Category Archives: international

May 02

The Limits to Internationalization

There’s a very important question that institutions across the land will soon need to confront, namely: how many international students can a public institution accept before taxpayers and governments say “no more”?

It’s not an idle question. In Switzerland, serious concerns are being raised about foreign student numbers that are getting close to the 40% mark. In the US, where big flagship public universities have been adding international students in droves over the past few years, most feel reluctant to go beyond a threshold of about 20%; beyond that, they feel they would be courting controversy with their legislatures.

In Canada, we have a couple of institutions in the Atlantic, and a college in the GTA, where the percentage of students from abroad is hovering around the 30% mark. We’ve already had skirmishes around the desirability of foreign students (e.g. the Ontario Tories’ attack on Trillium Scholarships), even when those students are paying their own way (e.g. Dalhousie’s decision to sell 10 medical student spots to Saudi Arabia).

The “danger threshold” in Canada depends on local context. Universities in communities where youth demographics are falling off a cliff (e.g. Cape Breton) can almost certainly get away with more international students than can universities elsewhere – even 40% international enrolments probably wouldn’t cause many to blink in Sydney. But that’s not a hard-and-fast rule: if Lakehead or Brandon were to try something similar, one could imagine a stir about concentrating on international students at the expense of the local Aboriginal population.

The really tricky cases are in Vancouver and Toronto, the two cities to which most international students want to go, but also the two parts of the country where the youth population is still increasing (Calgary fits into the latter category as well). Schools there have no shortage of domestic students they could educate, so every time they admit a foreign student – even one who is being charged 100%+ of the cost of their education (true in every faculty outside engineering, basically) – it could be portrayed as taking a spot away from a domestic student.

How explosive an issue could this be? A few months ago, we asked students how they would feel if their school were to limit domestic enrolment in order to increase foreign student numbers, and compared that to how they felt about a $5000 tuition hike. Here are the results:

How Likely Would You Be To Protest In the Event of:

Not terrible, but not great either.

This isn’t a scenario most institutions face, of course. But as budget cutbacks mount, and institutions’ financial calculus tilts in favour of increasing the number of full-fee paying international students, the chances of a nativist backlash increases. Schools should be prepared for it.

May 01

The Schwartzman Scholarships

So, a big deal was made by all last week when businessman Stephen Schwartzman decided to fork over $300 million (one-third his own money, two-thirds money he’s collected from a whip-round of blue-chip American companies) to create a set of scholarships for (mostly) foreign students to study at Tsinghua University. The money will fund 100 students per year – 20 Chinese, 45 American, and the balance from the rest of the world – to study at Tsinghua’s newly created Schwartzman College. Cue immediate comparisons to the Rhodes (not least from the donor himself), and tortured metaphors about tsumamis re-shaping international higher education, etc.

Allow me to be the killjoy here. There are three obvious points which need to be made about this donation:

1) Just doing the math on this: 4% times $300 million is $12 million/year, or $120,000 per student. Clearly, the entirety of that sum won’t be going to support scholars directly – a lot of this money seems to be for the Schwartzman College itself, rather than for the scholars.

2) The assumption that a scholarship’s size relates directly to its level of prestige is just crazy. Gates scholarships are twice the size of the Rhodes, but you’d have to be directly related to Bill to think they were equivalent in prestige. Scholarships are only as good as their alumni – and those take decades to pan-out.

3) Schwartzman, for some reason, is under the impression that the college which bears his name will have full academic freedom, even though it is located in one of China’s most politically sensitive universities (located in the capital, Tsinghua is the alma mater of both Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao). One suspects that, far from building a culture of greater trust and understanding between China and the US, as Schwartzman wishes, there’s a fair chance that an incident over free speech could wreck the whole thing.

There is a fourth point, actually. Despite the overblown Rhodes analogy, and the potential pratfalls on academic freedom, and how the membership of the program’s advisory Board (Kissinger, Blair, Mulroney(!), Sarkozy, etc.) suggests that there’s more at work here than philanthropic motives – let’s give credit where it’s due. At least American philanthropists are prepared to put money into international education. From what I hear from university fundraisers, Canadian philanthropists show not the slightest interest in international education.

That’s mirrored at the governmental level, of course: our government interest in international education lies purely in getting foreign students to spend money here, while the US State Department has created the “100,000 Strong” scholarship initiative to increase study in China.

