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

Introduction

Under conditions of incredible uncertainty, such as those experienced during a global health pandemic, how do elite universities respond to the crisis situation in relation to international students? 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 high-prestige 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. Elite universities are interesting to examine during a crisis since as institutions with centuries-long histories, they should prove durable. However, as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge noted as the pandemic unravelled, “The University has never, in recent memory, had to engage in such an organisational effort on this scale” (Toope, 2020a).

Students attending high-prestige universities tend to, or opt to, participate in a certain type of distinctive educational experience (Binder & Abel, 2019; Dacin et al., 2010; Ye, 2016). Examining how these educational organisations cope with the tensions of retaining international students’ participation while safeguarding their well-being in the context of an unravelling global health crisis could illuminate what these institutions “stand for”, what “stood out” in their responses, and how they “stand up” to the challenge of this test (Stark, 2020). Building theoretically on the sociology of conventions and testing (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999; Potthast, 2017; Stark, 2020), I analyse institutional responses, at the beginning of the outbreak, from elite universities in the US and the UK that have hosted large numbers of students from Asian countries. The notion of organisations and individuals being tested during moments of crisis is valuable in aiding us to examine this critical moment, for tests require the capacity of institutions and actors to confront situations of uncertainty, as well as decide on their value (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2000). In particular, the framework on orders of worth proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) in their seminal text on the sociology of critical capacity allows us to disentangle various modes of evaluation and relations that describe an array of justifications enacted.

The paper will begin with a description of the context of elite transnational education pathways from Asian to anglophone countries, before an elaboration of the theoretical framework that guides this paper's analysis. This will then be followed by a methodological section that describes the utility of analysing institutional responses during a crisis, ahead of the presentation of findings. The findings in this paper 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. Against the backdrop of these findings, the paper discusses what changes in elite transnational education pathways could mean for international higher education in general, and how logics of elite transnational education are being altered in the face of a pandemic.

Elite transnational educational pathways, from Asian to anglophone countries

Research on student mobility from Asian to anglophone countries has been extensive in the past decade, not least due to Asian countries being prominent senders of students into the heavily commercialised international education market (Börjesson, 2017).¹ Extant literature has been valuable for our understanding of Asian student experiences, their ambitions and anxieties, as well as the international education infrastructure that shapes and affects these mobilities (Collins, 2012; Ma, 2020; Waters, 2008). An important development in research on these mobility pathways, especially within postcolonial research, has been highlighting the importance of interrogating the dominant “global imaginary” that promotes the ideal of Western education superiority and to acknowledge the problematic power asymmetries that exist in international student mobility (Stein & de Andreotti, 2016).

Researchers are beginning to disentangle the complex dynamics entrenched in these particular international student mobility pathways, across universities in similar country destinations. For example, Cebolla-Boado et al. (2018) found that the prestige of British universities is a factor for shaping Chinese students’ decisions and preferences. Their findings indicate that “university prestige” operates as a form of symbolic resource that is mediated, validated and legitimised through social interactions (Cebolla-Boado et al., 2018, p. 376). Blackmore’s (2015) work on prestige in academic life has also illustrated that employing “prestige” as an analytical aid exposes and offers insights into the workings of higher educational organisations. By examining processes of stratification and commodification in higher education, we uncover how institutions seek to develop, maintain and maximise prestige (Blackmore, 2015).

Certainly, distinctions about what is acclaimed, and what is not, have been generated against the backdrop of a global higher education industry. Tools and valuation processes, such as benchmarks and rankings, have been employed as a means for governance and coordinating action, not just amongst universities, but also for students, their families, and future employers (Chiapello & Gilbert, 2019; Espeland & Sauder, 2016; Knight, 2012). At the same time, earlier studies emphasise how these differentiated forms of mobilities, compelled by the desire for accumulating particular forms of capital, can entrench social inequalities and intensify social stratification (Waters, 2012; Xiang & Shen, 2009). The notion of capital in this body of work draws on theorisations about how social and cultural resources acquired in educational institutions are expected to be convertible to other forms of sought-after capital, such as economic capital in the labour market post-graduation (Bourdieu, 1986). Elite schools around the world have thus been perceived as institutions that spur differentiation and hierarchisation, consecrate capacities as legitimate competences and socialise the student to being at ease with privilege (Bourdieu, 1996; Denord et al., 2020; Khan, 2011; Mangset, 2017).

