Characterizing Indian Students Pursuing Global Higher Education

Abstract

One might argue that an Indian student entering higher education is faced with a critical question-Where to study, in India or abroad? With a gross enrollment ratio of around 20% in the tertiary sector, only one in five in the 18 to 23 age group of a 140 million eventually gets to answer the question. But those who do, and whose numbers are rapidly increasing, pursue higher education abroad in response to a range of choices presented not only by increasing domestic provision in higher education but also through increased international collaborations (for instance, through branch campuses) that Indian students can avail of without leaving the country. As a result, this presents problems for characterizing the Indian student pursuing higher education abroad. By placing emphasis on the multiple transitions across spaces and tensions between "controlled" and "emergent" mobilities, this article sets out a conceptual framework with which to understand potential pathways into higher education, so that policy makers and educational providers can better understand international mobility in the Indian higher education sector.

Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship

“…The global imaginary of "scaling up" and the "global guarantee" work to cohere students as outward-oriented good Samaritans who obtain global-ness through education; this is in contrast to the lived experience of student activists, who state that they "do not want to integrate into a violent system." Here we see the paradoxical framing of diversity and cosmopolitanism in university spaces: it is imagined as a global good that creates modern and employable youth, but the university is also a site of exclusion for marginalised young people (Cheng, 2014;Findlay et al, 2011;Fong, 2011;Gopinath, 2014;Jeffrey, 2010;Parker et al, 2018;Raghuram, 2013). The institutional deployment of diversity (and global-ness) can be a mechanism for the protection of the institution (Ahmed, 2012).…”

Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future

“…Higher education is a site where contestations around class, gender, and caste play out and a vector through which young people and their parents seek future security, class mobility, and political influence. 39 For youth from the Indian Himalayas, this experience of the contact zone is overlaid not only by the lights and excitement of the city but also of feeling overwhelmed by spicy food, the need to haggle, and the crowds. In the narratives of young students, stories of the first arrival in Delhi, Jammu, or Chandigarh evoke the language of international travel or diasporic exile.…”