After the Asymmetry

When a Northern university signed a partnership with a Chinese counterpart in 2015, the lawyers in the room spent weeks on the host-country terms. Who would own the data. Whose accreditation would govern the degree. How disputes with the Chinese partner would be resolved. What almost no one was asked to price was the other half of the equation — the home government’s posture toward the partnership over its ten- or twenty-year life. Washington was treated as a stable backdrop, not a counterparty whose interests could shift. By 2024, that partnership was being unwound, not because Beijing had changed its terms, but because Washington had. The contract had been written for a world in which only one sovereignty mattered to the negotiation. That world is gone.

For most of three decades, the architecture of international higher education was built on a quiet asymmetry. Northern universities and Northern governments shaped the terms of cross-border partnerships, set the prestige hierarchies that determined which universities counted, and decided through immigration and research policy who could move where. Southern institutions — with the notable exception of elite systems in China, Brazil, the Gulf, and parts of Southeast Asia, which exercised substantial agency long before this moment — operated inside terms they had not written. The volume era — the period the field has just lived through — was less a market than a configuration of power, and the configuration ran in one direction. As the dominant logic governing how most institutions set their internationalization priorities, that configuration, too, is receding.

What this series has documented across five regions is the simultaneous reordering of both ends of that asymmetry. The Northern reordering is the part the practitioner literature has paid most attention to. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American visa system saw over 4,700 student visa records revoked or placed under review by spring 2025; the Canadian study-permit cap, announced by IRCC in early 2024 and implemented throughout the year, cut new study permit approvals by roughly 45 to 48 percent against the prior year; the Council of the European Union’s May 2024 Recommendation on enhancing research security formalized a Union-wide shift from open scientific cooperation toward the principle of being as open as possible and as closed as necessary; the legal architecture that has hardened across the Five Eyes since 2021 has outpaced most universities’ compliance capacity. The Northern university is now operating in conditions its volume-era playbook did not anticipate.

The Southern reordering has received less attention and is arguably more consequential. Here the picture is neither uniform nor simply the inverse of Northern decline. China has moved from a major source of outbound students to a major host of inbound ones and a research producer whose output now rivals that of the United States by several measures — and it is simultaneously a Global South power and a nascent research hegemon with its own asymmetric ambitions. The Indian National Education Policy of 2020 reframed internationalization explicitly as a project of building Indian capacity to receive the world on Indian terms, in line with the broader Atmanirbhar Bharat doctrine. Latin American institutions, even where regional integration remains slow, are increasingly explicit that bilateral agreements with the Global North must serve domestic strategic priorities rather than the reverse. Gulf states — wealthy hosts whose leverage has always been material rather than subordinate — have transitioned from passive landlords of educational free zones to active managers writing demographic and labor-market quotas into branch campus agreements. African institutions, slowly and unevenly, are beginning to question the contractual terms a generation of partnerships were signed under. None of these are coordinated. All of them point in the same direction.

The scholarly literature has had vocabulary for this shift for some time. Marginson and Rhoades’ glonacal heuristic, more than two decades old, named higher education as something that runs simultaneously across global, national, and local scales rather than inside single state containers. What Moscovitz and Sabzalieva have more recently added is the recognition that states across both hemispheres are now active shapers of academic activity rather than passive containers of it, and that the strategic interests of those states visibly drive policy decisions on both sides. Maguatcher and Chen describe the resulting environment as a multipolar order defined by ideological polarization and intense competition for technological preeminence. What is new in 2026 is not the theory. It is that the Southern half of the equation is now exercising the agency the theory had already attributed to it.

The opening this creates is real, and it is the central question for the next decade of international higher education in the Global South. The North’s volume-era model was not just shaped by power asymmetry; it produced consequential failures even inside its own terms. It optimized for enrollment numbers and ranking positions over educational outcomes whose evidence base remains, despite decades of effort, surprisingly thin. It treated partnerships as deliverables rather than as relationships whose value compounds slowly. It allowed the marketing function to overtake the academic function in too many institutions. It assumed that more international students, more MoUs, and more branch campuses constituted a strategy. The literature has been raising these critiques for at least five decades. Most institutions, North and South alike, have heard them and continued anyway, because the volume era’s incentives ran in the other direction.

