The Academic Empires: The World-Society Argument and Colonial Legacies in the International Student Migration System

In the recent years, sociological thinking about globalization in the education sphere has been heavily dominated by the world-society theorizing, originating in works of John Meyer and his various colleagues. The major expectation, arising from it, is emergence of a unified global academic culture, and, generally, convergence in organization and practices of the education sector. This paper tests the world-society theory by applying it to data on higher education students’ migrations between countries. The expectation derived from WS theory is that (a) the migration flows will demonstrate rapidly diminishing or already minimal levels of clusterization, and (b) that particularistic cultural-institutional variables (e.g. common language, similar institutional structures caused by belonging to common political units) will have minimal or diminishing significance in predicting size of student flows. Volume of international student migration between pairs of countries (UNESCO statistics) in 1998-2012 is used to reconstruct the flows system. Network measures were calculated for each of the years to observe the dynamics of student migration system. For evaluating significance of cultural-institutional variables, negative binomial regression with historical experience of belonging to the same political system (colonial empire typically) was performed as an independent variable controlling for proximity, economic affluence, and size. Historical experience of dependency is chosen as the most general proxi for probability of massive institutional import since wide literature on international migrations argues that institutional (especially educational system) and transport infrastructure, which were established to connect imperial centre and the colonies in order to get steady flow of raw materials, reproduces imperial language use as well as certain type of dispositions and identities. All this evidence gives only limited support to the world-society approach; cultural-institutional divisions retain and, eventually, even increase their influence.