Foreign Students
While the government has not taken significant measures in this area, the number of foreign students tripled between 2000 and 2003. Three forms of recruiting foreign students exist in Mongolia: establishing a memorandum of understanding or agreement of exchange; setting up a branch or twin program; and offering special programs for foreign students.
The National University of Mongolia (NUM), a main recipient of foreign students, enrols about 300 students from more than 10 countries; 40 per cent from China, 30 per cent from Russia, 10 per cent from Korea, and 6 per cent from Japan. One-third of the foreign students are studying in the School of Mongolian Studies, and 27 per cent are studying in the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures.
Mongolia has the potential to attract a substantial number of students from China, where many school leavers are denied access to higher education because of a shortage of education services. Mongolia’s proximity to China, and its low cost of education and reasonable living costs will attract Chinese students if Mongolian universities offer the right sort of programs. As an example, the NUM set up a joint bachelor’s program in International Commerce with the Agricultural University of Hebei. The program combines three years of study in China and one year of study at NUM. All subjects are offered in English. Upon successful completion of their studies, the students are awarded the bachelor’s degree of the NUM.
National University of Mongolia
There is also a demand for short-term research programs and field schools by students from wealthy countries like the USA, the EU countries, Japan and Korea. While Asian students (Korean and Japanese) are interested in summer language and cultural programs with visits to museums, excursions, theatre, cinema and meetings with local students or authorities, European and American students come for research purposes and internships: mobile livestock, archaeology field work, ethnography, anthropology, biodiversity studies, etc. It could be said that interest in Mongolian studies is growing in the West, Japan and the USA.
Another type of potential students are young people who seek adventure or wish to explore Mongolia, and people who need to learn Mongolian language for business and social communication.
Several problems exist in recruiting foreign students: lack of marketing skills and budget for marketing, scarcity of financial support to foreign students, poor housing and other facilities, insufficient trained and experienced staff, lack of comprehensive and reliable information and poor dissemination (WWW), unclear credit transfer policy and a limited number of attractive programs offered in languages other than Mongolian. Due to the lack of initiatives and human resources able to take lead the process, many opportunities are being missed. Some deans and heads of departments are slow to initiate flexible programs for foreign students.
Faculty Exchange
Faculty exchange has a long tradition in Mongolia. Until 1990, all programs were taught by Russian specialists and Mongolian university lecturers were trained in the former Soviet Union and socialist countries. There was extensive exchange of faculty members and training and retraining of Mongolian lecturers in those countries. Since 1990, the opportunities to travel for teaching, research, professional development and consulting have become even broader.
Still only a small number of foreign faculty members are working at Mongolian universities. However, their fields of specialization have become diverse, ranging from foreign languages to economics, law, geography, biology and so on. Moreover, the number of short-term visiting scholars and visitors has been growing from year to year.
There are no comprehensive national data on faculty exchange, but the cases of the NUM and MUST show a dramatic increase in overseas travel by faculty members. On average, around 20 per cent of the NUM’s faculty members go overseas for short-term visits and almost the same percentage of teaching staff study overseas for longer than one year. However, the number of returning faculty members fluctuates between 12 and 19 per cent in the case of the NUM.
Obviously the faculty and students who study or work overseas are among the country’s most talented people. When this critical mass of trained scholars stays in the host countries after completion of their studies/work, the return on investment in capacity building becomes minimal. Brain drain turns the expectation of universities for a “stronger organization through better people” into a situation of constant lack of management, teaching and research capacity. The loss of trained lecturers undermines the universities’ efforts for capacity building through internationalization.
There are several reasons why scientists leave the country and students stay longer in foreign countries. Embracing opportunities to update knowledge and improve career and private life is the fundamental reason to leave the country. Students trained in the West become attached to these countries because of better job opportunities and career prospects. At the same time, developed countries are pursuing aggressive policies to recruit talented brains from developing countries in order to meet demand from the business sector as well as from academic institutions. For example, Korean universities lacking graduate students in the natural sciences strongly encourage foreign student recruitment from Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia and so on. Some Japanese companies are making contracts with foreign universities to sponsor the best IT students and offer employment opportunities after the completion of their studies. The USA and Canada, too, have relaxed their visa procedures.
The outflow of qualified people is also caused by a poor local work environment in terms of occupational health and safety, scarce resources available for scholarly work (equipment, Internet, etc.), the low value of scientific work and low salary levels at home institutions. Salaries are often insufficient to support a family and the government cannot find a way to support universities and colleges to maintain a reasonable salary level. Another commonly-stated reason for staying away is fear of losing interaction with scientists and academics working in the same field and becoming outdated.
Financially, the outflow of scientists reduces institutional ability for future income generation that could be possible through technology transfer and product innovation. What it means is that universities in developing countries lose marketable talents to developed countries that have already accumulated sufficient human capital, money and physical resources.
