Here are three big questions I expect to be asking in my reporting. Will a hybrid approach to international education stick? 
Even more than the rest of higher education, international ed prioritizes the experiential. Global mobility, both inbound and outbound, has prized immersion in culture and place. Covid-19 disrupted that: Many international students were forced to study remotely from their home countries. Virtual education abroad and internships replaced semesters in Barcelona and Rome.Let’s be blunt: Many of these experiences were not ideal. But as the pandemic has worn on, we’ve all become better at virtual. It also offers opportunity: Virtual exchange can open international study to the 90 percent of U.S. undergraduates who don’t go abroad. Transnational education may bring an American education to students who can’t spend four years here. At the same time, concerns about sustainability have led students and educators alike to approach international travel more deliberately. In the post-pandemic future, will virtual and hybrid compliment the in-person? Or will they continue to be viewed, and resourced, as second class?

Can international education diversify? For a field that is global, it can sometimes look homogenous: U.S. colleges draw students predominantly from a handful of countries and send them out to a relatively small number of nations. Partnerships are clustered in certain parts of the world. Some institutions are deeply global, while many others have minimal international programming. We want to diversify participation in international experiences, but those of us drawn to this work don’t necessarily look like the students we hope to attract. (And yes, I include myself among the “we.”)Change has been coming, but it’s been incremental. Will the pandemic jumpstart diversification and transformation? Or, under pressure to do more with less, will the status quo be reinforced?

Will the pandemic help make the case for internationalization? Back in 2019, I wrote about whether the “golden era” for international education was over — if there had ever been one. The pandemic may offer even more of an inflection point. On one hand, it underscores the importance of the global connections made on campus — the swift development of Covid vaccines simply would not have been possible without multinational teams of researchers, many of them former international students. As international enrollments tumbled, the absence of foreign students made visible their critical importance to campus diversity and to college budgets. Even the Biden administration has recognized the value of international education and pledged to take a more proactive and consistent approach to sustaining it.Still, there will undoubtedly be college leaders who see the disruption to international mobility as a litmus test and decide that it is a discretionary activity that their students can do without. Belt-tightening and burnout has forced thousand of international educators from the field, and many won’t be back. Even some veterans have told me how discouraged they are by Washington policies that work as cross-purposes with attracting international students as well as their struggles to make the case to administrators. Which vision will win out?Your forecasts for the year ahead are below. But first some news…