When I first arrived at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a student from Venezuela in the fall of 1983, I was among a small minority: barely 7 percent of our student body was international. Today, more than half of our students come from distant corners of the world, eager to learn and shape the future of education together.
This remarkable transformation is a testament to Harvard’s deliberate embrace of internationalization—recognizing that, in the twenty-first century, a truly leading university must engage students and scholars from all over the globe.
That philosophy of education is in jeopardy as the Trump administration tries to restrict Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. It’s a policy as backward-looking as it is shortsighted. If the University loses the ability to draw international students to our classrooms and programs of study, it will be more difficult to educate leaders who can navigate an interconnected world—or draw on global insights to address domestic challenges.
For more than two decades, I directed a master’s program in international education policy that brought together students from around the world. I recently asked graduates to share what they had gained from learning alongside peers from more than 100 countries. They described invaluable lessons in cross-cultural communication and collaborative problem-solving; exposure to a range of ideas about competition, teamwork, and leadership; and a global network of friendship and support that persisted beyond graduation.
One graduate, who cofounded and directs a nonprofit focused on K-12 climate education in the United States, said international perspectives have shaped her current work:
I know to look abroad for inspiration on how to scale education reform. For example, Italy—they require climate change education, and now we’re looking at student outcome/impact data to see if this requirement yielded promising results. Or, looking into what they are doing at the curricular level in China or the investments being made in Pakistan…my classmates have never hesitated to take an exploratory call so that I could learn about what worked and what didn’t in various contexts, so that I can apply new strategies in the U.S.
Another graduate currently working in innovation strategy at a U.S. university attributes much of his personal development to his international peers:
Our dialogues and debates challenged my assumptions and broadened my worldview. And with each story, some previously inaccessible curiosity was unlocked. What education options were available for Indigenous learners in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh? It was something I had never considered, but I had the chance to learn about it simply by sitting down for coffee with a classmate.
But it isn’t just Harvard’s graduate students who benefit from an international perspective. It’s also the communities they serve. Two years ago, for my course, “Education Policy Analysis and Research in Comparative Perspective,” a team of graduate students—including former teachers from Massachusetts and a human resources professional from Ukraine—studied how to support the growing population of children of Haitian immigrants in Gardner, a small city in North Central Massachusetts.
Drawing on classmates’ experiences of different education systems facing similar challenges, as well as a review of comparative cross-national research, they focused on parental and community engagement and teacher preparation as levers that had not been previously tapped in Gardner. Their final report was published in a book and championed by local elected officials, enabling the education leaders of a relatively isolated school district in Massachusetts to benefit from the rich repository of knowledge and global experience available in this international course.
Last year, for the same course, a team of former teachers from Massachusetts, Japan, and Azerbaijan traveled to Holyoke, a post-industrial Massachusetts town where 83.6 percent of students were low-income. Their charge was to study persistent absenteeism in schools. They identified three root causes: residential instability, limited transportation options, and psychosocial adjustment challenges. Among the solutions they proposed was an information-sharing platform inspired by similar initiatives in Japan and a focus on socio-emotional learning that drew on recent strategies deployed in Azerbaijan.
Other groups in this course over the years have focused on topics such as how to most effectively educate English language learners in Florida, how to strengthen caregiver partnerships in Minnesota, and how to sustain educational opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Texas—all drawing insights from international experience.
Attempts to draw on global talent date back almost to Harvard’s beginnings: In 1654, the Polish educator John Amos Comenius was invited to become president of Harvard College. But Comenius declined the invitation—he decided instead to focus on improving the education systems in Europe—and Harvard remained a largely local institution until the presidency of Charles William Eliot in the late nineteenth century.
Global competence, comparative perspective... and creative problem-solving are necessities, not luxuries, for those preparing to lead.
Eliot, inspired by the modern research universities in Prussia, first championed Harvard as an engine of economic and social development and realized that the advancement of knowledge would be well served by attracting talent and ideas from near and far. By the early twentieth century, American universities, including Harvard, were pioneering academic exchanges, fellowships, and cross-border collaborations. In 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, a group of educational and diplomatic leaders founded the Institute of International Education to promote international student exchange as a way to foster peace and mutual understanding among nations.
In the second half of the twentieth century, universities increasingly sought to internationalize, motivated by the rising awareness of globalization and the need to prepare graduates to operate in increasingly interdependent global contexts. The desire for enhanced research productivity and excellence often drove international collaboration.
Internationalization was also seen as a new source of talent and revenue and, in some cases, as a status symbol contributing to positioning in world rankings. Universities began to see addressing global challenges as their mission, which requires drawing on international talent. At Harvard, these priorities were reflected in growing international enrollments, research initiatives, and funding.
While there are pragmatic reasons for Harvard’s internationalization, the moral and educational imperatives are even more important. Today’s most pressing problems—climate change, pandemics, migration, technological disruption, inequality, democratic decline—do not respect national borders. Global competence, comparative perspective, empathy, and creative problem-solving are necessities, not luxuries, for those preparing to lead.
This is as true for education as it is for business, public health, government, and engineering. Exploring why gender achievement gaps in science vary across countries, for example, helps us move beyond the limits of local explanations and reveals broader causal patterns. Cross-national studies of the relationship between student achievement and socioeconomic background have debunked the prevailing view that education policy must choose between excellence or equity: There are nations where the influence of socioeconomic background on student achievement is small, and students from all backgrounds achieve at high levels.
Insights from other nations that have implemented curricular reforms or teacher training can illuminate new paths forward in the United States. Some of the higher-performing educational systems in the world—in Singapore, for instance—have demanding curricular standards, coupled with support for teachers to teach to those standards and specific mechanisms to identify and boost the lower-performing students in every classroom. Those conditions have proven elusive in American educational reform efforts.
International students are also catalysts for new lines of inquiry and collaboration. Many of my own research projects and books have been shaped profoundly by collaborations with students who later became educational leaders in their own countries. International graduates shape education reform in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.—as ministers, policy entrepreneurs, and nonprofit leaders. They extend Harvard’s legacy, living out our motto: “Learn to Change the World.” My greatest professional satisfaction comes from seeing former students continuing the virtuous cycle of education without borders.
The contrast between my own experience as a foreign student and today’s internationally robust Graduate School of Education is striking. The international education policy program, which I created with various colleagues in 2000 and led for more than two decades, evolved into a concentration in global, international, and comparative education, which is part of the recent redesign of our master’s program.
Building on those experiences, we have just launched a new online master’s program in international education policy and management that will educate leaders in government, nongovernmental organizations, and international development agencies. This evolution was not accidental. It resulted from strategic vision, leadership, and the commitment of many—faculty, administrators, and students—willing to respond to a changing world.
A former student, now working as a policy analyst for the Peace Corps, sums up the importance of learning from international classmates:
Studying alongside international students enriched my graduate experience so profoundly that I don’t think I would have even applied to the program if I had known the cohort wouldn’t be international. If I were advising someone on where to study, I’d urge them to choose a place with a truly global student body—it makes all the difference.
To educate leaders equipped to meet today’s challenges, from war to climate change to migration, we must remain a University that is, itself, a community of nations. In this moment, when some would pull inward and retreat, Harvard must lean outward. For this, we need international students—not as visitors or as adornments, but as equal partners and co-architects of our shared future.
