 to the show policy for the people. I'm your host, Menara Mordecai. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Dean Newbauer, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manila. Aloha, Dean, welcome to this show and thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very excited to talk about international education and its impact on Hawaii. Welcome. Thank you, Menara. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for asking me. I want to begin by looking at the national landscape of international education. You've been working in the field of international education for a number of years. Do you find that it's changed much in the US over the last five years? If so, what forces have contributed to the changing landscape? Well, that's a three-part question, disguised as one, actually, because there were a couple of things that I would call major structural variables that were in play prior to COVID. And with the arrival of COVID, you suddenly get something that's radically different across the globe. So those three structural factors, the other two that we saw playing out, were, on the one hand, the emergence of international education as an increased global currency. It always had significant currency, but it had continued to grow over the last decade or so, particularly with the enormous influx of Chinese students outside of China, but also students from other parts of Asia, and then African students into China. So if you look at those numbers, they kind of go up like this on both sides of things. And that's a complicated story that will bypass here, but simply to say that it represented the dual face of higher education period. And that is, on the one hand, it is an enormous boon to the receiving country, so that if you go back into national data and look at the amount of financial input to American higher education over the last 10, 12 years, prior to the pandemic, it is a steeply rising curve. So what's the other side of that? And the other side of that is dependence. And so increasingly, one can make the argument, and many have, Simon Martinsen, perhaps most famously, about the possible downsides of becoming financially dependent on international education. And so just prior to the pandemic, the United States was having well over a million students, and that was despite the fact that our previous president, when he came into office, sent a set of signals that are reduced if not cut off higher education endeavors in the United States from Muslim countries. So the collection of that observation is that prior to the pandemic, one could go throughout a higher education country after country and look at the dependence. The United States was outdone actually by Australia, by explicit policy, the Australian national government mandated that its national universities produce 25% of their budgets with the income from international students, which they did. And so in many respects, Australia had the largest dependency on international education. And then when the pandemic arrived, it hit them even worse than it did in the United States. But what it did to the United States was to just cut a hole in the budgets of significant numbers of universities. And then to make just one more point, six months into the pandemic, it becomes apparent that as many as 600 higher education institutions in the United States will not see the other side of the pandemic for reasons of financial exigency. That's interesting. You mentioned briefly that the previous president had instituted during his administration some of the policies that stifled in international education, specifically in coming of international students to the US. Can you say a little more about what specifically was those policies and how did they work in the university? Well, you might recall within months of his taking office, he, through executive order, bans the migration into the United States of people from six Muslim countries. And there is then a pushback on that by a variety of sectors and throughout higher education. But it becomes part of what is in the play of forces throughout the Trump administration, where on the one hand, you have a set of policies that have been inherited from past practices and specifically from the previous administration. Then there is coming from the president, from the executive office, the sets of announcements which impact those policies. And then they are followed by the differential behavior of those who are in those agencies who say, in effect, we don't want those policies. The president has no right to do that, et cetera, et cetera. The New York Times on the past Sunday has a long article in the opinion section on exactly this dynamic playing out within the Census Bureau and Trump's determination not to count people to make not too much out of that who are unlikely to vote for him, but who also tend to be overwhelmingly Latino. And then people in the Census Bureau who simply got their backup and said, we're not gonna do this. And so that's the dynamic that was playing out within higher education as well. On the one hand, Trump was seeking to create a policy through these actions. And then there was significant pushback through the Congress, et cetera, et cetera. But it roiled higher education, if you will, and led to four years of various kinds of diminutives in which universities trying to figure out what they could do in terms of their engagements in international education and which of those things might bump into difficulty with federal authorities and indeed with the courts. So since Trump had lost the election, the new president has come in. Have you seen a shift in some of these policies? So on the one hand, we have perhaps a change in the formal policies. On the other hand, do you feel like the perception that the United States is not a well-complaced for international students? Is that still there? So what is your opinion about the perception and the shift in policy? Complicated question are because of COVID, because if one didn't have COVID, one would have a way of looking straight at that question and saying, yes, this was happening and then it was interrupted by Trump and now we're going back to X. But the fact is what we're going back to in most instances has no relationship to what was there formerly. And so throughout international