Aspectos da internacionalização do ensino superior: origem e destino dos estudantes estrangeiros no mundo atual

Abstract

This article aims to understand the internationalization of the higher educational process in the contemporary historical period, and tends to analyze carefully the main characteristics of the students' international mobility. The liberalization of the international trade has also influenced the national systems of education, by permitting more and more the growth of the privatization and commercialization of the educational goods and services, in most of the peripherical countries of the world-system. This new reality has consequences to the students' international flows. Most of them go to five main countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia), in which the number of the foreign enrollments have grown significantly, mainly in the last decade. This international mobility of the students, in opposition of what the apologists of the internationalization process use to say, brings benefits only to few territories; beside this, the supposed internationalization process has, itself, regional specific characteristics that allow us to think about a geopolitics of knowledge"