Right next to the kitchen in Emhlabeni, there were two staircases leading upstairs. The staircase on the right took you to the TV room that I was rarely in, given that it was 2014 and everything I watched usually came from a classmate’s USB drive. The staircase on the left was used even less frequently because it stopped at a door that seemed permanently locked. From the outside though, you could see it was a library, filled with blue, green, and red spines, and in the windows hung felt triangles with college names printed on them.
One afternoon during a free period, I sauntered through the kitchen and saw the door open at the top of the left staircase. The room, it turned out, was filled with college admissions materials, from the US, the UK, Australia, South Africa, France, Singapore and more, some current and others years old. Intrigued, I browsed through paused when I saw a shiny, Black, catalog-looking book with the word “Unafraid” capitalized and in glossy Black text right on top of a Black cover. Inside were shiny photos of students walking the streets, holding test tubes, and doing ballet. It took me a while to realize they were all women.
I began browsing more intentionally. I studied the timeline of the different graduates' paths during their time at school and post-college. I looked at a map with all the countries students’ visited for study abroad, like Japan, Spain, and Tanzania, which made me laugh. I gawked at photos of my idols who had visited campus – Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sheryl Sandberg. Convinced, I quietly closed the book, glanced at the stack of three or four still left in the library, and clandestinely walked out of the room, with the Barnard viewbook tucked under my arm.
My K-12 education began at the turn of the century when nothing was louder than the gospel of globalisation. We were being told over and over again that we were in a new era of multinational corporations and the rise of the internet where we could increasingly meet and connect with people all over the world and exchange ideas and beliefs but most importantly, goods and services. Institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations were running the world and telling us that we all had an equal say, films like Tsosti and Whale Rider sharing the same stage as Mystic River and Brokeback Mountain, and you could find an iPod and a vuvuzela in nearly any country on Earth. How much of globalization was actually thinly-veiled Westernization was difficult to discern at the time.
Higher education reflected these trends. As the world grew interconnected, the theory of being “globally competitive” grew in prominence as young people were given the message that to compete in a neoliberal, borderless, free market, they would need the skills and experience that would make them the best of the best across continents, because that was who businesses and non-profits and worldwide agencies were looking to hire. The 2000s saw the boom of a new subset of scholars at colleges and universities who were deemed “international students,” those who had left their country of origin for a post-graduate degree and a potential new life, elsewhere.
Why do we do it? For those of us who travel across continents, spending months and years from our family, what are we using the experience for? What is the purpose of education for international students and to what ends? And who is served by the presence and prominence of international students, and what does that say about the social, political, and economic goals of education?
My high school was part of the United World College (UWC) network, where philanthropist and former investor Shelby Davis provided automatic scholarships to students who attended partner U.S. colleges and universities. My classmates and I were given a list of schools that we were tasked to research before meeting individually with our school counsellor who every year would shepherd dozens of us into the next phase of our life through college presentations and interviews with universities that had flown to eSwatini to speak to us.
Although the majority of us applied to the United States deeply motivated by the Davis scholarship, a few also looked in to schools in the United Kingdom where it was only three years and the overall sticker price was cheaper. Most of my classmates applying to the U.K. were EU nationals — this of course being pre-Brexit— but for me, applying to the U.K. was also a way for me to connect to the country that my entire extended family had spent time in and still spoke about fondly, even decades later.
I took my SATs, completed my Common App and financial aid forms, and finalised all the schools I was going to apply to. We were advised to pick six schools — two we were likely to get accepted into, two reaches that we were hoping for, and two safeties in case it didn’t work out. I ended up with eleven schools in total between the U.S. and the U.K. that were all over, from Ohio to California to London and to Wales. And of course, New York City, where Barnard was. I graduated from high school in November 2014, sent all my college admissions materials in the following month, and then just sat, waiting to see where in the world I would be going next.
Despite the modernising growth of infrastructures and institutions in many parts of the world, and growing xenophobic hostilities in the Western world through state policies, legal mandates, and personal biases, places of higher learning in North America and Europe continue to be the aspiration for young people outside of these worlds. Three decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the promises of global democracy did little to reduce the distance between continents and their societies, primarily in terms of economic and social opportunities that were available. Oftentimes, the matriculation from colleges and universities located in the Northern Hemisphere come with the conferral of privilege, either providing the now privileged — who were often privileged before — with access to capital in all senses of the world that they could access, both abroad or in the home country. This process is lauded by many as the greatest benefit of an education, its ability to provide students with social mobility that transcends and displaces students’ into new worlds.
For Western colleges and universities, the recruitment and enrolment of international students is not done to altruistically support them actualising their mobility. Higher tuition fees and need-aware admissions incentivise higher education to profit from these populations, making profit one of the goals of education for these institutions. Furthermore, they are able to use the presence of international students to provide a façade of diversity, oftentimes prioritising foreign minorities over their own so that they can pat themselves on the back for being inclusive rather than dealing with their role in the racist and classist schisms within their own societies.
The consequences of these systems, it is believed, help to realise the vision of a globalised, interconnected world. International students, less through academic experiences of college and more through the social processes of their education, emerge fluent in a lingua franca that integrates them into a professional class that makes it that much easier to be at Brookings or the I.M.F. or Goldman or H.B.S. or Google, providing these institutions with a labor force already familiar with their beliefs, ideas, and goods and services. For those who return home, the experience binds them to others who wamesoma ulaya — who studied abroad — leading to the creation and proliferation of systems of privilege through new opportunities in their home countries too.
When the DHL package from Barnard arrived a few weeks after the acceptance email, it had inside of it the same Black viewbook I had already lifted from the library of my now alma mater. There was a card illustrating the New York City skyline at night and an eye mask with a note that said we would need it in the city that never slept. I took a picture and posted it on my two-year old Instagram account. Weeks later, after countless emails with the Barnard financial aid office, it was set. I was going to New York.
Why do we do it? I can only speak for myself. I grew up in a family where everyone had spent time abroad and credited the experience and exposure to the success and subsequent privileges that I was then able to access. From elementary school and onwards, the private international schools that I attended used where their alumni went to college as an indicator of how successful their education was in placing students from our part of the world in classrooms ranked on the U.S. News and World college rankings. Studying abroad, being an international student, meant that I was globally competitive, and I had succeeded to find myself sitting alongside peers whose privileges eclipsed mine.
With that though came the perpetuation of a myth that existed not only on a greater social level, but within myself too. This idea that leaving home, placing distance between yourself and where you came from, was the best marker of success. But as the number of international students in the U.S. and U.K. declines, alongside an overall decline in the number of students enrolling in college, the cracks are beginning to show. What would educational success look like if it didn’t involve that disavowal? What other pathways could students utilise to realise their dreams and aspirations, rather than just blindly following the narratives we have been sold, as I did? How do we recreate more equitable systems of success and access, and what role should privileged folks like myself play disavowing the systems that we benefit and continue to benefit from? How do we want the world to be and how can education get us there?
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Asking such big and important questions... I love this