Columbia students interning under the Santiago Center’s inaugural Virtual Internship Program, which was first launched in the northern hemisphere summer of 2020, have just had a paper published in an international journal regarding their research with Chile’s Universidad Católica (UC).
The paper, entitled “Overcoming Barriers in Higher Education Mobility between Latin America, Canada and Asia: A Scoping Review,” was published in Sciedu Press’s International Journal of Higher Education.
Columbia students Arooba Ahmed and Jia Jun Joel Wen performed their internships with UC's Undergraduate Internationalization Program. Under the guidance of Maribel Flórez, UC Director of Global Learning and Mobility Programs, they researched how to improve the university’s Higher Education International Mobility Programs.
Specifically focusing on internationalization policies, Ahmed and Wen reviewed higher education mobility between Asia, Latin America and Canada. Their findings revealed that there is great importance in fostering connections between cultures through education, which would then open barriers between countries.
“International student mobility is one way to foster intercultural relations [between Latin America and Asia], which are currently quite low between these regions. Canada has faced a similar struggle as Latin America to attract students in the Americas when faced with competition from US universities, but has had some successes which Latin American countries could learn from,” according to the paper’s abstract. “This study therefore completes a scoping review of the literature to categorize barriers and enablers to academic mobility between higher education institutions (HEIs) in Asia, Canada, and Latin America and synthesizes relevant suggestions. An integrative literature search of qualitative and quantitative studies was conducted using six different databases.”
Together with Flórez, Ahmed and Wen published the paper with Lillian Ferrer, UC Vice President for International Affairs, and Pedro Iacobelli, UC Director of the Center for Asian Studies.
