Global universities ‘need international accreditation system’

The internationalisation of higher education is being held back by the difficulties some students face getting global degrees recognised in their home countries, according to the vice-chancellor of a leading branch campus.

Fabio Piano, the vice-chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), said that without a global accrediting body, universities like his were having to seek multiple accreditations for their degrees from various jurisdictions to prevent their students from facing challenges.

While there have been some efforts at harmonisation, such as Europe’s Bologna Process, most countries insist international qualifications are assessed to ensure compatibility with domestic systems, with rules varying depending on professions and organisations involved.

The biologist, himself an Italian who studied in both Italy and New York before landing in Abu Dhabi, said he was among those who had encountered issues.   

“I had to do this myself because I was an undergraduate in New York at NYU as an international student, and my accreditation had to go through the system of the Italian Ministry of Education…In retrospect it got done, but it was quite a bit of work, and you want to have a system that is not so hard for recognition in a globalised society.”

He described this as a “mechanical” point, but said “we think it’s important, and like many other mechanical things, it allows us to [enact] our philosophical values, and our values are to really connect the world”.

Piano said having a global outlook was becoming ever more important in challenging students’ conceptions about other parts of the world.

Giving students an opportunity to “meet the other” allows “people to have an inoculation against being fearful…to create a community of people that can say, ‘yes, I know that not everybody has the same way of thinking around this topic, but it doesn’t mean that they must therefore be bad’”, Piano said.

“It’s about a common humanity that we need to consider developing as the globe gets more and more connected, and people meet more and more in some interstitial spaces and not wanting those spaces to become reasons for us to break apart.”

Piano said the UAE higher education system has great potential owing to the country’s large youth population and ability to invest, and said it has “developed the capacity to think in the extreme long term in ways that I think are very unusual”.

For him, the region is particularly well suited to lead on internationalisation in higher education, as “the Arab region is [made up of] so many different communities that in many ways it embodies the world”. 

However, there is a “tension” within the Arab region’s higher education sector between maintaining its regional identity and being outward looking, Piano said.

“As an Italian, I know that there’s a lot of sense of being proud of your history, but it can hold you back. And so, in some ways, I think that balance is the challenge that we are striking in the UAE,” he said.

“The lens of the Arab world is extremely important, but the world is the world. And so the UAE is allowing us to look beyond the Arab region, and to be able to attract talent from all over the world.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com