An Analysis of the Welfare Effects of Local Internationalization Policies in Malaysian Higher Education

Since the 1990s, Malaysia has upgraded the internationalization of higher education as a national strategy, and has successfully shifted from a “brain drain” bottleneck to an “education export” engine by positioning itself as a “regional hub of higher education excellence”. At the same time, the concept of local internationalization of higher education has been put forward in a very innovative way. With the Higher Education Blueprint 2015-2025, the government has strengthened the three core strategies of internationalization of private universities, cross-border education cooperation and diversified international student recruitment, so that the scale of international students will steadily increase to reach 250,000 in 2025 and contribute more than tens of billions of ringgit in education export revenue, which will lead to tourism, healthcare, real estate and other related industries, thus realizing the concept of “education-economy-culture”. From a macro perspective, Malaysia’s local internationalization model is highly consistent with the global trend of openness and inclusiveness of education. However, its sustainable development still faces three major structural contradictions: insufficient data transparency restricts policy optimization, lagging cultural integration exacerbates social tension, and unbalanced resource allocation affects educational equity. To this end, it is recommended to rely on the “Belt and Road” education cooperation framework and focus on building a two-way feedback mechanism – both to promote Malaysia’s high-quality educational resources to “go out” and to promote the experience of countries along the route to “introduce”. Only by establishing a dynamic evaluation system and a dialogue platform with stakeholders can we promote the paradigm shift of higher education from “one-way output” to “multi-dimensional win-win”.