Conclusion: Taking Educational Equality Across National Borders

Abstract

This concluding chapter considers how the contours of international higher education in the UK are both similar and different to other countries with high numbers and proportions of international students. Returning to the core question that frames the overall book, the chapter also asks what this case study of the contemporary and historical experience of international students in British universities with educational equality might tell us about some of the possibilities and challenges for conceptualising and promoting models of global educational equality and justice in other educational settings around the world more generally. In particular, it points toward the value of thinking of global educational equality not just in terms of some set of universal, unchanging principles and global regulatory regimes that might mandate equality from above, but rather as what some scholars refer to as critical and contestatory forms of “cosmopolitanism from below.”