These functions draw international students to travel long distances to attend elite universities overseas, as they aspire to amass “institutionalised transnational social capital” (Börjesson, 2005). In the decades leading up to the pandemic, the number of international students in prestigious universities in the anglophone world had made up a sizeable proportion of student populations. Table 1 illustrates from recent enrolment data, for example, the percentage of international students (undergraduate and postgraduate) in four prestigious universities in the US and UK.

Table 1. Proportion of international students, out of the entire student population, enrolled in prestigious anglophone universities (2019)²

University	Proportion of international students	Proportion of international students from Asian countries
Stanford University	26%	56%
Cornell University	23%	74%
University of Oxford	45%	32%
University of Cambridge	42%	35%

Even though the proportion of international students relative to the whole student population is lower for US universities than their UK counterparts, the percentage of international students from Asian countries is much larger. For example, Cornell’s international student population is made up of 74% students from Asian countries. In Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge), the international student population made up almost half of the entire student body, with students from Asia composing a third of the international population. Overall, the share of international students from Asian countries in total student populations of these four universities average at 15%. Together, these enrolment statistics illustrate a transnational educational pathway that has been traversed by students from Asian countries to prestigious universities in the anglophone world.

Early ramifications of the pandemic on student mobility pathways from Asian to anglophone countries

Since the pandemic unravelled, research focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on international education has intensified. Forecasts, opinions, and rapid surveying of factors that influence students’ decisions to study abroad have been useful for offering scholars of student mobility a sense of prevailing sentiments. Ongoing research on the consequences of the pandemic, not limited to stalled student mobility, is revealing, for example, the changing aspirations of student migrants from Asian countries (Mok et al., 2021). Yet, as we know from earlier research, the need to go beyond offering interpretations of student mobility with individual decisions or preferences, to examining national and organisational differences, is crucial for understanding the shape and inertia of mobility flows (Findlay et al., 2012).

My interest in looking into a particular segment of transnational higher education during this pandemic is not coincidental. Since 2012, I have been researching the use of elite transnational educational pathways for a system of sponsored mobility that has been reliant on its future elites receiving training in prestigious higher educational institutions abroad. Specifically, I have examined educational pathways from Singapore to Oxbridge, two universities that have hosted a large number of Singaporeans in past decades, analysing the various kinds of institutions that enable these journeys, and understanding how the aspirations of those who traversed these pathways have been shaped (Ye & Nylander, 2015, 2020; Ye, 2016, 2021). Relatedly, I have been analysing the role of government scholarships in facilitating these pathways, as well as how elite, upper-secondary schools in Singapore have been a conduit for sending students to the most prestigious universities in the anglophone world. The use of highly selective, transnational educational pathways has therefore, in the history of contemporary Singapore, been central to the preparation of its future leaders in the spheres of business and government.

It is from this position of previous research that I have been compelled to ask how the global health crisis might alter the logics of student mobility in this narrow segment of “elite” transnational higher education. A key process in this endeavour is to examine how hosting universities have responded to international students, under these extraordinary conditions of uncertainty and what the pandemic might help us to “see” in terms of destabilising the established social order. As an early reflection on the impact of COVID-19 on global higher education, this text should be read accordingly as such. Despite the expeditious nature of such an analysis, I aim to ground my analysis presented here with a theoretical framework that is well suited for examining situations of uncertainty and moments of instability, which I present below.