How exactly Canadians get off deriding Americans as being insular, I’m not quite sure.

April 30

The Minerva Project

The Minerva Project, an intriguing concept which bills itself as the world’s “first online Ivy League University”, has been making some news lately. The idea, in a nutshell, is this: the Minerva will all be taught online, with curricula designed by “the world’s top professors” (yawn), but classes taught by some of America’s many talented, but underemployed (and hence cheap) sessionals. We aren’t talking MOOCs here – these classes will be limited to 25 students each, so as to maximize teacher-student interaction. The project’s leaders say that the lack of a physical campus and reliance on sessional delivery will make it possible to invest in the best learning analytics software; Minerva will “personalize” each student’s education, giving students an Ivy-level education in Arts and Science, for half the price.

So far, so not-very-revolutionary. But here’s the interesting bit: the students will all live together, so that the important aspects of peer learning in residential colleges won’t be lost. And the twist is that they’ll live together while rotating through different spots around the world: Paris, Beijing, São Paulo, etc., for months at a time.

Cool.

Now, much of this scheme is undoubtedly nonsensical. There’s absolutely no way to develop Science programs without decent labs. And outside some intro courses in stats, psych, and languages, learning analytics software in the Arts is useless. But the idea of a travelling classroom with immersions in multiple languages and cultures is exciting. I don’t know how it would be accredited (whose laws apply?), and I expect that mitigating the liability issues that arise from sending a bunch of 18 year-old Americans to go live in Abu Dhabi, or wherever, will end up costing more than these guys think, but a truly global classroom allied to a truly global curriculum could be a huge selling feature for any school.

In fact, it’s such a cool feature that there’s really no need to bother with the whole online jive. The “curriculum developed by world-class professors” thing is oversold; loads of universities in Gulf countries claim to have MIT- or Harvard-developed curricula, and they’re not bursting with Ivy-calibre graduates. If you’re going to rely on sessionals for delivery, why not send them abroad, too? It might cost a bit more, but you’d save on software and get rid of the online stigma, as well. In fact, any medium-sized liberal arts college in Canada – Trent, say – could probably pull something like this off, greatly enhance their brand, and make a bit of money, while they’re at it.

But an “online Ivy”? Not going to happen. It’s a crazy idea. But thank God almighty, at least someone’s had a new thought in higher education that doesn’t involve a MOOC.

January 28

The Monash-Warwick Alliance

About fifteen months ago, I wrote that the next big thing in cross-border higher education was going to be an actual merger of two institutions, in different countries. Now, we have a real live experiment to watch, thanks to the Monash-Warwick Alliance.

This didn’t get a lot of press when it was announced (I certainly missed it), but it’s a reasonably big deal nonetheless. In a nutshell, these two large, young universities (Monash dates from 1958, Warwick from 1964), with excellent research profiles, have decided to join forces in quite a unique way. They’re not just doing easy stuff like joint degrees; the unique aspect is that it’s bringing alliance strategy down to the departmental level: joint research teams are being assembled, research platforms are being shared to make infrastructure money go further, and joint professors are being appointed (six so far in the chemistry departments). The duo seem likely to start moving towards a global brand, building on Monash’s already-aggressive international profile (campuses in Italy, Malaysia, and South Africa, and joint venture programs in India and China), and they’ve even appointed a joint vice-President to get them there.

What’s behind all this? Well, it seems the two schools’ Presidents, Ed Byrne and Nigel Thrift, share a somewhat apocalyptic view of higher education’s future. In a joint message issued at the time of the tie-up, the two say they see higher education institutions being stratified into four groups: at the top, maybe 30 institutions with such prestigious research and teaching reputations that they will simply be invited to set up boutique operations in host countries at no cost (e.g. Yale-Singapore); and, at the bottom, thousands upon thousands of institutions that will just do “mass teaching”. In between will only be small, specialist niche institutions such as liberal arts colleges, and about 50 (of what they call) “globally networked, research-heavy university systems”. This tie-up is designed to ensure that not only are Monash and Warwick secured places in that group of 50, but also that they will be considered as leaders in the field.

