Panel Three: Youth Resilience in the Post-COVID World: Education and Action

• Author: John Hunter
• Position: Vice President of Foundation for Law and International Affairs
• Pages: 37-57

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Panel Three: Youth Resilience in the Post-COVID World:

Education and Action1

Chair: John Hunter (Vice President of Foundation for Law and International Affairs)

1. International Higher Education Today

Mathew Johnson

The conversation today is particularly pointing for me. A little later this morning, I went

to a county about 40 miles away, where I would volunteer for the day at a vaccination clinic

distributing vaccination for COVID-19. COVID-19, from my perspective, is emblematic of

some of the challenges and benefits of internationalization. We would not have the vaccine but

for international cooperation at a level never before seen in human history. The case in which

we moved so quickly from diagnosis to treatment to vaccination has never before been seen.

So that is the paradox. Internationalization and globalization come with many wonderful things

and meanwhile generate some of the more challenging parts of human society. I have taken

students to South Africa and Bolivia, Mexico and Scotland, to India and Iceland, Sweden, and

several other places around the world. I have had a career for over 30 years, taking students

abroad with me. I’m a sociologist, and I study the way people organize themselves politically

and how they organize their education systems. Chief and my researchers always explain the

role of higher education institutions in encouraging individuals to be active members of their

society and citizens. I visited my students in India, Bolivia, Mexico, London, Hongkong,

Singapore, Ghana, and many other places after they graduated to see what they have done with

their lives, and over and over again, I was impressed with what a university education provides

for students, in terms of adding to their agency to be change-makers in the world. Later I

became director of the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement, the Carnegie

Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It is probably one of the most influential

foundations, at least well-understood in the higher education framework. For over a hundred

years, it has been involved in things like the credit hour. The dreaded credit hour that now binds

us all. That was really originally a measure of faculty labor, not learning, yet many institutions

frame our learning around credit hours as though that was the magic unit. They were also

responsible for modern tastes pedagogy in law schools, the modern structure of American

Medical education, and many other elements. In 1972, They developed the basic classification

system. The classification system is now used worldwide to differentiate different types of

institutions. Are you originally comprehensive? This categorization was originally designed to

allow researchers to compare institutions in different settings. Fortunately, that categorization

quickly came to a social hierarchy. In 2000, the foundation designed a new classification

system—the elective classification system.

The first elective classification was an elective classification and community engagement.

The foundation wants to remind institutions, and fundamentally we have a public purpose. And

that public purpose can be expressed in different ways. The first way is in community

engagement. So, they build the classification in community engagement which has been

operable in the United States now for 20 years. It is an alternative ranking. It requires a year-

long self-study and to be certified by a panel of researchers. We are running an international

1 This content was transcribed by Shiyun Wang, Yuchen Luo and Ziqiong Deng, all from East China University

of Political Science and Law.

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pilot in Australia and Canada, and five other countries will come on board after COVID-19. It

is an iterative and reciprocal process as we’ve gone international with the classification,

learning about ourselves along the way and changing our own framework in the United States.

Now we are adding new frameworks, a framework for leadership, a framework for racial equity,

and a framework for sustainability. We hope that this type of classification will spread around

the world, emphasizing the public purpose of higher education in terms of international higher

education. For me, there is perhaps no other form that has more public purpose embedded in

it. The power of teaching students in an international location or receiving an international

student here in Albion is amazing. It gives students the opportunities to take a perspective they

have never taken before, learn cultural humility, and understand that the world around them is

really a social construct. And that social construct can be changed, perhaps more than anything

that humanizes others. These things are all prerequisites for a peaceful and collaborative world

in the future. Just as John mentioned, the next generation will have to work very hard on these

things. International students carry a disproportionate share of the cost of higher education in

the United States. Many American institutions have suffered a significant or even fatal

economic blow by not welcoming their international students to the United States. Many US

institutions use the revenue created from their international students to assure access to low-

income US students and so have not been able to welcome those students to campus. Virtual

has been attempted by many of these campuses, but it doesn’t work. There is something

different about being in the smells and sounds, being in the conversation, and the flow of a

different culture that is not capturable in a virtual setting. So, it remains to be seen how these

institutions will recover after COVID-19, but the economic incentive to pull international

students is very high.

COVID-19 is an acute issue, but there are chronic issues we need to take into account as

we think about international education, so I want to leave you three questions. First is the

question of carbon. The next decade will bring more visibility and more public debate about

climate change than ever before. We see changes in our climate and in our world happening all

around us, and public figures taking stands about limiting their own personal carbon footprint,

some refusing to fly, what will institutions do to adapt to a low carbon form of higher education,

and will that limit our access to exchange programs and international travel? Will there be

fewer, but longer trips as some authors have positive where students take a whole year or

perhaps two years in a different location? Will we attempt to develop new virtual solutions that

have yet been insufficient? Will we work towards new transportation options to assure global

mobility? In the United States, the conversation today is about whether or not four years of

university education is the best way for those at the lower rungs of our socioeconomic ladder,

which have been growing over the last few decades, to move forward in the United States an

ever-changing economy. Today, there are many conversations about non-degree programs,

short degrees, work- integrated learning, stackable modular education for six or perhaps more

years to reach which today is done in four. How will we think about that type of learning and

international education? Will international institutions adapt to the economic needs of

American students, or will American students be out of luck? I think for some of us, we are

hoping for the development of a higher education culture that perhaps mirrors the high-tech

world where API now has become the connector point between software programs so that you

can virtually take data from almost any software program to another software program through

API. We need to develop a higher API so that a student in one country can do well in stackable

credentials, can move to another country and do a second stackable credential, can move to a

third country into a third stackable credential, and perhaps move back home and do a fourth

stackable credential and end up with a degree seamlessly moving from institution to institution.

These questions of carbon and flexibility are existential for higher education in the long term.

The last and perhaps most difficult to address is the global rise of right-wing politics in the