At the outset, the authors of this book tackle an interesting question: “what lessons can a study of the internationalisation of Norwegian higher education and research provide to international readers?” After all, Norway is quite a unique case. It is a small, affluent, resource‐rich nation on the edge of Europe. Even though internationalisation is a preoccupation of policy‐makers and institutional leaders in many countries, surely Norway's situation is far removed from that of most countries. Would not any findings presented in this book have little relevance elsewhere, except perhaps for its Northern European neighbours? Despite this challenge, this edited volume does manage to be surprisingly useful for thinking about how internationalisation progresses, and how it can be studied. In particular, the rigor and comprehensiveness of the methods used by the authors of each chapter is outstanding, and the systematic approach presented here deserves to be emulated widely.
The concluding chapter observes that in Norway, internationalisation is not a controversial issue, and unlike many other countries, in Norway it is easy to build a consensus in favour of internationalisation both within government and higher education institutions. One reason for this, the authors postulate, is that Norwegian institutions are in such a privileged position that they have much to gain and little to fear in opening up to the world. “Norway represents the case of internationalisation under conditions of a small, relatively open flexible economy with political stability that combines political intervention with economic liberalisation, and is placed among the five countries in the world that score highest on the key characteristics of a developed knowledge economy” (p. 178). Norwegian scholars and institutions are clearly very well‐placed to compete internationally. Although beyond the scope of this book, such a finding lends itself to comparative studies of internationalisation, and a neat starting point might be the wariness towards internationalisation in some Mediterranean European countries where even the Bologna process is seen as a threat to already vulnerable institutions.
Slippersteræter and Aksnes' chapter on internationalisation of research and development funding and collaboration makes excellent use of available data, showing that the proportion of research funding coming from foreign sources is increasing, especially in research institutes. Foreign funding accounted for 12 per cent of institutes' research income, compared with only three per cent of that of Norwegian universities. The institutes have a more diversified funding mix, receiving more of their research funding from business and research council grants, compared with universities which are more reliant on domestic government funding. Those institutes dealing with agriculture and the social sciences receive funding predominantly from the EU Framework Programmes, while foreign industry is the main source of foreign research funds for the technological institutes. The second half of this chapter examines Thomson ISI data on publications co‐authored by Norwegian and foreign scholars. While rates of international collaboration have increased globally, the increase in Norway seems to have been greater than average. Norwegian scholars seem to increasingly prefer European collaborators, who now make up around 45 per cent of co‐authors, with the remainder evenly split between three groupings – Nordic countries, North America and other countries. This particular regional orientation is a repeated frequently throughout the book, giving the reader the feeling that Norway's mental map of the world of higher education extends only as far the Alps to the South, to the shores of the Baltic Sea in the East, and to North America's Great Lakes in the West. While there is excellent coverage of relevant research and comparative data from within this sphere, little mention is made of the world beyond.
As many chapters show, in the past two decades, Norway appears to have become more integrated into European regional academic networks, and much of the growth in international engagement with European countries, building on the long‐standing connections Norway has had with other Nordic states and the United States. This is in spite of Norway not being a member of the European Union, and the chapter by Gornitzka and Langfeldt provides an excellent account of the ways in which national knowledge policies in Norway have sought to align the country into various regional and international process, despite being blocked from some key processes within the EU system. Norway is concerned about being sidelined within the region, but is still able to participate in many European inititiatives, such as the Bologna Process, which are initiated by the Council of Europe, and the EU Framework Programmes for research collaboration. Maassen, Vabø and Stensaker's chapter provides an interesting historical account of Norway's involvement in Nordic cooperation, and the ways in which this bloc has been transformed by the growth in pan‐European processes more recently.
One of the most interesting features of Norway's international engagement in higher education is its voucher system for student funding, which extends to funding those students who undertake qualifications abroad, either for their whole degree or for a part of a Norwegian qualification. Norwegian higher education students have a long history of travelling abroad for study, and Wiers‐Jenssen, in her excellent chapter on the outcomes for Norwegian students studying abroad, estimates cites estimates that in the 1950 s around 30 per cent of Norwegian university students were studying outside the country. Today, Norway provides grants and subsidised loans that allow around 6.5 to 10 per cent of the student body to study overseas, which is higher than comparable nations with high GDP per capita. The most explicit policy rationales for encouraging outgoing student mobility are educational and cultural, but there are widely‐acknowledged efficiency gains in doing so, as the cost of overseas study for Norwegians is likely to be a less expensive option for government than expanding domestic institutions. Wiers‐Jenssen analyses data from surveys of former students between 3.5 and 5 years after graduation. The students are divided into three groups, those who did all of their studies in Norway, those who obtained Norwegian qualifications but did some study abroad, and those with foreign qualifications. Internationally mobile students found it more difficult to enter the labour market initially, but had higher wages than non‐mobile students. Students who had studied abroad were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to work in roles requiring international skills, English language proficiency and international travel, and more had worked outside Norway, although the vast majority returned to Norway within a few years of graduation, so unlike many other countries with large outbound student numbers, brain drain is not an issue for Norway, especially since some returnees bring partners back to Norway with them. Such detailed comparative data on outcomes for internationally‐mobile and non‐mobile students is rare, and this chapter show the practical value of such research in evaluating the implications of policies supporting international mobility.
An interesting theme running through the book, which is picked up in the concluding chapter, is the formalisation of internationalisation in Norwegian higher education. In an earlier era, international connections and forays were usually initiated by interested scholars, whereas nowadays this bottom‐up internationalisation has been to some extent overlaid by a network of institutional arrangements within institutions, between institutions and between governments. The strength of this book is in its analysis of these emergent institutional arrangements, supported by access to excellent data on the international activities of both students and scholars. However, the over‐reliance on quantitative data gives the reader quite a distant view of internationalisation at the level of scholarly practice or classroom experience, much like trying to understand suburban life by looking at rooftops on Google Earth perhaps. Some richer description of practical consequences, perhaps though case studies or more qualitative approaches would add to the quantitative analyses presented here. One curious omission in the book is the lack of any discussion of incoming international students, apart from occasional passing references to the development of English‐language graduate programs and reciprocal recruitment of exchange students.