This view may underestimate the degree to which national governments, for reasons of prestige, if nothing else, will keep “national research champions” afloat. But the alliance model certainly seems much more promising than some of the university network and consortia models, such as Universitas 21, the Matariki Network, and the WC2 University Network, which are a bit heavier on chat than on action. Even if the Byrne-Thrift prediction is wrong, Monash-Warwick may turn out to be a model to follow simply because it offers a relatively clear and simple path towards a global brand.

Waterloo-Teknion, anyone? UBC – National University of Singapore? It could get interesting.

January 18

What Goes Up May Come Down

About six years ago now, when policymakers in Canada started to get excited about international education, many hoped that foreigners might be able to subsidize our expensive system of higher education. I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but the thinking was: if the Australians could manage it, presumably so could we.

To date, our results have been pretty good. International enrolments keep rising. The money keeps on flowing, offsetting the weakness in government funding. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, why not take a quick look at how the Australians are doing these days?

Figure 1 –International Student Enrolments in Australia by Sector.

Back in 2009, life in Australia was pretty good. Growth was quick and steady in language schools, universities, secondary schools, and what are known as “non-award students” (basically, exchange students not pursuing Australian qualifications). In vocational education, growth was off the charts. Overall, enrolment grew by nearly 40% between 2007 and 2009. All seemed well.

But then, for a variety of reasons (a high dollar, a few high-profile racist attacks, problematic visa rules), Australia managed to send all of this growth into reverse. It started in vocational education – a sector which, according to international education expert Dr. Rahul Choudaha, caters primarily to students who are “immigration-driven” (as opposed to education-driven). Then it spread to other sectors.

Figure 2 – Year-on-Year changes in New Enrolments

(stats geek note: isn’t it cool that Australia can actually track new enrolments separately from total enrolments? Why can’t we do that?)

How bad did it get? By 2012, Vocational education had experienced three years of double-digit losses, meaning they had given up virtually all of their gains from the 2007-2009 period. English language schools were in a similar position. Higher education didn’t see quite the same drop, but because its students stay in school longer, enrolment effects take three years to work their way through the system. Even if new enrolments evened out over the next two years, total enrolment will still fall by about 8%. All told, the decline in new enrolments has been 24%.

Just how much all of this cost Australian institutions is a matter of some debate. But think about it at your own institution: how big a hole would it blow in the budget if you had to cope with the loss of 24% of your international students? At many institutions, you’d likely be looking at a drop in total revenue of 3 -4%. That’s almost Quebec-style austerity.

Of course, it could never happen here, Canadians love foreigners, etc. etc. But as those charts show, the market giveth, and the market taketh away. Today’s winners can be tomorrow’s losers. That’s the new reality.

January 10

A Country that Actually Does International Education

Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases. International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit. International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries.

(There’s an International Education 3.0, too – one which involves institutions in different countries actually merging some parts of their operations to become a genuine, multi-national single-entity. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but as I said last year, it could be on its way relatively soon.)

The margins on “1.0 students” can be pretty significant – which, of course, is why it’s tempting to stick with them. The margins on “2.0 students” tend to be a lot smaller, but, in general, you can attract a heck of a lot more customers if you don’t require them to pick up and move halfway across the globe in order to consume your product. And that’s the thing about countries that really do international education: they go where the customers are.

So, do Canadian institutions do this? At most institutions, it usually doesn’t amount to much more than teaching a few extension courses, or professional programs in Africa, or (if you’ve got an MBA program) some joint programming with an institution in Europe or Asia. There are some exceptions: Calgary and CONA have campuses in Doha. Waterloo had one in the Gulf, but that crashed and burned this fall (memo to Waterloo: publishing the post-mortem would be a favour to everyone). UNB, with campuses in Egypt and the Caribbean, is the leader in this field, but even there the total number of foreign students barely runs into the thousands. Meanwhile, almost nobody has really got into the business of licensing courses, which is where the real numbers are.

Compare this to the UK for a moment. Last year, UK institutions taught over 920,000 international students. Of these, only 46% were actually studying inside the UK itself; the rest were outside the country, the majority of which (291,000 in total) were not even registered at UK institutions but rather were at “overseas partner institutions,” delivering programming leading to the award of a UK degree.