Tests, critical capacities and changing regimes of student mobility

Guiding the analysis theoretically in this research endeavour are ideas gleaned from the sociology of conventions and testing. In a special issue, the sociologist David Stark (2020) identified three aspects of testing and being tested in pandemic times. He argues that tests are often proxies that stand for something. They are critical moments that stand out due to how they disrupt the flow of ordinary social life. When put to the test, institutions or actors are assessed on whether they stand up to the challenge (Stark, 2020). The notion of organisations and individuals being tested, during moments of crisis or situations of indeterminacy, is valuable in aiding us to examine this critical moment. Since the outcomes of a test (épreuve) are never known, tests assign uncertainty a significant place and require the capacity of people to confront these situations of dispute and decide on their value (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2000). Crises have begun to be systematically considered in the arena of international education studies. These challenging, critical moments bear a unique characteristic of transgressing borders since their resolution involves both sending and host countries (Ramia, 2021).

The theoretical utility of analysing tests is rooted in the sociology of critical capacity that asserts that the human capacity to agree, dispute, or criticise is central to social relationships (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). Difficult questions about morality and moral judgements in challenging times, and how they affect actions and relationships, have been central to the COVID-19 crisis (Luft, 2020). By wrapping this analysis around the moment of a test, as well as paying attention to critical moments whereby value frameworks are questioned, this paper aims to be theoretically generative for contributing to ongoing research on the institutional work around elite transnational education’s maintenance and disruption (Dansou & Langley, 2012).

The framework on “orders of worth” proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot – in one of their seminal texts, although published decades ago – is relevant and useful today in offering us the tools to disentangle various modes of evaluation, relations and qualification that describe an array of justifications (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006). In this framework, six common worlds (or cités) were identified, whereby justifications follow the guiding principles of inspiration, fame, the domestic, the civic, the market or the industrial order. The inspired world emphasises creativeness and nonconformity; domestic stresses esteem, trust and authority; civic emphasises collective interest and solidarity; opinion, or fame, lifts up recognition and what is renowned; market is focused on price, exchange, desire and purchasing power; and the industrial is concerned with productivity, efficiency and expertise (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, p. 368).

Each of these worlds provides actors with a mode for deciding or assigning worth or value, as well as for justifying any given situation or arrangement. This framework has been a central analytical heuristic within the sociology of conventions and testing, where within this research programme, uncertainty is viewed as an inherent condition of contemporary societies (Potthast, 2017). Theoretical tools gleaned from conventions theory are increasingly being applied in a variety of cases in the area of international education and mobility studies. For example, the framework on different orders of worth has been used for analysing academic mobility in the European Research Area (Leemann, 2018) as well as quality in education export (Juusola & Räihä, 2020).

Other research approaches have identified types of logics that characterise the global space of international students, such as the logics of market, proximity and colonial linkages (Börjesson, 2017). Yet, the pandemic has caused a rupture in these pathways of mobility, raising pertinent questions about what kinds of logics governed (or will govern) the response to halting or reinstating mobility, and post-pandemic futures. In this paper, I set out to focus on just one, small segment of international higher education: that of elite transnational educational pathways. While complete data on actual student mobility trends might not be possible to analyse at this juncture, it is possible to analyse institutional responses towards international students, and how that could shape or influence future mobility patterns.

Methodological considerations: analysing public institutional responses during a crisis

There are risks to studying and writing about unfolding events during a crisis. The methodological challenge of analysing things that are evolving and not-yet fully formed is, however, a perennial problem for any researcher examining change (Abbott, 2001; Hughes, 1971). Additionally, in the event of a crisis, there are ethical dilemmas of collecting student voices in situ, which although are extremely vital for helping us to understand what is going on during these critical moments, has to be done with extreme care and ethical considerations due to the challenges individuals may be encountering in a pandemic. In this paper, I focus on institutional responses during the commencement period of the crisis, where there was no modus operandi or clear schema for universities to follow or imitate. As a novel and complex problem plays out, institutional responses represent a public-facing communicative worth. More importantly, examining how centuries-old educational institutions coped with the tensions of wanting to retain international students alongside coordinating other organisational demands in the context of an unravelling global health crisis can illuminate what they stand for, what stood out in their responses, and how they stand up to the challenge of this test (Stark, 2020).