higher education and particularly what we're looking at here in the United States is relationship of American institutions to international students. So much of that has become non-in-person and by being non-in-person, it avoids the literal phenomena of taking a body through customs and et cetera, et cetera. But raise this all kinds of other questions as you well know. That's really interesting. So we actually don't know what that last tape is going to look like until after COVID. And then the other part is finances, right? I would say in addition, yes, I'll get to finance in a minute, but I would say on the other side of that in the earlier question that you raised is what was going on in higher education structurally? And since 2016, we've become accustomed to talking about the fourth industrial revolution which embodies the extent to which artificial intelligence is being used in a whole variety of ways. And what the pandemic has done is to put energy into that phenomena that was just unfathomable prior to the pandemic. And so what we have seen now in an effort to hold on to some sense of normality. And what I mean by that is here you are a department at X University. It could be the University of Hawaii, Manoa and you've got a wine number of students and they suddenly were out of the country and now can't get back in the country, et cetera, et cetera. So you have this relationship with them through the dynamics of artificial intelligence. And then because that's the situation all over the world, you have once again this kind of flamethrower on the base of these AI innovations. And the question becomes what indeed will any of in place education be after the pandemic given the fact that so much reliance has been done. And just to mention one thing there which is certainly true of the University of Hawaii but I've been around enough to know that it's common throughout. And that was forcing the faculty in a very, very short timeframe to become at least marginally efficient and sufficient in distance education to replace in person education. And now if you look at the literature the literature is just chock full of studies about what succeeds and what doesn't succeed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But we're in a different era and that era is so defined by COVID that it tends to cover over the AI portion. But just before I leave that, prior to the pandemic we had a meeting of some colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the East West Center and a network that we have in Asia on the impact of artificial intelligence on higher education. And then the impact of artificial intelligence in nations and it was widely accepted in Japan, for example, that perhaps as many as 40% of jobs that were currently existing would disappear over the next decade to be replaced by artificial intelligence. And so that, to me, I don't even know where to begin to think about a society in which 40% of the jobs go away as a result of artificial intelligence. But it is a dynamic which is running under COVID and coincident with it and which COVID has brought to the fore as the only viable solution to keeping a higher education in any form that we know it in place. And it will continue. Just one last thought about that, if you will. Last week, Dan Brown, an epidemiologist from the University of Hawaii produced locally an hour long review of COVID-19 throughout the world and with particular emphasis on Hawaii and it's Dan's belief as it is for a number of epidemiologists that COVID may not disappear until 2024. So it's not like, what are we gonna do next week? So here I'm sitting in Hawaii while you are away watching the University of Hawaii get prepared to open next week and I was just on the Manoa campus this morning and at some level nobody knows. They'll try it this way. They've been extraordinarily thoughtful in how to do it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's in-person education because that's the bread and butter of higher education throughout the world is in-person education. Unfortunately, international students are still struggling getting into the country because of various travel restrictions. Is that correct? Yeah, so there's a added layer of that. Yeah, but on the positive side of it's extraordinary in our university and then as one goes to the literature, you can see what's happening at other universities. The immense creativity that has gone into distance education since it moved from being really, be frank, marginal to in-person education to the main dish because let's face it, these are powerful institutions and once they put their collective mind to something, you get a lot of change and that's what's happening. So, you mentioned that universities are definitely getting financial gains from having international students, but there are other benefits to having international collaborations and presence of international students on campus, specifically visiting scholars and graduate students. What are some of the key studies and research areas that are currently benefiting from international university collaboration? And specifically if you know of any in Hawaii. Yeah, there's three kind of answers to that, if you will. One is what is what I would call the sociology of in-person education any university anywhere and that's who learns what from whom. And I think that it extraordinarily well reflected in the research that the single most benefit of person to person education is not what you learn in the classroom, it's what you learn by being in the environment of higher education. And so that's what is being at stake here and what is happening is the emergence and I don't think we've seen enough of it yet, at least I haven't, but I think we will in the next couple of years in what I would call the informal electronic sociology of higher education. It's how students and faculty come to know each other and engage each other outside the person to person classroom. The second large component of that is opening up the door to what has been, I wouldn't say a separation, but well, in many ways it's been a separation between the research component of higher education institutions and the teaching and socialization components. And that's always been complicated and those of us who've been in the business have simplified