Distribution of UK International Students

So, if that’s what it looks like for a country to be serious about international education, how does Canada compare? I’d show you if I could, but apart from students who actually show up here to go to school, no one even counts the numbers for Canada. And this, in some ways, probably tells you more about our efforts than any actual statistics ever could.

November 30

The Limits of Vocational Education in Developing Countries

I was interested to read Canadian International Development Assistance Minister Julian Fantino’s big policy speech last week. It made headlines for its apparent dissing of aid groups and its lauding of the potential role of the private sector (which, big shock, is not universally popular in international development circles), but what I found intriguing was the way it emphasized human resource development as a focus of future Canadian policy.

The specific example Fantino used was a string of vocational and technical schools Canada is setting up in the Caribbean. I know zilch about this particular initiative, but I do know that technical and vocational education is in a pretty rotten state in most developing countries. It’s usually of low quality and there is little demand for it.

It’s a chicken and egg problem: pretty much every post-colonial society has grown up with the idea that leaders go to university. As a result, everyone wants their kid to go to university despite the fact that curriculum is often brutally out-of-date, having changed disturbingly little since the British (or French, or whoever) left fifty years ago. If you really want to blow your mind, check out figure 13 in this recent OECD report - in virtually every African country, unemployment among university graduates is much higher than it is among primary school graduates.

Despite this, demand for universities continues to increase, often at the expense of demand for vocational education. Part of the reason is that vocational education simply isn’t very good in most developing countries; but even where the standard isn’t terrible (Ghana, for instance), the vocational institutes are having trouble hanging on to students.

The standard of vocational education in these countries does need to rise, but without an image make-over that won’t accomplish much. Your average conservative policy thinker assumes that students will go where the money is, but that’s simply not true; often, what students pursue is prestige, which in the developing world is synonymous with a university degree (even if that means unemployment). What’s needed is to raise the prestige of vocational education.

That’s something Canadians know more about than most. Over the past two decades, polytechnics like NAIT, BCIT, Humber, etc., have really improved the perception of applied post-secondary by updating the notion of what it means to be applied. In Africa, one of the best development projects any country could undertake would be to build and maintain a truly modern polytechnic that could act as a continent-wide beacon of VET reform and start a move away from universities on the continent.

If the new Conservative development policy leads us in that direction, then it will be a very good thing indeed.

November 21

If I were a Human Trafficker…

… I might be looking at Canadian immigration and student visa policies and thinking that there were some pretty nice loopholes to exploit. Because there are some fairly juicy ones out there.

The most obvious loophole – which, in fairness, the government is already moving to close – is that student visas don’t currently require students to attend a particular institution. Hence the stories of students arriving but never attending a school, or of some Ontario institutions “stealing” visa students by pouncing on them at Pearson and convincing them to come to a different college than the one to which they’d been admitted (I have no idea if this one’s true, by the way – but it’s a great yarn).

It’s also how a human trafficker teamed up with an unscrupulous employee at Lakeland College (the college itself was blameless) to issue fake acceptance letters which allowed a group of 60 Polish welders to enter the country. The human trafficker profited on the arrangements by hiring the men out to construction firms at twice the rate he paid the men.

But even with new, tighter student visa rules, potential gaping holes remain. The Canada Experience Class allows graduates of Canadian institutions to gain permanent residence based on:

(1) Obtaining a diploma in four semesters of “full-time study” (as defined by the institutions itself).

(2) Working for one year following graduation as a “retail sales supervisor,” or in a “specialized service occupation” (a classification which includes line cooks).

How difficult do you think it would be, say, in one of the provinces with relatively lax regulation of private institutions, to do a deal with such an institution to create some customized four-semester “full-time” programs? And then do some deals with employers to give these people jobs at which they can be ruthlessly exploited for twelve months? Actually, my guess is you wouldn’t even need to pay them salaries – if their families trusted you enough to get the paperwork done right and get their kid permanent residence status in Canada, they’d probably pay you. I don’t know exactly what the going rate for a pathway to Canadian citizenship is, but I’d guess mid-five figures, at the very least.

If I can come up with this, you can be fairly sure that actual human traffickers have come up with it, too. In fact, something not a million miles from this happened in California last year. The odds that something comparable is happening here are unknowable, but I’d guess they’re high enough that we should worry.

A couple of bad apples have the potential to spoil things for everyone. A little more vigilance on everyone’s part will pay dividends in the long run.

