Is there a recognised definition for 'international student'?
This post will be a part of a series where I want to discuss this term which is used a lot but is quite ambiguous, while at the same time it impacts how we percieve hundreds of thousands of people.
I started off this idea with a simple query: is there a recognised definition for international student? This was my google search, and as a result I eagerly gobbled up the AI snippet summary… and then I remembered to scroll down, and search beyond the first page…
Why ask this?
The reason I wanted to ask this question is because there are some pretty flagrant disparities in between how students’ statuses are interpreted, and this makes a significant impact on how these students are portrayed in society or structures. In contemporary terms you can imagine this in the way the media discusses their situation or impact, such as on rental markets in places like Dublin, or the rationale for awarding study visas based the the course or length of study. What this means is that ‘international student’ is a policy word, which means that it lacks specificity and is an umbrella term which can be frequently misused to dictate discussions. For me, this makes the word international student open to abuse, and this makes it more than a bit of an issue.
When I was writing about this during my EdD dissertation, I got a caught up in trying to rationalise the best term to use. As I spent so long writing my dissertation, you can probably find stages where I went between international students and students from overseas, which was my chosen term. I didn’t try to argue about it, I just gradually used it more. An amount of this ideation came from a tweet (before it was X) by Vijay Ramjattan - which I currently cannot locate which is kind of typical - who asked if there was a different term we could use to talk about international students. The rationale, I think, is that this term has become particularly racialised and demeaning in western, white majority societies, which I am quite happy to agree with. However, there is a lot more to be said on this, so I will digress with the intention of talking about it more later. In this post, the importance and uses of the term is the focus, and I hope I can get to the point about the challenges behind establishing a set definition.
I’m going to try to set out a few positions on international students and allay their view on the word. While I appreciate that there are many who interact with and have a view on who or what an international student is, this is not an academic review paper which is going to extensively review the literature. Many of my observations will come from what I know already, some snippets from my own work with students, some points taken from government perspectives, and a bit of ad hoc googling. My intention is to start broad and get narrower, but will resist including everything in this single post.
The World Wide View
This is going back a bit, but according to a UNESCO source from 2006, an internationally mobile student has traveled abroad or to another country with the ‘singular objective’ of studying. Importantly, UNESCO step away from the established term and title them internationally Mobile Students, which I think removes the classification away from what has already become an established but ill-defined term. Today, that singular objective has been removed from the definition, but there does seem to be some expectation that these students are solely in higher or post-secondary education More recently, the Criticial Internationalisation Studies Network looks towards the definition of ‘international students’ (their quotation marks - appropriate or not?) as those who travel away from their home country for education in a different country (emphasis mine). Importantly, CISN prioritises the lack of definition as key in their discussion, and follows by emphasising the conflicts present.
Domestic considerations
When we narrow our perspective away from the global sphere and begin to consider individual national interpretations, conflicts emerge which blur the distinction. This blurring is perhaps an aspect of national data collection mechanisms, or possibly for some other reasons. One challenge which compounds this issue is there are multiple interpretations of what is an international student, and these vary between national HE systems, universities, or what I’ll call ‘interest groups’ — essentially bodies formed with supporting internationalisation in some manner or form.
Notable directions the definition include:
Defining international students based only passports status, which may necessitate the need for a visa (Australia)
International students are exclusive titles reserved for students in higher education, while other students may not be categorised (United States)
Note that these are just snippets, but you will see at this level that it is worth taking into consideration the amount of organisations with varying ways of thinking about international students. Some will be well thought through, while others will take much for granted. This is part of the reason why I feel that it is necessary to clearly define international students. Importantly, many of these bodies have a lot of control over awarding visas, so the description and stipulations within are highly relevant.
Ideas and definitions in international education tend to have a single direction, which is top-down. Those countries which attract the most students, also generate the most revenue, produce significant research in academic circles, and are also perhaps the biggest players in the expansive transnational education. That these all speak English does not go unnoticed. This has led to more countries, notably in Europe, attempting to build lasting or sustainable systems. While some still rely on students coming to study in French or German (just as obvious examples because they’re the other big platers in European HE). This top-down direction means that it is infrequent to find understandings of what are international students which have not originated from a major provider of spaces for international students.
With all that said, this still leaves the understanding and classification open and quite disjointed. With some caveats due to the nature of this source, it appears there could be over 170. Acknowledging the presence of so much variety amplifies the fact that, even if many are repetitive or depend on individual or case-by-case circumstances. If a term can so frequently defined, it can be frequently abused or manipulated to serve other ends in the media or by government, for example. In these situations, the term ‘international student’ is an umbrella term which is frequently utilised to dictate the direction and content of bigger societal discussions.