Cross-level Internationalization Strategies: The Swiss Experience

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The landscape of Higher Education and its institutions and activities have changed tremendously over the past two decades. Today, internationalization of Higher Education has reached all stakeholders and actors on global, national and regional levels. This session will focus on cross-level interactions and activities of internationalization using the example of Switzerland.

On the national level, internationalization efforts are often accompanied by initiatives and programs, which can have an impact on the internationalization strategies at other levels. On the institutional level, higher education institutions (HEIs) develop their own internationalization strategies, and in doing so, they take national frameworks and funding schemes into consideration.

The session will illustrate the connection between cross-level internationalization strategies by highlighting Switzerland as an example. It will predominantly focus on activities for young researchers without loosing sight of mobility schemes in general and institutional cooperation. To begin with the internationalization strategy of the Swiss Confederation will be introduced. swissnex Brazil, as a representative of the federal internationalization initiatives, will present its field of activities as a facilitator between Swiss and Brazilian HEIs and other institutions. At the institutional level, the Universities of Bern and Zurich will showcase the implementation of their internationalization strategies as well as of some measures for young researchers.
They will also reason how and to what extent national internationalization efforts have had an impact on their work.
Bringing together actors at the national level with representatives of HEI will highlight the challenges that all actors who implement internationalization activities meet and lend itself to approaches as to how these can be addressed.

Outcome: Participants of this session will learn how cross-level internationalization strategies influence each other, without being interdependent. In addition, examples will show the participants how an internationalization strategy can be put into practice. Last but no least this session presents the Swiss system of higher education in general and it showcases Swiss HEIs as potential partners for universities of Latin America and the world.

Author(s):

Malin Borg    
swissnex Brazil
Switzerland

Zoë Ghielmetti    
University of Bern
Switzerland

Yasmine Inhauen    
University of Zurich
Switzerland