SMU School of Social Sciences (SOSS)’ Yasmin Ortiga has been selected as a 2019 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

The postdoctoral fellowship was established in 1986 by the NAEd with a grant from the Spencer Foundation. The fellowship programme is intended to support early-career scholars working in critical areas of education research and the NAEd seeks to fund proposals that promise to make significant scholarly contributions to the field of education and to advance the careers of the recipients.

The Award comes with a $70,000 fellowship stipend, three Professional Development Retreats led by Senior Scholars, and is open to all eligible applicants regardless of race, national origin, religion, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation. More information can be found here.

According to Michael Feuer, Past-President, NAEd, “The NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship program is special because it funds early career scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. To date, nearly 800 current and former fellows have been awarded this prestigious fellowship, including many of today’s most productive and influential education researchers.”

For Assistant Professor Yasmin, she aims to use the stipend to do fieldwork in the Philippines, beginning August this year and hopes to conclude data gathering by the end of 2020.

Here is an abstract of her project, which touches on higher education in the Philippines:

Unlikely Faces in Unlikely Places: International Student Mobility and the Rise of the ‘Third World’ Education Hub

Studies on international student mobility have mainly centered on the experiences of prestigious universities located in wealthy nations like the US and Australia. Largely ignored is how institutions in the Global South also take advantage of worldwide demands for international degrees, catering specifically to students with less economic and social capital. This qualitative study investigates the emergence of an unlikely education hub in the Philippines, a country with a reputation for sending migrant workers overseas, yet is relatively unknown as a destination for international students. In recent years, Philippine universities have seen an influx of students from India, Iran, and the US. These students enter low-tier, for-profit universities offering degrees for professions where Filipino migrant workers are highly represented (e.g. nursing), often with the promise of also finding work in a global migrant labour market. This project investigates the structural barriers and social networks that channel international students towards these programmes. I also examine how Filipino educators adjust to these students’ presence, altering school structures in appealing to their needs. In doing so, this project seeks to highlight a significant, yet often ignored segment of the global higher education market. I argue that it is by investigating student mobility to seemingly unlikely destinations that we can better understand the diverse ways that global changes affect the purpose of higher education, beyond the conventional models that have dominated current literature.

Said Yasmin, “I am really grateful to get this award. The fellowship is open to scholars from all over the world, but it is often very rare to see fellows who come from universities located outside the US. I am very proud to be a sociologist representing SMU, conducting a study on Philippines higher education. I just hope to do a good job in the future!”

Congratulations Assistant Professor Yasmin on achieving this Fellowship Award.

More about Yasmin Ortiga

Yasmin Y. Ortiga is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SMU. She studies how the pursuit of knowledge and “skill” shapes people’s migration trajectories, changing educational institutions within both the countries that send migrants, as well as those that receive them. Her previous research investigated how Philippine higher education institutions attempt to produce workers for “export,” altering local curriculum and school structures in order to educate students for the anticipated needs of foreign employers. She recently published the book, “Emigration, Employability, and Higher Education in the Philippines” (Routledge). Her work has also been published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Globalizations, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

You can also read about the other NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow recipients here.