For this study, and drawing from my own research experience in this area, I focus on countries that Singaporean elite students typically travel to for higher education, namely the US and the UK. Historically, the two most attended universities amongst top-tier scholarship recipients over a 40-year period are the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and the two most attended US universities have been Stanford and Cornell (Ye, 2021). As illustrated in Table 1 earlier, besides hosting cohorts of Singaporean students, they also host large numbers of students from other Asian countries. These four anglophone universities and their responses constitute the sample in this study, but also for generalising more broadly about elite transnational education.

All of these universities had set up public COVID-19 microsites as the crisis unravelled, which serve as useful portals and displays for the institution’s official response. I examined publicly available letters and updates from these microsites, focusing on texts that are related specifically to international students.³ The period of examination was from March 2020 up until end-August 2020, spanning the first school closure and suspension of classes up until discussions of opening for the next academic term, representing an intense period of uncertainty where justifications for major institutional decisions were being enacted. These responses were set against a timeline, and analysed iteratively with the framework on the orders of worth as a theoretical heuristic (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The paper analyses public institutional responses, but considers various levels of actors involved in these processes such as states, in relation to migration policy and geopolitics; and students, in relation to the management of their migratory experiences.

Findings

For each university as a confined environment, there exists a “plurality of interfering orders of worth” where different regimes of justification coincide, clash or combine (Potthast, 2017, p. 342). A theoretical framework that fosters the identification of multiple logics is expedient for this current analysis. This is not least due to the dynamic interplay of various conventions inherent in different kinds of “prestige paradigms” in higher education such as exclusion versus inclusion; the global versus the local; and market logics versus sustainability (Blackmore, 2015). Specifically, the civic, market and domestic regimes were found to be most prominent in the responses directed towards international students. As described earlier, the civic world is evaluated through collective interest; its relation is about solidarity and the way it is qualified is through the attainment of equality (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, pp. 368–370). The next common world, that of the market, has a mode of evaluation anchored in pricing. In this regime, the focus is on exchange, as qualified through desire and purchasing power. Finally, in the domestic regime, worth is dependent on trust and authority. In the Findings section to follow, the various regimes of justifications that were identified as most salient at the commencement of the crisis will be presented.

The civic regime

From the onset of the outbreak, international students were singled out as a group that the universities and colleges would look out for. Across institutional responses, international students were welcomed to remain on campuses, while everyone else was instructed to leave as soon as possible. For example, in a Stanford letter sent out by their President in March, it was written that those international students who cannot get back to their countries, as well as homeless students and students who have health or safety risks, would be prioritised campus housing. At Cornell, the Vice Provost for International Affairs implored staff to “remember the needs” of international students. Noting that students are returning to over 115 countries where governmental responses to the pandemic were “highly variable”, staff were reminded that international students were facing complicated immigration issues, varying access to technology and public health infrastructure, that will challenge their ability to travel and study (Wolford, 2020).

Later in July 2020, when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced guidelines forbidding international students from remaining on campus if classes were held virtually, the President of Cornell sent out a letter titled, “Standing with our international students” to express disappointment with these guidelines. She further expressed that the university was supporting litigation that was going to be filed by other US universities to prohibit enforcement of the ICE order. She emphasised that the policy was “senseless” and “unfair” and that it ran counter to all that Cornell stood for as a “global academic community” (Pollack, 2020). A week later when ICE rescinded the order, she celebrated the “significant victory” for all Cornellians and for international students in the country.

