International Education

From February 26 to 28, 2025, the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU) International Education Conference was held at Sophia University Yotsuya campus. The theme of the conference was “Challenges and Opportunities for Internationalization,” and the conference brought together approximately 80 faculty and staff members in charge of international education from 44 institutions around the world.

Loyola University hosted a working session at its Seville campus with rectors and senior leaders from the institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in Africa and Madagascar (AJCU-AM). These sessions built on prior meetings held throughout 2024 in the Democratic Republic ofthe Congo, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, which gradually shaped a group of institutions aroundan initial proposal of collaboration. The program provided a space to exchange ideas about the structure of the group,identify priority areas for collaboration, and explore funding opportunities for joint international projects.

A year ago, two very close universities, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, and Universidad Loyola, España, accepted a stimulating challenge to compare the best practices of their partnerships’ offices. Later, a more interesting approach got the best of us and we decided that we should also ask other partners to share their best practices with us. Thus, we contacted 25 universities and gathered the answers of 15 of them. Indeed, this is by no means an exhaustive analysis, however, this exercise was very insightful and most definitely strengthened our relationship between us and with them. Let us share with you the data and our conclusions.

Since 2018, international relations administrators of the Mexican Jesuit Universities (SUJ, in Spanish) have hosted a Pre-NAFSA get-together, and last year, based on the success of the SUJ reception and building on this strength of experience, they came up with a proposal to extend an invitation to all the international relations administrators of the IAJU universities attending NAFSA