it simply by trying to have a way to talk about it, that's sensible. But it is a well-known thing in higher education and you know it yourself that as you go through that process you learned as an individual as much from the socialization that you have with your peers as you do from anything that you might gain from the faculty despite how brilliant they might be. And so what we're having here in the AI once again to repeat myself is an emergent structure and that emergent structure is progressing rapidly and the research is beginning to pop out. And the next year I would venture to say 20, 30% of the articles in the higher education policy journals will be about that phenomenon because it affects another part of higher education that we rarely talk about and that is how you administer that structure because in fact what people have at the administrative level have had to do over the last 18 months is how to learn how to run institutions in ways that they were almost entirely unprepared to do. And those who do it successfully are gonna end up with less read on the balance sheet as opposed to those who don't. And I know you worked with a number of international students who came to the University of Hawaii and then decided to remain in Hawaii and contribute to that either by being a researcher or getting jobs. So there is a distinct benefit to the economy that we're seeing from international students and international education. Extraordinary and in Hawaii just to take a local incident. One of the things that Hawaii has suffered from for the last three decades has been the distribution of physicians throughout the islands. And Honolulu and Oahu tend to be, because that's where the big hospitals are, tend to be Dr. Magnets. And by the time you get to the big island in Kauai, much less so. And I'm just listening to Mr. Green who is Dr. Green, who's the Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii who talks about how the pandemic is helping to, along with those who have come to Hawaii from outside, migrating both from the mainland and from outside the US to situate themselves in rural Hawaii. And that's a phenomena that my looking at the research says is very prevalent in the rest of the United States. So where do most of the graduate students in the United States come from? And the answer is China and India. What do they do? Well, taking some liberties here with the actual science, significantly Chinese students are much more likely to end up in the hard sciences and engineering. And Indian students, despite the fact that they have a significant presence in engineering, are much more likely to end up in medicine. So one of the things that you see in the United States today as we go around, you know, taking COVID shots from this administrator and that administrator throughout the United States is that, to my eye, 50 to 60% of them are South Asian. So, you know, the question is how will the pandemic affect higher education recruitment? Part A. Part B is to the extent that it's not person to person. To what extent will that affect the migration of these extraordinarily talented people into the workforce? And that's a complicated question. Yeah, and what I'm hearing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that there is a definite benefit to having international education channels open, tempered so that there isn't an over-dependence on it, but we can measure benefits specifically to our state, to Hawaii, by the number of graduates that contributes to the economy, the amount of tuition dollars that contributes to the university. So we're seeing some of these concrete benefits. International education is in this flux where it's affected by COVID, it's affected by previous administration policies. And what I ask of all my guests, as an expert, if you were given a seat at the decision-makers table at the state level, what policies would you put into place today for both short-term and long-term impact on international education that can benefit the state going forward? That's a great question. And I would ask those sitting at the table with me, aren't we confident that the pathways that we are seeking to open to innovation at all levels in all fields are there or what has historically been the case not only in Hawaii, but other places as well? In the name of having an open door, do we partially have it closed for some of those who may not look exactly like the ones that we want to come through the door? And I think that's a critical issue. I think that, and that takes us to a whole other subject that we managed to avoid throughout most of this conversation, which is the research and nationalism that has been the result of the previous administration and how that is affecting politics in all of the states. And a whole other subject is the extent to which state public universities are a consequence of that politics in places where not only the pandemic, but the preferred policies of the previous administration have led to an extraordinary intensification of the political structure. And that plays out in boards of regions that plays out in what happens in the legislature, et cetera, et cetera. So those will be the unsettling issues, I think, on our end in the coming three to five years. Interesting. So the policy implementation, it needs to happen at several levels, beginning with state as well as board of regions and perhaps even at departmental level. Yes, and you know me well enough to believe that I think that that is all part of the same set of policy questions just conducted at different levels. And the extent that you don't involve all of those levels radically affects the relative effectiveness of your ability to implement the decisions that come out of that process. Okay. This has been a really interesting conversation. As you know, you and I talk about higher education quite frequently and I always learn a lot from you. So I'm really grateful we got a chance to talk about this important topic. It is in flux and we are waiting to see what happens, but I do believe with experts like you that if we are, you know, go forward with intentional policies and good policies that we can see to end after 2024, maybe sooner. Thank you so much. I hope that's true. I hope that's true. Thank you for asking. Thank you so much, Dean. Aloha and take care.