University internationalization: an approach from comparative education with a critical pedagogy focus

Traducción sujeta a revisión. Original en español

Luis Bonilla-Molina [1]

1. The power of internationally comparative critical studies

The arrival of capitalism, especially in its industrial phase, marked a trend toward the globalization of the economy, politics, culture, and society; the dominant world system (Wallerstein, 2004) required—and now even more so in its financialization phase—the interconnection of all spheres of civic life.

In the case of comparative education, understanding school and university systems involved advancing paradigmatically towards understanding the impact of the dynamics of the prevailing mode of production in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), starting from the reconciliation between history and comparison (Caruso & Tenorth, 2011), highlighting the externalization of the place of enunciation of public policies in the sector and the interdependence of its actions with the set of market logics.

This transnationalization of university studies was—and is—only possible if one starts from a proper understanding of the logic of appropriation in deep and diverse cultural structures. That is, by understanding the similarities in the evolution of internationalization, but especially its differences and singularities, as appropriate to the uneven and combined development (Novack, 1974) of late capitalism (Mandel, 1962). In fact, around 1800, when comparison with a scientific rank was conceived as a method for exploring human—social—phenomena and was used by anthropology, linguistics, and law, comparison currently corresponds to the current state of a world-society and the questions linked to its pluralization. Without a comparative perspective, the world cannot be understood or transformed. (Caruso & Tenorth, 2011, p. 16)

The risk of comparison was to attempt to assume a new form of totality that did not take into account the singularities and their impact on the whole homogenizing movement, that is, to ignore the impact of the resistances (Giroux, 2004) and contradictions inherent in the dominant field of educational policies on the construction and modeling of university reality. Approaches that incorporated the dialectic between the global and the local (Arnove, 2000), as well as cultural studies (Hoggart, 1957), contributed to resolving this risk.

Therefore, the distance between the empirical and the theoretical should be methodologically resolved in the process of conceptual, interpretive and new theory construction, which implied renewing the role of experience in educational research (Potts, 2010), as well as the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches (FAIRBROTHER, 2010), an effort in which the work of the Humboldt University research program on educational internationalization, led by Jurgen Scheriewer, was fundamental.

Specifically, the notion of a global education system (Schriewer, 2011) allows us to understand university studies within the framework of changing interrelations , fraught with tensions between power relations (Torres, 2015). In this context, formulations on the link between the cosmopolitan and the national (Sobe, 2011), the genealogy of books (Roldán, 2011), and the flows of educational knowledge (Novoa et al., 2011) were particularly significant.

This opened up the possibility of understanding public policies in education differently , especially for universities, within a broader framework than the local and national, but also the ways in which the singular influences macro definitions. The notions of significant experiences, international reform trends, the crisis in university education, the challenges facing HEI institutions in facing the future, training and employability, and institutional knowledge and evaluation became fields of study for understanding the present and the trends in university change, especially given the implications of educational transfer as a political transfer (Steiner-Khamsi, 2011).

2. The need to clarify the analytical frameworks used to understand public policies

The comparative study approach to university public policies involves specifying and determining the units of analysis . In this regard, the comparison of spaces (Manzon, 2010) recognizes different perspectives; Bray and Thomas (1995) use the cube figure to graph the interaction of these units, while Bereday (1968) – cited by Mark Bray – identifies four analytical moments: description (pedagogical data), interpretation (evaluation of the pedagogical data from the historical, cultural, political and social dimensions). At the same time that Bray and Thomas privilege the State-province relationship in their analyses, they reconsider the use of the “comparative cube” (Bonilla-Molina, 2014) with six faces (classroom, classroom-institution, classroom-surrounding community-region, classroom-nation, classroom-geopolitics), which privilege studies from the concrete impact on teaching-research-extension, which enable more precise analytical inputs to understand the hegemonic and standardizing tendencies in education.

The comparison of systems (Bray & Kai, 2010) is based on Allport’s (1995, p. 469) definition of integrated -homogeneous- and differentiated systems -which tend towards the multiplicity of structures that coexist, not always merged or complementary- from which it is possible to advance in the comparison of curricular models, didactic approaches, planning mechanisms, evaluation proposals, definitions and management styles, which interact with enrollment, continuation, integration with the labor market and indicators of the institutional evaluative culture.

