Joint degrees and double badging of testamurs between like-minded institutions. Graduates regularly taking their university qualifications beyond national borders, as professional labour markets become truly internationalised. But there are several cautions to be raised. My first caution relates to that of the internationalisation of degree programs. While the UNSW programs will be international in the sense that they are at the cutting edge of world knowledge, they are also located in the Australian context.
International students come to Australian universities to experience the Australian dimension.
So, even though universities are becoming more globally connected, internationalisation must not mean we give up our distinctive cultural frameworks and surrender to the homogeneity of the international degree. International standardisation may be acceptable for the McDonald's hamburger, but the university is a different story. A second word of caution on the new internationalism is that the great opportunity for universities to see their graduates moving back and forward across national borders should not be hobbled by national registration requirements. This would be a latter day version of tariff protection, which is not a happy thought to ponder. Indeed we need to go beyond simply accepting that national borders should be open to professional qualification recognition and actively promote the idea of international mobility of university graduates.