Page 25 - AEI Insights 2019 - Vol. 5, Issue 1

Munusamy and Hashim, 2019

to various international and national forces and actors to examine the formation of policies and
influences on the internationalisation of higher education.

POLITICAL

RATIONALE FOR THE
ACADEMIC INTERNATIONALISATION ECONOMIC
POLICY OF A GIVEN
COUNTRY

CULTURAL /
SOCIAL

Figure 1: Rationale for the internationalisation policy of a given country
Source: “Qiang (2003). Internationalisation of Higher Education: towards a conceptual framework. Policy Futures
in Education, 1(2)” (Cited in van der Wende, 1997).

Internationalisation of higher education in Malaysia

Many Asian countries are leaning towards becoming an education hub in the region by
reforming their higher education system through enhancing the quality of higher education,
ranking, international collaboration and increasing the total number of international students.
Malaysia, like other Asian countries, is paying more attention to the criteria in
internationalising the higher education system to become an international higher education hub
in the region (MOE, 2015; Shahijan, Rezaei, & Preece, 2016). Internationalisation has
transformed the Malaysian higher education system. The phenomena is experienced through
the students, faculty members, education and mobility programmes and higher education
providers. Since the 1980s, Malaysia has embarked on improving approaches in international
collaboration, student mobility and academic programmes (Ramanathan, Thambiah, & Raman,
2012; Shahijan et al., 2016).

Malaysia is actively finding ways to enhance the access and quality of higher education with
the final target being to internationalise the higher education system (Mohd Ismail & Doria,
2014). Tham (2013) reported that Malaysia is shifting from being a sending to a receiving
country for students and has an embedded ambition to be a regional hub for higher education
(p. 649). Since the mid-1980s, Malaysia has supported Transnational Higher Education
(TNHE) to brand the country as a regional higher education hub and to internationalise higher
education (Morshidi, 2006). Naidoo (2009) identified that in 2006 itself Malaysia already had
490 TNHE programmes with foreign higher education institutions mostly from Australia,
United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. International branch campuses in

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