The comparison of time (Sweeting, 2010) proposes a dialogue between personal and institutional dimensions, identifying distinct temporal moments between them. This entails specifying the forms of history that prevail in comparative studies in university education. Sweeting identifies the typologies of pedagogical doctrines (influential educators), the constitutive elements of institutionality (orthodoxy), the tensions between official thinking and criticisms (controversial productions), the impact of political positions on the implementation of common policies (such as decentralization, centralization, autonomy), anthologies (substitutes for archives), and social histories of education as sources of study.
For its part, the comparison of cultures (Mason, 2010) demands cultural genealogy, an assessment of the impact of national culture on the construction of States, the forms that education has taken within the framework of national culture, the center-periphery relationship in educational culture, especially in the cases of colonial or neocolonial economies, national cultural flows in the definition of training priorities for development, the weighting of knowledge in local culture, among other elements. In comparative studies, the relationship between culture and pedagogy acquires special relevance, especially due to the combination of policies, structure, culture, values ​​and pedagogical perspectives (Alexander, 2000), incorporating ethnographic methodologies in comparative studies.

In the comparison of values (Wing-On), Cogan’s (2000) studies on convergent and divergent values of citizenship and topics such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and intersectionalities stand out, and more recently, qualitative studies on the quality of education (Bonilla-Molina, 2014) appear linked to this topic, which seek to understand the interpretation that different societies make of a term that is polysemic.

UNESCO, the OECD, and institutions that have emphasized international standardized testing, as well as rankings, accreditations, and bibliometric systems, emphasize comparative performance studies (Postlethwaite & Leung, 2010), which contrast local and national measurement criteria with international ones. The trend in the field of performance studies is toward differentiating between homogenization and standardization with respect to the alternatives that may arise. Of particular interest is the identification and interpretation of the ways in which these convergences and divergences are expressed.

The comparison of educational policies (Yan Rui, 2010) focuses on the changing field of educational policies in general and university policies in particular, where the contradictions between approaches to power, institutions, the nature of individuals and society stand out. In this field, Popkewitz (1999) and Bonilla-Molina (2025) focus on the tensions and interactions between power and oppression, resistance and alternatives, while others such as Morín (2000) and Tedesco (2013) prefer to concentrate on applicability, assuming that there is a neutral political consensus on the aims and purposes of education in general and university education in particular.

In the comparison of educational organizations (Dimmock, 2010) the differentiated studies on universities in local, national, regional and global contexts, acquire special relevance, especially in the identification of categories, processes and results that show their similarities, differences and singularities. Fundamentally, they are based on the structuring elements of educational organizations (Dimmock, 2010): a) degrees of centralization and/or decentralization (physical and technological resources, financial resources, curricular frameworks, time, students, staff, structure for decision-making), b) leadership (power of managers, leadership style, forms of collaborative work, participation, motivation, planning, decision-making, organizational communication, conflict resolution, staff evaluation), c) curriculum (objectives and purposes, breadth, originality, differentiation) and d) teaching (teacher-student relationships, epistemology of knowledge, graduate profile, employability, relationship with graduates), among others.

Finally, it has been proposed (Bonilla-Molina; Goes; et al., 2025) to study internationalization as a constant in the Latin American-Caribbean regional time and space , through studies focused on the relationship between global and national policies, and its expression in bibliometrics, accreditations, rankings, recognition of studies, employability, student and academic mobility, as part of the evaluative culture in the period of neoliberal globalization.

3. University internationalization: finding the starting point

University internationalization is the result of the externalization (Schriewer, 2010) of the place where public policies are expressed and implemented in higher education institutions (HEIs). In other words, externalization implies overcoming the naive view of university autonomy as the primary source for determining the strategic goals and tasks envisioned for universities in each time and space. It should be clarified that, while it is recognized that adapting to external hegemonic orientations is the central task of HEIs today, this does not imply a disregard for or devaluation of their own initiatives that challenge the imposition of the general, nor the contradictions between power and alternatives, tradition and innovation, territory and the international division of labor, knowledge production and consumption, and the reproduction of knowledge.