The Southern institutions now positioned to lead have a choice the North did not get to make in the same way. They are entering a sovereignty era with the potential benefit of having watched what the volume era produced. They can — and this is the productive part of the asymmetry inverting — build internationalization on terms that the literature has long argued for but the volume era systematically did not reward. They can insist on understanding what internationalization actually does for their students, their faculties, and their countries before scaling it. They can be honest about where the evidence is thin. They can refuse to mistake activity for outcome. They can negotiate partnerships as equals committed to a common project of knowledge, rather than as junior partners gratefully accepting Northern terms.

The honest reading of the volume era is that the failures inside it were rarely the dramatic kind that produced headlines. They were the quieter kind. Partnerships that existed on paper but generated nothing of substance. Programs whose claims about intercultural competence outran the evidence base. Recruitment strategies that brought students into systems that were not actually ready to support them. MoUs signed at the conclusion of state visits that no one inside the institution had the bandwidth to operationalize. Branch campuses launched with announcements written like real estate transactions rather than academic commitments. None of these failures registered loudly. All of them accumulated. The North did not learn from them cheaply. It would be a serious waste for the South to pay the same price a second time.

Whether the Global South takes the opening is not predetermined. The same incentives that produced the volume era’s pathologies in the North — rankings, visibility, marketing budgets that grow faster than academic budgets, ministerial pressure to announce partnerships — are operative in Southern systems too. The Latin American pattern, in which institutions rationally prioritize prestige-building bilateral agreements with the North over the slower work of regional integration, is one version of the same temptation. The early evidence on China’s outbound branch campuses, on India’s overseas IIT expansion, and on Gulf states’ transnational ambitions will indicate within a few years whether the South is building a different model or scaling a familiar one under new flags.

The future the literature has been imagining for five decades — partnerships between Northern and Southern institutions structured as collaborations between counterparties with distinct but compatible commitments to advancing knowledge — is now within reach in a way it has not been before. The same sovereignty era that opens negotiating space between genuine counterparties also, however, generates countervailing forces: research security frameworks that restrict what can be shared, compliance burdens that favor large and well-resourced institutions, and geopolitical polarization that can harden into academic nationalism. The structural possibility is real; whether it is seized, and whether the sovereignty era produces genuine collaboration or merely a new set of asymmetries under different flags, remains an open question. The IAU’s most recent global survey documents how unevenly leaders across more than a hundred countries are reading this moment, and how few institutions have yet moved their governance architecture to match what the moment requires. The gap is the opportunity.

Next week, the final post in this series turns from diagnosis to architecture: what institutions on both sides of the bilateral structure now have to build, if the sovereignty era is to produce something the volume era did not.

References

Council of the European Union. (2024). Council Recommendation of 23 May 2024 on enhancing research security (2024/C 199/01). Official Journal of the European Union.

Council on Health Research for Development. (2013). Where there is no lawyer: Guidance for fairer contract negotiation in collaborative research partnerships. COHRED.

Gacel-Ávila, J., Villalón-de-la-Isla, E. M., & Vázquez-Niño, G. (2024). La internacionalización de la educación superior en América Latina: una visión comparada. Revista Educación Superior y Sociedad, 36(1), 310–334.

Maguatcher, J., & Chen, B. (2025). Re-imagining global higher education in an era of geopolitical re-alignment. Global Policy Journal.

Marginson, S., & Rhoades, G. (2002). Beyond national states, markets, and systems of higher education: A glonacal agency heuristic. Higher Education, 43(3), 281–309.

Marinoni, G., van’t Land, H., & de Wit, H. (2024). Present and future of internationalization of higher education: Insights from the sixth IAU global survey. International Higher Education, 118, 8–9.

Moscovitz, H., & Sabzalieva, E. (2023). Conceptualising the new geopolitics of higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 21(2), 149–165.

Walker-Munro, B. (2024). National security, foreign investment & research security: The current state of art. Griffith Law Review, 33(2), 167–188.