November 16

Au Revoir, UVPs (Sayonara, Language Departments)

Marketing 101: if you’re trying to sell something, you need to have a “Unique Value Proposition,” or UVP. What is it, exactly, that your product has that no other one has? What’s the combination of quality, price, niche features, etc., that you can provide that no one else can?

What’s interesting (to me at least) in the world of international higher education is how few Canadian institutions actually have a UVP, or at least one they could consciously enunciate. Usually it’s something along the lines of “we’re a quality university located in a vibrant community (replace “vibrant” with “idyllic” if you’re actually out in the boonies) and we offer degrees in English!” The subtext being, “You know you love English, you non-english-speaking foreigners – it’s the lingua franca of global commerce, innit?”

Well, imagine for a moment what would happen if that last bit weren’t true. Imagine if, as Nicholas Ostler posited a couple of years ago in The Last Lingua Franca, that machine translation were to improve to the point where it rendered the need to learn foreign languages essentially obsolete. The social cost of learning another language is high, as is people’s attachment to their own language. If machines could translate for us, demand for second language learning would likely plummet.

O.K., you don’t need to imagine any more. Last month, Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid was at a conference in Tianjin and took the opportunity to show off some machine translation software that did simultaneous spoken English-Mandarin translation. You can read LiveScience’s account of the event here, but you really want to actually watch the video (actual demonstration starts at about 7:30).

If that didn’t totally blow your mind, go get a cup of coffee and watch it again when you’re awake. This is the universal translator. This is the Babel fish. O.K., the error-rate is still pretty high. But the countdown is on to these things being widely available commercially. We’re talking years, not decades.

Quite apart from the obvious havoc this is going to wreak on modern language departments (seriously – who’s going to pay for them once simultaneous machine translation is ubiquitous?), everyone banking on international education being a cash cow for decades to come needs to think things through very carefully. Just ask yourself this: how many international students would still go to your school if they didn’t need to learn English?

Yeah. Exactly. Now what’s your UVP?

Truly game-changing technologies don’t come along that often, but this is one of them. This business just got a lot tougher.

November 15

“Mainly, it is confusing”

A colleague (and frequent reader) pointed me in the direction of a highly entertaining document about Canada’s international education pretensions. It’s an executive summary of some qualitative research (i.e., focus groups) that Ipsos-Reid conducted in Brazil, India and China on DFAIT’s behalf with respect to “Imagine Education au/in Canada”, the Canadian education “brand” which is famously unpronounceable in either language.

Now, you might think that research of this nature might have informed the drafting of that report of the Advisory Panel on Canada’s International Education Strategy which came out in August and has now been released as accompanying documentation. But you’d be wrong. In fact, this document had to be prised out of DFAIT with a freedom of information request, and was released, for reasons which utterly defy comprehension, not on the DFAIT website but on that of the National Library.

It’s great reading, anyway. Here are my favourite bits:

“There is no awareness that Canada has world-class educational establishments; indeed, apart from a few mentions of University of Toronto there is very little awareness of any Canadian educational establishments.”

“Canada is a not top-of-mind destination for foreign study for participants in any of the three countries except with Brazilian participants interested in language studies”

“There is no perception of a Canadian Education advantage compared to others”

“The Imagine Education in/au Canada brand has some weaknesses which need to be addressed. Mainly, it is confusing and not seen as sufficiently linked to education and Canada.”

Gosh. It almost sounds like we’re not doing as well as we thought we were. It almost sounds like we might have work to do. It almost sounds like doubling the number of foreign students might be really, really hard, and require a lot of work and investment. It almost makes it sounds as if statements like this…

“Canada’s brand is based on consistently high quality and a reputation for excellence across the entire education sector. Canada offers international students a safe and multicultural learning environment in which they can choose to study in English or French.”

Or this…

“The education brand for Canada is characterized by a broad spectrum of possibilities for international students and researchers with across-the-sector quality at its core.”

…are utterly without foundation.

Which makes you wonder: how was it, exactly, that those exact statements make it into the final report of the Advisory Panel when the authors have clear evidence in front of them that suggested something quite different?

We can achieve more in international education, but we won’t do so through wishful thinking. Right now, there’s way too much of that going around.

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HESA

Higher Education Strategy Associates