The Covid-19 Pandemic and International Higher Education in East Asia

The internationalization of education is facing an unprecedented challenge because the world is presently confronted with the Covid-19 pandemic. Prior to the current global health crisis, increasing concerns were raised about the value and benefits of international education to different social groups. Critics of the internationalization of education emphasized that international student mobility only favours the elites in society, disadvantaging groups with limited socioeconomics status (Mok, Wang and Neubauer 2020). In view of the Covid-19 pandemic, some leading scholars in the field of international higher education is emerging, of which one major consequence is the intensifying inequality after the post-pandemic period (Marinoni and de Wit 2020). Although Mok and Marginson anticipated a potential paradigm shift from West to East when students choose their overseas learning destinations (Mok 2020l Marginson 2020a), other scholars have considered that the future of globalization may be called into question.