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The first two chapters provide a crucial institutional perspective on the geography of transnational education and student mobility. I examine the internationalisation of education in terms of large-scale population movements, transnational institutions, globalising organisations, and dominant ideologies. In chapter 1, I consider how the widespread implementation of neoliberal ideology has transformed educational policy and practice at an international scale. The global spread and standardisation of education is linked to a burgeoning IE industry, which is built upon the differentiation of national education systems. The chapter examines the multiple scales at which the internationalisation of education manifests: the role of supranational organisations in coordinating, standardising, and ranking activities, that is, advocating, for example, global benchmarking, world best practice in education, and international forms of accreditation, and the activities of particular countries, especially Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in marketing their national education systems to an overseas consumer. Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have recently been concerned with developing an international educational brand. I ask the following: How do these activities transform the meaning of education in each of these countries? And, what are the implications of these trends for international student mobility? Chapter 2 turns this discussion to focus on Canada by examining the development of IE at different scales from national level initiatives to those of provincial governments, district school boards, and individual institutions as they internationalise curricula, facilitate educational exchanges, provide distance-learning courses, and establish overseas campuses. The intersection of educational provision with economic concerns is clearly evident throughout this analysis. Overall, these two chapters seek to provide an account and theorisation of IE from the perspective of governments and institutions (i.e., a top-down perspective).
The next four chapters entail a shift in scale and methodology by providing a detailed exploration of the implications of IE from the bottom-up perspective of migrant students and their families. Chapter 3 begins an in-depth empirical analysis of interview data obtained through fieldwork in Hong Kong. It paints a picture of a distinctive milieu out of which a middle-class obsession with academic achievement, overseas credentials, and migration has grown.