ASEAN Higher Education and the Internationalisation Trend

Written By: Nathalia Ramadhania

Batch 4

According to the website of the Young Southeast Asian Leadership Initiative (YSEALI),
approximately 65 percent of people in the ASEAN region are under the age of 35, which
makes ASEAN countries aware of the importance of higher education to develop a high
quality of human resources and ensure the socio-economic advancement.

There will always be new trends for Higher Education in ASEAN every time, but the trend of
Higher Education Internationalisation seems to never end. Internationalisation of higher
education has become an important agenda for Indonesia, and the government suggest for all
institutions to participate. These days, the Higher Education Institutions in Indonesia are
competing to design strategies that include or focus on the internationalisation. These
strategies for focusing on international higher education engagement is aimed to gain a
world-class status while also gaining a reputation as institutions with high research
productivity, and are often linked with the country’s national plans and economic priorities.

One of the internationalisation strategies is promoting student mobility program. Student

mobility has become one of four main priorities to harmonize the Higher Education System
of ASEAN. Young generation connectivity through student mobility program is not only for
knowledge exchange, but also to experience another culture in order to build an integrated
ASEAN community.

I want to participate as a delegate in the Second ASEAN Mobility Forum to take part in
sharing my experiences, opinions, and thoughts about ASEAN student mobility. I also want
to learn from another people's mobility stories.

Being one of SHARE Scholarship Awardee really changes my perspective of ASEAN Higher
Education, and with all the experiences and knowledge that I have, I will do my best in
promoting SHARE Scholarship and the benefits of student mobility program.

For INA SHARE Alumni Association

As for INA SHARE Alumni Association, I hope that all of us can maintain a longlife
relationship. I have an idea of INA SHARE Alumni Association holding voluntary events
such as teaching english to kids or sharing about ASEAN Awareness to high school students.
As it is almost impossible to gather all the alumnis, we can just do it in each of our city
(Jakarta, Depok, Bogor, and Semarang) and report the activities to the group. Each
universities should come up with 3 events ideas, so that every month we can at least report
one activity to the group. With this kind of activity, we can meet each other and also give
back to the community.

I also want to suggest that we create an instagram account. For the starters, the contents of the
instagram account can be the introduction of all the members of INA SHARE Alumni
Association, so eventhough we never meet each other, we can at least know each other’s
faces from instagram.