Where English, neoliberalism, desire and internationalization are alive and kicking: higher education in Saudi Arabia today
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The internationalization of higher education globally continues to grow more and more towards commercialization and neoliberalism paths, despite growing concerns about the underlying consequences. Building further on our work and using Saudi Arabia as a national case, this article critically investigates how and in what ways the Saudi government's desire to internationalize its higher education system has overlooked the many problems associated with its English-only policy, and the neoliberal shaping of social and economic pressures. The article also demonstrates the paradoxical messages concerning internationalization success, strategies, and visions conveyed by the Saudi government and by several institutions from English-speaking countries in response to Saudi Arabia's aspiration for internationalization of its higher education. We draw on several data sources in this article, specifically: (1) the Colleges of Excellence (CoE) project documents – a major Saudi government's initiative to restructure the technical and vocational education system; (2) Several publicly available news items released by technical and vocational colleges from Canada and the UK as well as by the UK government in relation to their participation in Saudi Arabia's CoE project; and (3) publicly available news items published in a number of key local Saudi newspapers regarding various aspects of the CoE project.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it