From a comparative education perspective, university internationalization implies the nationalization of educational policies , generated by local power networks – economic, political, technological, social and cultural. From this perspective, the world is a unit of analysis and the national-local are case studies. For the field of critical pedagogies, today’s world is governed by the logic of capital and the market, which have concrete expression in education and school systems, including higher education institutions [2] . Consequently, this demands an understanding of the origin of school systems, their evolution since the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and, very especially, the adaptations that have occurred in the systemic structures defined in Didáctica Magna (Comenius, 1632), whose influence continues to this day.

Within the framework of critical pedagogies, change is assumed to be a constant in time and space, resulting from the ways in which the contradictions inherent in power relations and class struggle are resolved at different historical moments. Therefore, the study of these interactions in the components of changing interrelation networks is of special significance . For example, what the World Bank (WB) postulates and promotes and what is the alternative reaction-proposal of student and teacher organizations, which generates contradictions that are resolved through synthesis -Hegelian-Marxist dialectic- or through bifurcations, unexpected paths or reconfiguration of the communicative form of policies -negative dialectic [3] (Adorno, 1966)- within a framework of immanence of the contradiction.
This requires the construction, recovery, and adaptation of the semantic constructs specific to the world system, specifically associated with education. In this sense, for example, when attempting to identify the pedagogical categories that express the crisis of effectiveness and legitimacy posited by neoliberal globalization as part of its strategy to reform nation-states, we find that the crisis of governmental effectiveness takes the form of a crisis of educational quality , and the lack of legitimacy as problems of university relevance.

Consequently, comparative research must employ inductive, deductive, analogical, and abductive methods at various times to approach an understanding of the object of study, which in this case is university transformation as a result of internationalization.

In this sense, internationality as a fact of the world system is differentiated from university internationalization as a process (Caruso & Ternoth, 2011). Therefore, we define university internationalization as «the interaction between the set of supranational policies that demand goals, objectives, and purposes of university work—which correspond to the different stages of the cycles of technological innovation and knowledge that allow for the symbolic and material reproduction of the mode of production—with the national policies of HEIs, and local academic and management cultures.» This implies an assessment of university internationalization as an uneven process in its evolution, but which in each case combines related guiding policies, such as accreditation, bibliometrics, rankings, academic and student mobility, and degree recognition. These common policies are what allow for a comparative study of university internationalization as a process.

4. The components of university internationalization

Each component of university internationalization (UI) is often approached and equated with the term; this is a conceptual and methodological error. Bibliometrics is not internationalization, nor are rankings or accreditation separately. University internationalization is composed of a set of exchange operations that interact and create dependencies, expressing themselves in complementary public policies.

Consequently, it is urgent to identify the components of UI and find the points of intersection between them. In our case, the notion of neoliberal evaluation culture serves as an «integrative intersection» that connects them and provides strategic meaning to their understanding. This requires identifying the two major paradigms of the dominant world system: competition and hierarchy , which guide the current stage of university evaluation culture, complemented by the subcategories of entrepreneurship , self-management , and diversification of funding sources. Finally, by specifying the indicators that allow for measurement and classification, five categories have been identified that guide this neoliberal evaluation culture: quality, relevance, innovation, impact, and efficiency (Bonilla-Molina, L. et al., 2025), which appear as weightings in each of the components of current university internationalization. The unresolved aspect of the systemic intentionality of internationalization is the dichotomy between the aspiration for transdisciplinarity in the construction of knowledge and the disciplinary forms that its management takes, especially due to organizational designs based on faculties, programs, and departments in universities, something that is of special interest to critical pedagogies and to those of us who revive negative dialectics.

A first approach to the components of university internationalization (IU) allows us to identify the following:

1. Bibliometrics
2. International rankings or classifications
3. University accreditation
4. Recognition of studies and qualifications
5. Academic and student mobility

These five horsemen of the university apocalypse were widely developed and explained in University Internationalization in the History of Latin America and the Caribbean (Bonilla-Molina, L.; Goes, A.; and others, 2025), highlighting their interconnection, complementarity and shared identity, without which the study of university internationalization would be limited.