Opportunities, Threats and Obstacles
Opportunities
Collaboration at the individual, institutional, or regional level and in any area or aspect of higher education has the potential to bring significant benefits to Mongolian higher education. The most important benefit is strengthened capacity of human resources working and studying at higher education institutions. There will be mobility of both students and teachers that helps in understanding the customs, traditions, cultural variations and social dynamics of each other’s society.
Considerable promise exists for university partnerships in areas such as quality assurance, updating equipment, faculty training and student scholarships. The World Bank has shown interest in dealing with challenges encountered by higher education in developing and transition economies: scholarships for returning scholars to buy equipment and materials, technical and financial assistance to groups of small countries that wish to set up a regional quality assurance system, supporting investment in ICT infrastructure for higher education institutions, encouraging sub-regional partnerships to establish a networked university, franchising partnerships between local and foreign providers of higher education and distance education and strengthening science and technology research.
Threats
The picture is not entirely positive. One of the important global forces being experienced by higher education institutions is increased competition. Numerous well-established universities speak of “wanting to capture the higher education market abroad,” usually referring to the markets of less developed countries (The Futures Project, 2000). Mongolia is far behind these countries as well as behind Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and China. Studies of the international marketization of Mongolian universities (joint programs, programs for foreign students, etc.) reveal that, in addition to cross-border supply (distance education, e-learning and virtual university), three other modes are developing extensively in Mongolia. These are student/faculty mobility, twinning programs and the establishment of foreign branches in Mongolia. China could be a potential market for Mongolia, but there remain obstacles to realizing the potential, such as the limited number of programs offered in languages other than Mongolian, a lack of marketing and poor learning facilities.
The growing need for a highly-educated labour force in a knowledge society, an aging population and falling interest of local students in fields like engineering (as described earlier, a “dirty, dangerous and difficult” profession), an aggressive recruitment policy of foreign universities and increasing interests of Mongolian students looking to the USA, UK and Australia for both undergraduate and graduate studies, all add to the outflow of students and scholars. Lacking modern teaching and learning facilities and promising work and career opportunities, Mongolian top universities find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain highly qualified faculty members in the face of attractive offers from international organizations, foreign universities and research institutes and corporations. It is not clear how much Mongolia is gaining in proportion to how much it loses due to brain drain. As observed by the National Training Foundation, the investment of $14 million by the Mongolian government in the form of loans to talented students for overseas graduate studies has not been repaid since 1997, and the majority of students studying in Japan and Germany remain there for more than ten years. One of the hurdles in the area of higher education is recognition of degrees and qualifications. Universities in various countries do not simply recognize each other’s degrees and transfer credits earned abroad and there is no international or regional mechanism.
It is hard for developing countries to judge international curriculum when the national accreditation and quality assurance system is only just getting established. While there is a need to ensure quality and flexibility of national education in order to achieve international recognition of Mongolian diplomas and qualifications, safeguarding Mongolian students from poor-quality international education is becoming a challenge. The competition from foreign education providers urges managers of higher education to improve the quality of teaching and learning in their institutions.
Obstacles
Mongolia has taken important steps towards internationalizing its universities since the establishment of democracy at the beginning of the 1990s. However, there still remains much for the international community, the Mongolian government and individual institutions to do.
Mongolian universities need the support of international agencies and foreign universities, particularly for infrastructure development. They should also take the negative impact of the brain drain into consideration and help elaborate special programs to attract and retain skilled people.
The government of Mongolia needs to fully understand the impact of globalization and internationalization and then help individual institutions, specifically by revisiting its budgeting policies and creating a favourable legal environment for higher education. It should also identify areas where international funding is required and develop a strategy for working with the appropriate international agencies.
Individual institutions must act in a number of areas, including developing effective administrative structures, measuring their academic programs and research against international standards, and expanding the number of study abroad options and joint degree programs. The appropriate utilization of human resource capacities should be a priority. This means that merit-based selection, performance-oriented evaluation and promotion are necessary at institutional level.
Mongolia can offer few incentives to returnees. Salaries and facilities comparable to international levels are out of question due to the ‘small pocket’ of Mongolia. Therefore, the support of international organizations and relationships between world universities are important. Moreover, intra-regional, inter-university networks and professional networking will help scholars maintain closer contacts with their colleagues and people with the same interests and benefit from educational and research exchange. Exchange programs such as those offered under the DAAD (Germany) or EU Tempus Individual Mobility Grants could be very helpful in lessening isolation and enhancing institutional capacity.
This concludes Part II
Author's Information
Author's Information
Sodnomtseren Altantsetseg is Head of the Office for International Affairs at the National University of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar. She was a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow and visiting scholar to Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. (2005-06) and is now a doctoral student at the NUM. Her research focuses on public sector reform, globalization and higher education and strategic management. Altantsetseg has conducted research on internationalization of higher education institutions in Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The research was funded by Toyota Foundation in Japan. Besides her duties at the NUM, Altantsetseg works and provides advice for several research and consulting organizations: Asia Research Center, Global Reach Center and Network of International Education Administrators and Scholars of Central and Inner Asian Universities.
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