The "guest students" of Turkish universities and internationalization

Türkiye has risen to 10th place in the ranking of countries hosting foreign students in their universities. The number of students currently studying at Turkish universities is approaching 300,000.

This information formed the substance and the reason for the speeches at a panel organized jointly by the International Academy (International Relations Academy, IRA), which operates in Istanbul, and the Mediterranean Center (Akdeniz Araştırmalar Merkezi). The panel, in which I was one of the participants, was titled "The Effect of Higher Education and Türkiye Scholarships on the Development of Türkiye's Soft Power."

The number of foreign students in Türkiye has been rising rapidly, especially since 2012, that is, since the date when the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) began granting scholarships to foreigners who would study at Turkish universities, and it soon began to exceed the number of students to whom YTB gives scholarships. That was what had been expected from the start anyway. One of the aims of Türkiye in granting scholarships to foreigners was to create and increase demand for Turkish universities, and thus for these scholarships to serve, strategically, as a "supporting" function for Türkiye's international student mobility. Exactly as intended, whereas in 2013 one in every 4 newly enrolled international students was a scholarship holder, today this ratio has fallen to 5%.

We have mentioned before that Türkiye, which rapidly raised the number of universities from 76 to 210 and expanded the capacities of existing universities two- and three-fold, has reached almost first place in the world in its rate of university enrollment. With nearly 10 percent of its population studying at universities, Türkiye is on the one hand trying to make up for lost time, but on the other hand, by enriching and strengthening human resources with the technical knowledge and skills required by a world increasingly concentrated on the service sector, it is making its most accurate investment in the world of the future.

As we mentioned before, contemporary sociologists have underlined that the service sector requires a widespread and developed higher education institutionalization. For all fields of the sector require higher education. Seen from this angle, it was a very important strategic decision for Türkiye, whose industrialization has reached a certain level, to strengthen its service sector as a third leg of development.

Of course, on the one hand the world is becoming thoroughly integrated, and this integration brings with it a race to find a market across the entire globe. International mobility both improves the quality of universities and enables you to find a place in these markets. In parallel with the university capacity it has rapidly increased, Türkiye also adopted an internationalization strategy. Of course, we may recall that, compared with other matters, it experienced a serious delay in this one. The reason was the resistance of the old regime, at the outset, to the opening of new universities and to the increase of the capacities of existing ones. Unforgettable follies such as the headscarf ban and the coefficient practice kept Türkiye's universities shut in on themselves, and left them behind both in the universality that the concept of the university requires and in international openness.

It was of course unthinkable that there would be any demand from the world for a university with a headscarf ban. Moreover, it was not possible for decent scholarship to emerge from a university so laden with ideology. In the end, it was not possible for a high-quality university to come out of a structure so closed to internationalization.

Yet not only in Türkiye but across the whole world, international mobility was growing exponentially over this period. According to the most recent data provided by UNESCO, the number of international students enrolled in higher education programs worldwide in 2020 was 6 million 361 thousand 963. This number had barely reached 2 million as we entered the 2000s, and Türkiye's name was not even mentioned in this market.

Of course, a foreign student also means a kind of export of educational services, and it means that the product you produce becomes able to compete with the world market. Being open to this market itself actually ensures the institutionalization of continuous objective oversight over your quality. Seen from this angle, this is a reality that should ease the concerns that rising numbers are against quality.

But undoubtedly, internationalization in education goes much further than an export of education. Foreign students carry a culture, an understanding, a language and, of course, a bond from the country where they were educated to their own countries. Some describe this as being the country's "cultural ambassador." But for Türkiye this carries a much deeper meaning too. Moreover, the incoming student brings his or her own vision, horizon, culture, language and, most importantly, cognitive capacity, and thereby adds them to the multiculturalism, the pool of science and reason, the richness and the horizon here. The experience of taking classes with many people from different countries in one's classroom has a completely different effect on university education.

Prof. Mukhtar al-Shanqiti, a Mauritanian thinker-academic and one of the other participants of the panel, touched at this point on a difference he sees between foreign students studying in Türkiye and those in other countries (the USA, France, Britain, Italy, etc.) with which Türkiye has now begun to compete. While those other countries generally try to load their cultural and political missions onto the foreigners they accept as students, they also aim to reproduce their historical colonial roles. However, since the only thing they can recall about the past is colonial relations, the students educated there, far from admiring these countries, in fact acquire a national consciousness against them by learning this history further.

Yet the student studying in Türkiye has no way other than to remember and learn the bond of a geography of the heart between the history and culture of his or her own country and Türkiye. In this history there is brotherhood, there is closeness, there is a genuine feeling of affection and reunion.

In fact, even when defining its scholarship holders, YTB makes a special effort not to call them "foreign students." By substituting the concept of "guest student," it shows a commendable courtesy.

After writing these lines, I read the Anadolu Agency's news about a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot project developed by an Egyptian student studying at Siirt University. This is it, I said. A simple example, coinciding with the timing of this article, of how the internationalization of the university, with its center and its provinces alike, contributes to quality. There is no need even to say how many such examples there are.