Across the Atlantic, UK ministers sent out letters to international students to canvass for their support in this initial period of the crisis. The Minister of State for Universities wrote in April 2020, emphasising that the UK government “recognises” and “appreciates” the positive social, cultural and economic contribution that international students offer to the country, and that they

… enrich the university experience for all students, bringing greater diversity to university and college campuses, as well as fresh ideas and new perspectives. This cultural exchange helps build life-long friendships, as well as laying the foundations for future networks, and important business, political and diplomatic bridges. (Donelan, 2020)

At Cambridge, the Vice-Chancellor lifted up this piece of communication, emphasising that is a sentiment he fully shares (Toope, 2020b). Although racialisation of, and racism towards, international students predates the pandemic (Brown & Jones, 2013), these letters sought to stress that the government would look out for the safety of international students, particularly after a series of xenophobic attacks on Asian students in the UK drew serious concerns among enrolled and prospective students.

Despite communication from state and university institutions to emphasise collective interest and solidarity, some international students in the UK expressed disappointment with responses directed towards them, ahead of the autumn term and universities reopening. This expression was most vividly represented in a public, open letter signed by almost a thousand international students and student representatives from Oxford, directed to the Vice-Chancellor, documenting frustrations and disappointment at how the university had responded to them through the crisis. The students highlighted, in particular, the lack of uniformity in the measures they were instructed to take due to the decentralised collegiate system, causing significant confusion for the international student body and inability for them to coordinate and support each other through this challenging period (International Student Representatives, 2020). A key point in the open letter was that they felt that the university had prioritised market logic over their wellbeing.

The market regime

Already in April 2020, concerns were expressed about university finances and how the anticipated fall in the number of new international students arriving for the next academic year will have implications for budgets. The Oxford Vice-Chancellor in an update wrote that, “Like everyone else, we are operating under conditions of considerable uncertainty so we don’t yet know the scale of the losses we will face” (Richardson, 2020). As noted above, international students in Oxford expressed frustration in their open letter with the university and colleges’ responses, and asked that the institution not seek to generate “short-term profit” from them through certain policies such as requiring them to return to campus in the autumn term, but also charging them for mandatory self-isolation in college residences. They asked that the University be accountable for the consequences of these decisions, and stated that it was irresponsible to require students “to return as usual while not making the appropriate preparations for this to be a reality” (International Student Representatives, 2020).

Calling the institutional response to international students “underwhelming”, they compared their university’s policies for international students returning to campus to another university in the city, contrasting the ways in which their wellbeing had been acknowledged. They also emphasised how international students – as compared to their local peers – faced outstanding circumstances in the pandemic due to border closings, flight cancellations, and long mandatory quarantine periods. The students ended the letter with a strong statement:

… we urge you to consider that no matter what is decided, the University will be at a financial loss. Cutting losses should not be the main objective, but defending its long-term prospects: its ability to attract world-renowned academics, its global reputation, and its great diversity. (International Student Representatives, 2020)

The international students’ concerns towards the institution’s COVID-19 response highlight how they were aware of their commodification and the various logics that are available to be prioritised. By evoking what is at stake when the university prioritises market worth over reputational and civic worth, the open letter seems to imply that how the university responds to this test of the pandemic will showcase what it stands up for.

Under circumstances of extreme uncertainty, rapidly changing migration policies, and the continuous spread of the virus, formulating policies around international students that are safe, fair and financially feasible has been a notorious dilemma for universities. By examining institutional responses, some universities appear to have displayed “innovation” in managing the fluctuating elements of academic mobility during the crisis such that international students could continue to feel safe in enrolling for the next academic term. For example, in June 2020, Cornell, launched a Study Away option for eligible international students. In contrast to the cancelled Study Abroad programmes that traditionally promoted exchange out of the country, the Study Away option allows international students to live and study at a local campus in their country or region. When the programme was launched, there were 16 locations available to host these students who were residents or citizens in these countries; 11 of these locations were in Asia.

