Globalization and Higher Education Research Group
Who we are
The Globalization and Higher Education Research Group is a collective of students and faculty at OISE that study how global trends affect national higher education policies, institutional practices, and students.
The research group is lead by Elizabeth Buckner, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Current research focuses on the following areas: private higher education, the internationalization of higher education, higher education in the Middle East and North Africa, and universities’ adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals.
What we do
News and Updates
January 2022 – Dr. Elizabeth Buckner’s book “Degrees of Dignity” is published by the University of Toronto Press. Read it here!
March 2022 – Dr. Elizabeth Buckner and Dr. Amad Al-Azzawi conduct fieldwork on private higher education policy in the UAE.
April 2022 – Our group members present four papers at the Comparative and International Education Society Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN.
June 2022 – Dr. Elizabeth Buckner was named a Canada Research Chair in Higher Education for Sustainable Global Development. Read more here!
April 2021 – Dr. Buckner stars a new collaboration with scholars at Cambridge University to investigate public missions of Universities in Crisis, entitled Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’: UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey
April 2021 – Dr. Buckner is awarded a three-year SSHRC Partnership Development Grant to support a new collaborative research project with Boston College and the International Association of Universities on the Future of Internationalization in a COVID-affected world
April 2021 – Three doctoral students from our team are awarded very prestigious SSHRC Doctoral Grants – Amad Al-Azzawi, Ceara Khoramshahi and Zahra Jafrarova
May 2021 – Our team presented numerous papers at the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education, including a panel on private higher education with scholars joining from around the world
June 2021 – Yoyo Zhang and Phoebe Kang are awarded a UofT Student Engagement Award to conduct research on research on the impact of Anti-Asian racism on international student mobility
July 2021 – Dr. Buckner is awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (IDG) to support a new project on sustainability tracking in higher education
August 2021 – PhD Student Amad Al-Azzawi publishes a new article in the journal Pharmacy Education titled “The relationship between pharmacy licensing policies on clinical training (CT) and success rates for international pharmacists (IPs) within Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States: A comparative policy analysis.” Read the Article »
September 2021 – PhD Student You Zhang, along with two OISE PhD students, publishes a new article in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education titled “International Students’ Motivations and Decisions to do a PhD in Canada: Proposing a Three-Layer Push-Pull Framework.” Read the Article »
March 2020 – Before COVID, we had a really enriching visit to SUNY-Albany to meet with Dr. Dan Levy and his team of graduate students.
March 2020: COVID-19 has it us all hard! We had to put our fieldwork to the UAE on private higher education on hold.
April 2020 – Dr. Buckner and PhD Student You Zhang present their work on student-faculty ratios worldwide in a Highlighted Session of the Higher Education Special Interest Group at the Virtual CIES Annual Conference
June 2019 – We present findings from our project on private higher education at the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education in Vancouver, BC
June 2019 – We present work on internationalization strategies at the Securing Sustainable Futures for Internationalization of Higher Education conference at OISE.
July 2019 – Dr. Buckner and PhD student Cassidy Gong travel to China to conduct fieldwork with 12 private universities in 3 provinces.
Research Highlights
As part of the Future of Internationalization Partnership (FIP), a collaboration between OISE, Boston College, and the International Association of Universities, we have recently completed a rigorous review of studies on the impact of COVID-19 on the internationalization of higher education. Our analysis examined the short-term impact of COVID-19 on internationalization, spanning March 2020-August 2021.
In total, we identified 158 publications, including peer-reviewed academic articles, magazines, newspapers and book chapters that met our inclusion criteria. We then coded each publication based on its publication type, country or region of focus, internationalization domain or activity, and emergent key themes.
All the articles analyzed in the review (academic and non-academic) are now available. The following visualization makes it clear that there are a few focal themes and many gaps in the current literature.
Photos from our team
