In the last few decades, many developing countries have dramatically expanded the number of government-sponsored fellowships for graduate studies abroad to increase their participation in the knowledge economy. To award these grants, these programs have typically relied on international university rankings as their main selection criterion. Existing studies suggest these fellowships have been disproportionally awarded to applicants from privileged social backgrounds, thus intensifying existing national educational inequalities. However, this evidence is mostly anecdotal and descriptive in nature. In this article, we focus on a Chilean fellowship program, an iconic example of these policies. Using a causal path analysis mediation model and relying on social reproduction and stratification theories, we investigated whether the distribution of fellowships varied across applicants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and how university rankings affect applicants’ chances of obtaining the fellowship. Our findings revealed that, in a context of high social inequalities and a stratified education system, using international rankings as an awarding criterion reinforced the position of privilege of individuals who accrued educational advantages in high school, as well as the disadvantages of those less fortunate who faced fewer prior educational opportunities.
In this article, we argue that efforts to internationalize higher education that do not make visible the colonial legacy in the higher education space become catalysts that intensify and reproduce the power asymmetries among countries, universities, and ways of knowing. To support and illustrate our argument, we carried out an analysis of two of the largest international scholarship programs implemented by Latin American countries, namely, the Brazilian ‘Science without Borders’ and the Chilean ‘Becas Chile’ programs. Our analysis shows that Brazil and Chile, aiming to enhance their position in the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, implemented strategies of internationalization that assumed, naturalized, and possibly biased the intrinsic benefits of internationalization at the expense of local needs and realities. We also found that Brazil and Chile embrace a concept of internationalization equated with academic mobility to (almost exclusively) Western/European industrialized countries of the global North.
In this article, we argue that efforts to internationalize higher education that do not make visible the colonial legacy in the higher education space become catalysts that intensify and reproduce the power asymmetries among countries, universities, and ways of knowing. To support and illustrate our argument, we carried out an analysis of two of the largest international scholarship programs implemented by Latin American countries, namely, the Brazilian ‘Science without Borders’ and the Chilean ‘Becas Chile’ programs. Our analysis shows that Brazil and Chile, aiming to enhance their position in the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, implemented strategies of internationalization that assumed, naturalized, and possibly biased the intrinsic benefits of internationalization at the expense of local needs and realities. We also found that Brazil and Chile embrace a concept of internationalization equated with academic mobility to (almost exclusively) Western/European industrialized countries of the global North.
Key words: Internationalization of higher education, Coloniality, Brazil, Chile, International scholarships
How to cite this article: Chiappa, R. & Finardi, K.R. 2021. Coloniality Prints in Internationalization of Higher Education: The Case of Brazilian and Chilean International Scholarships. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. 5(1): 25-45. DOI: 10.36615/sotls.v5i1.161.
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