In this arrangement, students take a mix of online and in-person classes and participate in co-curricular activities with their peers while having access to facilities and services made available by these local universities. While the eligibility of this option is limited to students who have citizenship or residency in these locations, as well as meeting the requirement of being in “good academic standing”, these students continue to pay their regular Cornell tuition fees – on top of required fees expected from the local university (Global Cornell, 2020). In considering the wellbeing and safety of international students, the market regime, anchored in pricing, desire and purchasing power, is still present. The enactment of this institutional response raises interesting questions about the global and the local in international student mobility, particularly when a prestigious university is dependent on local university partnerships to host their students.

The domestic regime

Another regime of justification that was salient in the institutional responses was the domestic regime, where the characteristic relation is trust, and the qualification is authority (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). Migration and visa issues dominated the communication with international students during the peak of the pandemic. For example, international students were instructed to follow travel guidelines of the country or state their university was located in, as well as their own home country’s mandates for citizens abroad. At times, these different domestic regulations conflicted, often leading to confusion, as acknowledged by a response from Cambridge early on as the crisis developed in March. For example, while the UK government had told people to avoid all travel, students were receiving conflicting advice from their home governments that were recalling their children home immediately.

The question of who “represents” the virus is thrust into the foreground. As Stark (2020, p. 73) notes, the “crisis of the pandemic – a medical problem, a public health problem – is also a crisis of representation”. The shutting of borders and its impact on student migration has been an area of deep interest to actors promoting global exchange through higher education (British Council, 2021; DAAD, 2021). The authority of domestic governmental agencies is a potent force in shaping the kinds of responses universities can have with regard to international students. As noted earlier, when migration or public health agencies enact certain regulations, universities have to abide, or take the road of contestation.

Unique to these elite universities examined here is how student experiences have traditionally been shaped by the residency requirement, with recurring formal and informal organisational rituals enacted in dining halls, or regular ceremonies that perpetuate exclusivity and erect symbolic boundaries (Binder & Abel, 2019; Dacin et al., 2010). Due to the public health situation not improving after the summer of 2020, Stanford had to change their provisional decision about welcoming undergraduate students back on campus for the autumn term. In a letter expressing regret, the President noted:

… what makes Stanford a special place is embodied in the in-person interactions we have here – in the residences, with faculty at office hours, walking with friends across campus, in our student organizations and artistic venues and sporting events … Each of us embodies this Stanford spirit, and I am confident that we can sustain the collective energy of our extraordinary community throughout this crisis, until we can be present together once again on the Farm. (Tessier-Lavigne, 2020)

This extract emphasises an affectionate longing for the community and collective spirit that the university had developed on-site, on-campus, and if undergraduate students were welcomed back on campus, it is significant they should be able to live out that experience. But not being able to guarantee that experience due to the necessity to adhere to local policies and public health guidelines, the domestic regime clearly takes centre stage.

Contesting orders of worth in elite transnational educational pathways

In morally complex situations, organisations are forced to confront ambiguous questions of what kinds of practices can be considered legitimate, and what types of criteria can be used to establish moral legitimacy (Reinecke et al., 2017). In these situations, the construction of moral legitimacy takes place via communicative processes between the organisation and its publics (Reinecke et al., 2017). Using a theoretical framework on orders of worth as a heuristic for analysing an intense situation of instability and uncertainty, this paper examined the test of the pandemic on elite transnational education and how institutions responded to erupting tensions due to conflicting regimes of justification. The analysis revealed contesting orders of worth between states, institutions and students, as clashes between market, civic and domestic regimes exert significant pressures on organisational efforts to coordinate and cope during this critical moment.

Social situations often involve the intersection of different logics of action and orders of justification; in contesting over what is appropriate, one regime prevails or compromises may be enacted (Leemann, 2018, p. 861). The test on elite transnational education examined here also draws attention to the friction between individual responsibilisation and collective duty through a form of mobility that is conventionally perceived as a private sojourn for private gain (Ye, 2020). International students at prestigious universities, a group commonly viewed as possessing a degree of privilege, are now subjected to mobility setbacks. In the case of elite transnational educational pathways, the pandemic majorly disrupted the sought-after residential experience. When international students are prevented from entering their university destination and schools have to go virtual, possibilities for consecratory rituals to be enacted are limited, forcing institutions to search for ways in which they recreate that experience as a part of their quest for certainty.

