A good deal of higher education market reports indicates that the global higher education market size is reaching USD 100 billion and the total number of international students in the world is reaching 7 million. Recently, almost 300.000 international students enrolled at nearly 200 universities contributed roughly $1 billion to Türkiye's economy annually. Aggressively, we see that high-level political bodies of university education intend to increase it more. In this conjunction, we think that Turkiye's efforts on global education policies, strategies, and actions to increase its share in the global higher education economic market need to be discussed timely and critically.
TopIntroduction
“No better text for a History of Entrepreneurship could be found than the creation and development of the modern university, and especially the modern American university.” Peter Drucker
It would not be that much of an overstatement to propose that Turkiye’s entrepreneurship efforts on fostering and extending the internationalization of universities in Türkiye’s as of the 2020s appear that its aims will be achieved somehow. That is, Ayyıldız and Durnali (2021) illustrated that many projects at different levels have been developed in the country to reach international students and meet their needs and expectations as much as possible, especially since the beginning of the 2000s. While some of these are mainly developed and carried out by universities, there are other initiatives at a macro level, such as Study in Turkey, which are developed and run by the Council of Higher Education (CoHE). To that end, we will delve deeper into Turkiye’s efforts on global education: what they are and how Türkiye has been implementing them. The next section will focus on the background of related subjects.
TopBackground
When delving into current literature to find something about the role of higher education organizations, mainly, we found that they play an essential role in economic growth (Dutt & Veneziani, 2018; Hawkes & Ugur, 2012; Tilak, 2010; Woodhall, 1987), economic development (Kruss, McGrath, Petersen, & Gastrow, 2015; Stein, Andreotti & Suša, 2019), knowledge economy (Schendel & McCowan, 2016; Đonlagić and Kurtić, 2016; Peters & Humes, 2003), development (Stein, Andreotti & Suša, 2019; Oketch, McCowan, Schendel, 2014; Tilak, 2010), innovation (Bano & Taylor, 2015; Pillay, 2011), human capital (Castells, 1994; Pillay, 2011), contribution to society beyond the diplomas - externalities of education - (Schendel, 2015) and teaching foreign students, to wit: Durnalı, Orakcı and Özkan 2018 stated that “developments in knowledge and technology bring distant proximity and distant societies’ closer; diversify activities across societies such as co-operating in education, facilitating communication and transport. A reflection of these developments is seen in higher education activities as well. Especially in order to contribute to the development of a country, sending students to another country with an advanced higher education system has been becoming increasingly widespread.” (p. 204). Besides, higher education organizations have responsibility for both carrying out research (Duderstadt, 1999; Limon & Durnali, 2018) and teaching skills (Spring, 2018) such as critical thinking (Durnali, 2022) and creative thinking (Durnali, Orakci, & Khalil, 2022). On the other hand, a university education can create a serious economy for the cities or countries where universities are located.