ABSTRACT
It is difficult to understand the internationalization of higher education in recent decades without linking it to the geo-political changes borne of the spatial expansion of global capitalism. Universities continue to be affected by ‘neoliberal’ state-driven policies directed towards accretive privatization, socializing possibilities for technological proliferation and the intensification of work-place regulation through international competition (Morrow and Torres 2000). The state-driven valorization of the regulatory force of quasi-markets appears to have become an arbiter of the educational values of universities. National governments have used international conventions and agreements to subordinate public education policies to the ideological project of ‘neoliberal globalism’. Once the education of the public was intended to deepen and extend the socio-economic security of sovereign citizens through forming and informing their character and virtue, as much as the constitution of democratic nation-states. But now, the state appears to have become a vehicle for producing a different kind of subject. Increasingly, students are expected to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the global expansion of higher education, while graduates are expected to have the capacity to see, imagine, and experience labour market possibilities beyond the nation-state.
