had its genesis when Rebecca Ye was on a visiting fellowship at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic unravelled. She thanks the Asia Research Institute, NUS, for the opportunity to present this paper and for the feedback received at a November 2020 workshop on international student mobilities and post-pandemic futures. Rebecca is also grateful to the two reviewers, the editorial team, and Erik Nylander for their useful comments through the publication process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “International students from Asian countries” is used here as a broad category to refer to a group that is composed of students with diverse and distinctive experiences and resources. The outbound student mobility rates from Asian countries to the anglophone world are wide-ranging; countries like China, India, Singapore and South Korea have disproportionately more outbound students in these universities. Acknowledging these distinctions, the aim here is not to discount these differences, but rather to focus on a particular segment of international student mobility in order to illuminate patterns of change or stasis.

2. Sources for public institutional responses: Cambridge https://www.cam.ac.uk/coronavirus/news; Cornell https://covid.cornell.edu/updates; Oxford https://www.ox.ac.uk/coronavirus/communications; Stanford https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/latest-updates.

3. Sources of data: Office of Global Learning (2019); The Bechtel International Center (2019); University of Cambridge (n.d.); University of Oxford (n.d.).