5. Determinants of university internationalization
   
   

University internationalization in its current phase (1961-2025) is justified by a set of standardized determinants. These are:

1. The acceleration of innovation and the need to recover the capacity of school and university systems to anticipate the immediate future and provide the knowledge and professionals that society demands (read: mode of production). To achieve this, it is essential to study the relationship between industrial revolutions and education in general and universities in particular;
2. Permanent change , which implies the sustained tension between tradition and innovation, that is, how much of the past must survive in the present, in such a way that it is possible to open space for novelties, making visible the inherited routines that hinder the concretion of the academic policies of the present;
3. The demands of knowledge production and employability are the way in which externality shapes university internationalization at each stage;
4. Academic Darwinism as a concretization of the paradigms of competition and hierarchization of academic work, whose horizon is mobile and in permanent adjustment by entities that exceed the governance of HEIs;
5. Diversifying funding sources as a way to encourage higher education institutions to adapt to the current dynamics of commodity production, consumption, and governance;
6. Academic productivism, whose assessment parameters are expressed outside the university world, is why there is no autonomy to determine its forms. Productivism is manifested in each of the components mentioned;
7. Meritocracy as a breakdown of the self-perception of knowledge workers, due to what this implies in class identity, for which new categories are constructed that model collective self-perception as “precariat” (Standing, 2014), “cognitariat” (Berardi, 2019) or “digital teachers”

These determinants impact university culture, without whose material implementation it would be impossible to achieve the hegemony that university internationalization—neoliberal—has achieved in the current period.

6. The dominant narratives on university internationalization

With the arrival of neoliberal globalization, five lines of discourse emerged to legitimize public policies inherent to university internationalization. These are educational quality, relevance (social and market), training innovation, impact of results, and efficient use of allocated resources.

As we mentioned, these lines of discourse in turn became the indicators used to assess and develop international rankings, university accreditation, bibliometrics, convergence of studies and degrees, as well as academic and student mobility.

University quality — or its synonym, academic excellence—is a polysemic term that encompasses any change process that is credited—even without empirical evidence—with producing positive transformations. Quality uses so-called «best practices,» rankings, and the idea of continuous improvement in real time, without a fixed teleological horizon, as benchmarks.
Relevance is assumed through graduate profiles, employability, and the connection to the (business) world of work. The social sphere has been diluted within the concept of relevance, concentrating on the pragmatic sphere, that is, what allows for the promotion of self-management of life, community entrepreneurship, and the financial intelligence of communities. Of course, there are very important university outreach initiatives based on the common good, but they are increasingly isolated, and their work is undervalued within the logic of the neoliberal evaluation culture.

Innovation has ceased to be a matter of expression within the academic and university world, but has become the appropriation of technology and knowledge packaged in research centers associated with factory production, social control , and ongoing institutional reengineering, as required by the mode of production in times of exponential growth in scientific and technological developments. Precisely, the coupling of higher education institutions (HEIs) to the acceleration of innovation constitutes the backbone of university internationalization.

The impact on university internationalization is associated with productivism, especially with regard to the number of graduates who join operational, research, and innovation activities in the processes of generating goods and services that contribute to the prevailing accumulation model.
Efficiency is increasingly associated with the use of budgets in institutional process-product dynamics. That is, with the cost of each graduate, attempting to impose the logic of quality management and decreasing «waste» in the production of goods. Consequently, the tendency toward efficiency translates into educational disinvestment, job insecurity, and a diminished social agenda for students with support needs;

Added to this is the STEM paradigm [4] in higher education, which considers that the usefulness of academic work is that which contributes to the work of the «hard» sciences, technologies, engineering, mathematics and design associated with the productive world, while in the social sciences the pressure is to produce synthetic knowledge -privileging articles over books- useful -for governance, production and consumption- as well as the collection of data that enables the construction of consensus and contributes to warding off conflict; interpreting more than understanding, distancing itself increasingly from the idea of ​​directly getting involved in the transformation of what is evident as unjust. The university promoted in this period is oriented towards employability and production, rather than social justice. This vision becomes an ideology of university internationalization. These narratives have led to the loss of conceptual identity of the university and turned functional pragmatics into the epistemology of HEIs.

