Tucked away almost unnoticed on page 67 of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s Fiscal Update last week was a fascinating little statement: “To build more skills and provide training that will help support Canada’s international trade and increase global ties, Global Affairs Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada will work together to develop a new international education strategy.”

What should we make of this?

The initial impression made by this phrasing is not very good.  Sure, it makes sense that within the Government of Canada, Global Affairs and ESDC takes the lead on this file.  But the lack of any mention of provinces, faculty, universities, colleges, etc, in the announcement – the people who pay for and deliver post-secondary education and who will have to deal with any changes to international education policy – should ring alarm bells.  I mean, if all we’re going to do is produce a laundry-list of initiatives the feds can do without anyone else’s participation, and attach some enrolment targets plucked from thin air, we’re going to get some variation of   “World Needs More Canada…accelerated visa processing…spend a few million on marketing…Canada’s Moment…changes to post-study work visas… TARGET 500,000 students by 2025!!!  WOOO!  Working hard for the middle-class!”

(Now that I think about it, I could probably make bingo cards for this.  Or a nerdy drinking game.  Could be fun.)

But it’s worth imagining what would happen if we actually took the notion of an international strategy seriously.   What if, instead of just saying MOAR INTERNATIONAL STUDENT DOLLARS, we seriously engaged with challenges of welcoming and accommodating international students in all parts of the country?  If we centred the quality of international education?  What would that look like

On that, I have five by-no-means-fully-thought-out ideas that should inform a new approach to strategy:

Process.  Global Affairs and ESDC may hold the pen on this report, but they have to get the heck out of Ottawa to actually write it.  Talk to provincial governments about how they feel about more international students – and what they think about the student-to-citizenship pipeline.  Get into classrooms that are 70-80% international and talk to students and faculty about what that’s like.  Visit Cape Breton University and see both the upside and downside of sudden surges of international students, or some of those private colleges in Toronto which are teaching the curricula of non-Toronto community colleges.  Listen to the actual on-the-ground challenges, not just the mindless “everyone loves Canada” nonsense that gets churned out in Ottawa.

Duality.  The Government of Canada has enormous difficulty dealing honestly with the fact that Canadian universities are playing in two entirely distinct linguistic markets, and that one of them is a hell of a lot more popular than the other because most people want an English education.  But it’s 100% true: Quebec’s top ten sources of international students look completely different from those of the other nine provinces.  An honest strategy wouldn’t ignore this: rather it would come up with two different approaches to deal with marketing in different markets.  Also: NO BILINGUAL LOGOS.

Capacity-Building.  At the end of the day, our efforts in internationalization have almost nothing to do with governments and almost everything to do with institutions.  If the institutions can’t make it work, then we’re going to get a bad reputation and the whole thing falls apart.  So at least part of any strategy should be geared towards institutions and helping them work out how to get better at internationalization.  Institutions need to get much better – quickly – at learning from each other.  Let’s help universities and colleges in small communities learn how Cape Breton managed to pull off a 40%+ international enrolment rate.   Let’s have national discussions among profs about dealing with classrooms where the majority of students’ first language isn’t English or French.  Let’s talk about best practices in recruiting, student services, and peer teaching, and in making connections between domestic and international students.  This kind of learning from one another is not something we do particularly well in Canada, but if we’re going to go bigger on international higher education we need to learn how.

Housing:  Influxes of international students can exacerbate tight rental markets.  This doesn’t matter everywhere, but where it does matter, it’s a big deal.  Ignoring this issue would be a really bad idea. 

Quality: Ok, I know this one is a reach.  The feds hate talking about quality assurance because they know it’s none of their business and provinces hate talking about quality because most of them either don’t know how to do it or are afraid of institutions, who in turn hate talking about quality assurance because they are all PARAGONS OF EXCELLENCE THANK YOU VERY MUCH, so the odds against seeing anything on quality assurance in a new strategy are pretty high.  But it is striking how pretty much every other country in the world puts a section on quality assurance in their international strategies.  There is a simple reason for this: when something bad/asinine happens at one institution in a country, reputationally it can affect every other institution in that country.  If your international strategy doesn’t talk about quality, then you are operating less in strategy than you are in faith and prayer.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes back from this.  My personal rule of thumb is simple: if Global Affairs and ESDC are tasked with developing a new strategy quickly (like, say, before the next election), this strategy will almost inevitably be superficial and not that interesting.  But give everyone a year or two to actually think on this and come up with genuine ideas for integrating strategy at the institutional, provincial and national level?  That would be a process well worth supporting.