Five years to recover global mobility, says IHE expert

Higher education can expect at least 12 months of “abnormal conditions” from the COVID-19 pandemic – with at least five years before global student mobility recovers, according to Professor Simon Marginson, the director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, a partnership of 14 universities with its headquarters at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Speaking to the online International Higher Education Forum 2020 organised by Universities UK, and for which University World News is a media partner, Marginson said: “International higher education is going to take a massive hit” – with the pandemic expected to last longer in Europe and North America “because of the need to flatten the curve and minimise the casualties” than in East Asian countries which handled the coronavirus differently at the outset.

Economists, he said, were suggesting “a possible 10% reduction of global GDP and a very long recovery period – with the greatest impact, both economically and in terms of health issues, in the emerging countries from which we draw many of our students, in South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sub-Saharan Africa” …

View original article