A friend of mine once told me, “If a school calls itself an International School, it isn’t.”
Developing countries around the world have imitated the Western model of higher education. This imitation can go to extremes, such as the graduation procession of the professors in their caps and gowns (even accompanied by Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”), or the curricula full of Western history, art, and culture.
In some respects, this imitation is desirable, especially when students want to continue their higher education abroad, where they must transfer local credits and majors that mesh with the Western programs. Even if a student wants to transfer from one African university to another, the Western system of credits, used by most African universities, provides a consistent framework for the transfer.
However, maintaining the illusion of internationalization can get downright silly. Most of the universities in my country spend a lot of money and effort visiting foreign universities, where they can sign a meaningless Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which they can then post on their campus entrances, websites, and social media pages as “Our Partners”. Many universities post dozens of these official-looking documents, although none of them have ever resulted in any exchange of programs.
Let me describe some of the lengths to which one university, with which I am quite familiar, has gone to promote a false image of internationalization. ‘International Students’ (but all local students) are admitted into a program, ostensibly English-medium, which can lead to transfer to an American university. Applying students must take an English test, but no one ever fails, and about half of the students are at beginner level of English and cannot understand an English lecture or read an English text.
To maintain the international image, all courses require texts and syllabi officially used in American universities, usually 600-800 pages in length and in an academic English incomprehensible to the students. At present, the university described has no international lecturers, so that all courses are taught in the local language, even for TESOL and English Literature majors. Students emerge with a bachelor’s degree in TESOL without a knowledge of English.
Recently, this same university is promoting, with great fanfare and hoopla, an MOU promising transfer into an American university after year II. One problem: students must achieve a certain TOEFL score to study in English in America, but those students are not properly informed of this requirement, and will be unable to pass the TOEFL. Hence, there will probably be zero students in the program (well, maybe 1 or 2), but the CEO has stated publicly, “It doesn’t matter whether there are any students; this is good for our international image.” There you have it: it’s all about image, not about education.
In order to facilitate the above agreement, the university had to revamp its entire curriculum to dovetail with that of the American university. All students (perhaps none of whom will actually go the the US) are now required to take an Art History course (purportedly in English, but not really), with the usual 600-page unreadable American textbook. In order to introduce this course into the curriculum, some other course had to go. They chose to omit a really useful course in Critical Thinking to be replaced by the Art History.
This kind of fakery is going on all over the developing world. The result is selling students the dream of international education while providing little education useful to most students.