Why Internationalization?

There are several reasons of why HEIs desire to internationalize their service. The rationales are (De Wit and Knight 1997; Knight, 1997) clustered into four groups to propose a useful framework of the issue. Those are political, economic, academic and socio-cultural rationales.

Knight argues that (2002: 3) the use of internationalization has been more closely linked to the academic value of international activities rather than to the economic motive.

The each of the rationales briefly designates that academic means including the enhancement of the international professionals of institutions and reputation, economic or financial means

including the recruitment of fee-paying international students as a source of institutional revenue, cultural and social means create an environment that allows an international understanding, and political means educating the next generation of global leaders (Callan, 2000).

The four different approaches are mainly being used to describe the concept of internationalization. Those are activity approach, competency approach, ethos approach and process approach. The first one promotes activities such as curriculum, student/faculty exchange, technical assistance and international students. The second one emphasizes the development of skills, knowledge, attitudes and values in students, faculty and staff in order to develop internationally knowledgeable and intercultural skilled human resource. The third one emphasizes the creation of a culture or climate that values and supports international and intercultural perspectives and initiatives. The fourth one stresses integration or infusion of an international and intercultural dimension into teaching, research and service through a combination of a wide range of activities, policies and procedures (Qing, 2003;251). In this taxanomy the leading approach which has closer coherence with the definition of the internationalization is the fourth one. In AYU, the presence of various Turkic students from different countries enables the last three approaches, but the lack of student and faculty exchange with other external universities and lack of student mobility impair the first approach.

In addition, there are three different models presented in attempt to capture the diverse approaches to the internationalization of a university. The first one is competitive model which introducing international content into curricula and other elements of campus life is chiefly a means to make students, the institutions and the country more competitive in the global economic market place. The second one is liberal model identifying the primary goal of the internationalization as self-development in a changing world and/or global education for human relations and citizenship. The third model is social transformation model which suggest that the most important goal of internationalization is to give students a deeper awareness of international and intercultural issues related to equity and justice, and to give them the tools to work actively and critically towards social transformation (Wagner, 1991). The post-Soviet era necessitated the development of individual skills and qualifications in order to obtain competency in the transition economies. Therefore, AYU more fits into the social transformation model and less into the competitive model.

Similarly, it is argued by (OECD, 2004a: 295) that there are four mutually exclusive approaches to cross-border higher education. Those are mutual understanding, skilled migration, revenue-generating and capacity building approaches. It is discussed that unlike the first approach which is more prevalent in the most countries than other approaches, some countries uses cross-border education as a means to attract a skilled workforce into their knowledge economy (skilled migration approach) and sometimes, additionally, to generate export revenue to the education sector (revenue-generating approach). On the other hand, emerging economies also use imports of cross-border education services as a means of building their capacity in higher education, (capacity building approach). In that sense, AYU more fits into the last approach. Budak argued that the contribution of AYU is higher to Kazakh higher education system rather than to the Turkish one. In fact, the expansion of international HEIs in all Central Asian republics designates more to the capacity-building approach.

It is argued by Wende (2001: 433) that in the period after the Second World War and in the de-colonization period in particular, political and cultural rationales were basic arguments for internationalization, but in the 1980s, the academic rationale of internationalization as a means to improve the quality of education and research become more prevalent. Recently, international labor competence and economic competitiveness, i.e. economic rationale has obtained greater importance.

The developed countries involved more in the process of the internationalization. They compete for academic staff, research funding and oversea students. English-speaking countries are widely active in seeking to attract those students as a way of earning exports and income for their HEIs, such as in Ireland “internationalization” became an issue of strategy document for the national interests (OECD, 2004b). Such as, in order to increase the quality level of tertiary education, the Dutch Government owned internationalization as an educational policy (OECD, 1996: 8).

Unlike economic and academic rationale, political rationales refers to the mission of AYU in regards to serving for overall Turkic people, and socio-cultural rationale attracts diverse students and allows them to internalize Yesevi principles. Thus more understand and to familiar each other, more respect to others’ culture and language.