Innovating policies for university internationalisation in the changing post-pandemic global field

In the past several decades, internationalisation, which is featured by people and ideas’ unparalleled transnational mobility, has become a key discourse in higher education. Despite the spectacular outcomes that higher education internationalisation has achieved, scholars have detected weaknesses and vulnerabilities in its current policy and practice, which the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified. Informed by Marginson’s global higher education field framework, this study provides a critical reflection on the field’s evolution and the prospects for its future directions from experts’ perspectives. In unstructured interviews, 20 leading international scholars confirmed the global field’s dynamism and openness, and identified certain tendencies in its evolution, including a diversified and flattening structure. The experts highlighted the urgent demand for policy innovation on university internationalisation at the regional, national, and institutional levels in response to the changing global field in the post-pandemic era. The experts also stressed the significance of internationalisation’s cultural dimension, through which higher education internationalisation can escape the trap of the capitalist logic and address its shortcomings to achieve sustainable prosperity.