The test of the pandemic on elite transnational education pathways can also be viewed as a stress test on elite universities and associated institutions. As Stark (2020, p. 84) notes, a stress test can be thought of as testing the robustness of an organisation and that “while the test results definitely matter, most consequential is what results from the test”. Arguably, how universities have reacted at the height of this pandemic as it unravelled will have an impact that will continue to shape interactions with, and actions of international students, which might then have consequences for how, and whom, these highly selective institutions might recruit and retain in years to come.

Earlier accounts of student mobility emphasise market logics that come with a deficit narrative of the international student as an “economic contributor” (Lomer & Mittelmeier, 2020). In this test situation, we see how, despite the prevalence of the market regime, two other orders of worth – the domestic and civic – surface prominently, suggesting a potential rearrangement of logics in elite transnational educational mobility. The discussion on the civic regime in student mobility connects to recent, timely discussions, from critical perspectives, on the need to rethink the ethics and politics of international student mobility, give attention to international student security and well-being, and for educational internationalisation to become more socially sustainable and equitable (Marginson, 2012; Ramia et al., 2013; Yang, 2020). In an important recent paper, Yang (2020) argued that while previous scholarship has been exploring international student mobility ethics and politics implicitly, there is now greater urgency to explicitly address these issues.

Worlds in motion: looking ahead

This analysis raises pertinent questions such as what will changes in the elite transnational education landscape mean for international higher education in general, as well as for local admission and enrolment rates at the tertiary level. Some scholars have suggested, for example, that if overseas students “stay away”, universities can enrol more disadvantaged people (Mountford-Zimdars, 2020). Will the limiting of international students result in less or more inequalities and how, and at what level, will that be evaluated? Also, what are the implications of this test on countries with systems of sponsored mobility that have historically depended on legitimising local elites through studying in prestigious universities abroad? Could this test bring out the role of local institutions of higher learning in this mobility story (Ye, 2021)?

A 2020 survey of students from Mainland China and Hong Kong found that 84% of respondents were not keen to study abroad after the pandemic (Mok et al., 2021). For those who will travel abroad, their interest is now directed to studying in Asian regions, indicating a significant shift in the mobility aspirations of international students. Higher education institutions in the region have tried to leverage this opportunity by offering appealing PhD scholarships to attract students, who have been offered places in top universities abroad, into their universities instead (Mok et al., 2021). Additionally, in the award of public service government scholarships in Singapore that has traditionally financed students to study abroad in elite universities in the anglophone world, the year the pandemic unravelled in 2020, the lowest number of scholarships was disbursed in recent history (Ang, 2020; Ye & Nylander, 2020).

Factors such as the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics in Europe and the US have compelled observers to predict that the dramatic era of higher education internationalisation might be coming to an end (Altbach & De Wit, 2018). The slowdown here might refer to pathways from the Global South to the Global North more specifically, and was already projected ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the emergent emphasis on the role of domestic institutions of higher education, there appears to be pressure asserted to ensure more inclusive internationalisation, to emphasise the civic regime in international students’ affairs, as well as to rebuild international higher education by addressing social justice and sustainability (Glass et al., 2021; Sidhu et al., 2021).

While it might not be entirely possible to disentangle which mechanisms propel the civic emphasis on the justification and organisation of student mobility, the consequences of the pandemic, as well as concerns about slowing student mobility that are tied to economic concerns, might contribute to this temporal shift in modes of evaluation and qualification. Through this analysis, we are also reminded that educational institutions have, to a large extent, borrowed the ability to accord “worth” to individuals from the state. Even for centuries-old higher educational institutions, without the active involvement of states promoting, facilitating and enabling student mobility, aspects of the international education market become impaired. The institution’s ability to certify worth to international students is limited, and this has been made evident through the test of a global pandemic.

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.).