| |19 OCTOBER 2022HIGHERReviewTo attract more international students, Germany has incentivized student mo-bility with the recent changes made to the immigration policies. These chang-es not only help international students to stay and work in the country for 18 more months, but it also helps students with sufficient employment contracts and German language skills to have ac-cess to long-term work visas as well as permanent residency. Transnational Education (TNE) to Improve Relations TNE or Transnational Education can be referred to those programs or edu-cational services in which the student is located in a different country than the one where the awarding educational institution is located in. When com-pared to countries like the UK, the US, and Australia, German higher ed-ucation institutions are new to offering cross-border higher education. With that said, according to the German Ac-ademic Exchange Service- DAAD, as of now, German universities offer more than 250 programs in 30 plus countries to nearly 33,000 students. One facet that makes German TNEs unique from many others is the fact that it is part of a long-term internationalization strate-gy from the German government. And these cross-border partnerships are not only viewed as a method to increase the global competitiveness of German higher education institutions but it is also used as a development aid to sup-port the academic capacity building in other countries. Indian Students in Germany China is the largest international stu-dent market for Germany with more than 40,000 Chinese students enroll-ing in German higher education institu-tions recently. India is the second larg-est sender of international students to Germany with over 28,000 Indian stu-dents pursuing their higher education in Germany in 2022. While the num-ber of Chinese students in Germany is increasing, Indian student numbers are clocking in the most growth recently and between 2016 and 2019, the num-ber of Indian students in Germany has doubled. The plethora of STEM edu-cation opportunities coupled with the lower cost of higher education can be seen as the two major reasons which makes Germany an appealing higher education destination for Indian stu-dents. Aside from that, over the last de-cade, according to a research published by the Institute of International Educa-tion (IIE), there has been a significant rise in the number of English-taught programs in Germany which has also helped the country to become an at-tractive higher education option for as-piring international students. As a strategy to further acceler-ate the flow of international students, DAAD has come up with an initia-tive- `internationalization through dig-italization'. The primary aim of this initiative will be to promote academic mobility though digital learning plat-forms, as well as webinars and online portals to match aspiring students with academic institutions. Aside from this, the German government is systemati-cally promoting the country as a mod-ern-day international science hub and many large scale funding are made as a part of this strategy. With all this, Germany is aiming to increase their presence in the global higher education space and continue their growth trajec-tory as a premier international study abroad destination. The German government has generously funded internationalization strategies as they have made their intentions clear in attracting the worlds' smartest minds into the country
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