by Cheryl Yu & Susan Fang
In 2023, there are around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.1 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers, and Hindi and Spanish account for the third and fourth most widespread languages currently.
We all know the developed Western English-speaking countries, the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, have been the leading players in the international education arena to attract international students from Asia, MENA and the rest of the world.
During the last few years, the Greek government started to put the internationalisation of universities on the national agenda. Greece, a country with 24 universities, had 23,735 students who were enrolled in UK TNE programmes according to the HESA data (21/22). Being within the top 10 countries of UK TNE-hosting countries, only 25 UK HEIs have TNE with more than 50 students despite that 70 out of 162 HEIs in the UK have some TNE presence in Greece.
Metropolitan College, the largest TNE provider in Greece with over 10,000 TNE students, has been working with UK, US and Switzerland partners to deliver university courses over 20 years with 8 campuses across Greece. In Greece, private education is not given university status and cannot be called a university, but a college. Without their degree awarding power, TNE becomes their option to offer degree courses to students; subsequently, 80% of TNE provisions are with private colleges.
Though significant improvements in the policy and regulatory environment are in place, local colleges still perceive TNE as a 'grey area'. While being regulated, it needs more clarity and support. As a private education provider, Metropolitan College has certainly marked its map in the UK, through its 'heavy-weight' TNE provision and strategic direction and investments in research and SDGs which allow its representation on the world's recognisable THE impact ranking. This also brings Greece's higher education under the spotlight of the global arena.
For the last 20 years, the private sector has been the only one that has steered its way to work internationally, through TNE, as a means to gain degree-awarding power when limited support and regulations are available domestically.
Historically, like many other TNE hosting countries, TNE programmes were designed for students from an affluent family but who could not get admitted into state universities due to limited space and competitiveness. TNE was the backup plan and the alternative. However, this has started to change since a few years back. Students choose their degree studies more consciously, proximity to home which offers cheaper living costs, free accommodation and local connections to part-time jobs, and comparable education quality between state and private (international) education.
Unlike the TNE hubs in Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai, the strategic vision of the TNE hub is to 'import' Western education in order to ‘export’ higher education to nearby countries. For both private TNE providers and state universities in Greece, the majority composition of the student population has always been domestic students with a small number of students from Arab countries and Cyprus. Even for the more innovative and entrepreneurial TNE programmes, such as those at Metropolitan College, the international students account for 5-10% of the total student number.
There are a few reasons behind this.
First, the internationalisation of higher education was never on the agenda of state universities until the last few years when the new administration came to power. Local students who go to state universities do not need to pay tuition fees at both UG and PG levels, whereas TNE programmes charge a fee between £3k to £10k for UG and PG programmes, varying among programmes and providers.
Since the new government and new law, a number of new initiatives have been put forward, such as promoting and encouraging TNE collaborations with overseas universities, offering master courses delivered in the English language and charging a fee of £5k a year for a 2-year master's degree, the government-funded and initiated medical courses delivered in English especially targeting international students with reasonable fees (£12k/year) in comparison to other competitors in Europe and the UK. Currently, Greece is actively collaborating with India and looking to attract Indian students to study master's degrees in Greece.
Secondly, like the majority of other European countries where English is not the native tongue, this limits the exposure of the educational provision to non-Greek speakers. Here we do not need to enter the obvious politics of language in the unequal globe. When a prospective international student cannot understand your university's website to be able to learn what you offer as a rudimentary foundation, it is unlikely that they will choose you as a destination to study.
Despite much of the public in Greece speaking English, Greek is the dominating delivery language in the classroom, private, TNE or state universities. Subsequently, international students can only choose the limited degree provision delivered in English, or they come from a country where they speak Greek, like Cyprus.
However, it seems that there is something that other countries can potentially question and learn. How can TNE be delivered in another language rather than the dominating English language?
So what happens if the local native language is widely accepted and encouraged as a medium of instruction for TNE programmes rather than in English? ill this fundamentally challenge the ideology of superior knowledge developed in the West and encourage more people whose first language is English to make more conscious efforts to learn a second language?
Thirdly, we all know that one of the underpinning driving factors of international students to a destination country is also about the potential and opportunities to be able to stay to work in that country as a whole ‘package’. However, European legislation dictates that international graduates have to return to their home countries unless they are also able to secure a job successfully. There is no easy way to master the Greek language in order to find employment locally.
After the financial crisis, Greece opened its door to China and other countries through a golden visa strategy to invest in local property and other industries, so that 'foreigners' could reside legally in Europe, which was not always welcomed by other European countries.
When facing an economic crisis nationally, the geopolitics matter less. However, we also have to argue and recognise that the geopolitics often determines the economics and vice versa. At the same time, politics cannot be separated from ethics which are often selective, normalised by neoliberalism and based on the historically unequal exploitative nature. Geopolitics, economics and ethics are deeply interconnected and intertwined.
With regard to student mobility, UNESCO data shows a 40,395 outbound mobility compared to 22,429 mobility, where Cyprus serves as one of the leading sending and receiving countries as a result of the language. With the new government's awakening to push for the internationalisation of higher education, will the decision to run programmes in English be able to attract international students successfully to the country?
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