Higher education has become the core focus of building a knowledge economy (Robertson & Keeling 2008). At the same time international higher education is expanding and the market side of the education is becoming more evident in current discussions (Altbach & Knight 2007). Furthermore, the GATS-agreement which aspires to liberalise trade in services, including higher education, has evoked discussions about the implications it has for the higher education (Altbach 2004). Therefore, the marketisation framework in international higher education is becoming more and more interesting and important. In Finland, for example, higher education has traditionally been free for everyone – a public good. The situation has now altered as the new Finnish Universities Act allows the higher education institutions to collect tuition fees from the students outside national borders (although limitedly, for example excluding the EU-countries). (Rinne & Koivula 2009; Rinne 2010, 102-103; Yliopistolaki 2009.)

The idea is to study the policy of attracting international students to higher education institutions in Finland and in China in marketisation framework. The level of the study moves from the supranational level via the national level to the institutional level. Documents from the supranational organisations (WTO, OECD, and EU) and national documents from Finland and from China are used to contextualise the phenomenon and to form the interview guidelines. Interviews on the institutional level will be conducted both in Finland and in China. The interviews form the core of the research.

The focus of the research is to find out the measures the countries and the higher education institutions take to attract international students and the reasons the countries find it important to attract international students. Furthermore, the role of the marketisation in the process is under examination. The research is on the early stage and the analysis will be started on the supranational documents. In this presentation, the focus is only on the supranational level of the research and the preliminary research framework conducted. The main question addressed in this presentation is what kind of framework do the supranational documents form for the international higher education in Finland and in China?

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