Assessing policies for attracting international students: case of Malaysia

Abstract

While the world market for international students in higher education is dominated by traditional major players such as the US, UK and Australia, Malaysia has emerged as a recent contender with a market share of 2%. There is a gap in the literature in assessing the contributions of policy initiatives, including trade agreements, towards attracting inbound international students, especially from emerging contenders such as Malaysia. The objective of this paper is to compare and assess the policy initiatives at the unilateral, multilateral, regional and bilateral level and their impact on the host environment which is defined in terms of the key pull factors that have attracted international students to Malaysia. The main findings show that domestic policy initiatives have enhanced the host environment for attracting international students by providing a governance system that protects the interests of international students through its regulations. Efforts to improve quality assurance and accreditation also serve to attract international students. The regulation of fees contributed towards competitively priced programmes that are also pull factors. Multilateral, regional and bilateral commitments are relatively new, emerging only after 2006, and have less potential influence on inflows of international students as these commitments reflect, at best, existing practices in this sector.

Keywords:

• higher education
• Malaysia
• policies
• trade agreements
• international students

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the four anonymous referees for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions, although the usual caveat applies.

Notes

1. See Tham, Mahmod and Alavi (2010) for details of the commitments as of 2010.

2. This does not imply that there are no other factors that can influence the decision-making and selection of colleges by international students. Indeed the literature indicates that there are other variables at work that are outside the scope of the objectives of this paper.

3. WTO (2008: 4) defined Mode 1 as services received from abroad through the telecommunications or postal infrastructure of a country since the service supplier is not present within the territory of the Member where the service is delivered.

4. Several American universities have reportedly either signed or considering signing agreements to set up degree programmes and research projects there.

5. Rumbley and Altbach (2007) have indicated that financial incentives seem to spur international branch campus activities in particular countries/regions.

6. Japan, however, was reported in another OBHE article, to have five Japanese offshore study abroad campuses in 2005, with three in the US, one in the UK and one in New Zealand (OBHE, April 2009).