7. The tension between innovation and tradition

As Eric Hobsbawm (1983/2002) would explain, tradition usually has a moment of invention , in which an idea of novelty was reflected that lost its vitality and charm in the present. Although the university is an institution that predates modernity, it is industrial capitalism – with its need to «massify» scientific knowledge to improve governance and production – that is providing it with its structuring tradition , while the third industrial revolution , especially since the neoliberal period, has confronted it with a particular form of renewal that is expressed in the five components of university internationalization.

The tradition of capitalism, in its university genealogy, embraces Comenius’s idea of school systems (including the university, which he called the academy) operating on a scale, organized by age group and centered on a disciplinary perspective, ranging from the simple to the complex. From this perspective, higher education institutions focus on the triad of teaching (teaching to reproduce the science that made industrial capitalism possible, the liberal and now post-liberal political system, as well as the consolidation of consumer mentalities), research (to improve the knowledge-technology relationship to impact the capitalist mode of production), and, more recently, extension (following the Córdoba reform and the needs of peripheral capitalism). The tendency has been to homogenize and uniformize them, with less and less respect for their singular and autonomous features. But capitalism itself began to question this tradition, especially after the International Conference on the World Education Crisis (1967), creating an innovative idea of the academy, which seeks to break through with the components and policies of internationalization.
As discussed in University Internationalization in the History of Latin America and the Caribbean (Bonilla-Molina, L.; Goes, A.; Menezes, B.; Gomes, I.; 2025), university internationalization has been a constant in the region, from the European conquest and colonization to the present. Internationalization has sought to standardize the educational processes of HEIs, placing them at the service of the global market, as a mechanism to resolve the problems of productive integration between the periphery and the capitalist center. This is more relevant today than ever, especially through the internationalization of neoliberal evaluative culture and its five components (bibliometrics, accreditation, rankings, degree recognition agreements, and faculty-student mobility).

The internationalization we are currently experiencing stems from attempts to adapt the university world to the new characteristics of knowledge production brought about by the Third Industrial Revolution (1961)—the overcoming of disciplinarity in favor of transdisciplinarity and complex thinking—making competencies—training rather than teaching—the molds of university education, and the growing relationship between innovation and capital production, based on commodities, services, and goods. To achieve this, internationalization, with its five components, becomes the mechanism for achieving this goal.

8. Conclusion

University internationalization is the way in which the educational policies of the world system are expressed for HEIs at present, with the purpose of ensuring that the production of knowledge, professional training, research and academic extension contribute to the reproduction of the mode of production and to overcoming the fall in the capitalist profit rate.
However, what prevails is a kind of normalization , a construction of «common sense» that legitimizes what has been promoted in the last sixty years as innovation, as what is expected of university practice. This does not deny the presence of resistance to this hegemonic way of understanding university activity, but it is evident that the world system has achieved an «everyone is in» attitude that is putting the very survival of the university as an institution at risk. Studying, understanding, and analyzing the phenomenon is not enough unless accompanied by a will to transform everything that limits the possibility of a university that is situated, committed, and radically promotes critical thinking.

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[1] Visiting professor at the Federal University of Sergipe, within the framework of the CAPES Solidaridade program

[2] At times, we distinguish between school systems and HEIs, because what universities do does not always correspond to the definitions, processes, management, and purposes envisaged in the regulatory frameworks of the former. Consequently, when discussing higher education, we must always question whether or not this correspondence exists. On the other hand, academic arrogance, shielded by an interpretation decoupled from autonomy, tends to understand the university world as a self-managed and self-sufficient island.

[3] Adorno’s negative dialectic focuses on the rejection of the Hegelian-Marxist synthesis, maintaining criticism at all times, without seeking a final resolution of the contradiction (higher synthesis from the resolution of the contradiction), maintaining the particularity in the way these processes and relationships are expressed.
[4] STEM; acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics