A couple of people have pointed out that I may have rushed to some conclusions about the meaning behind the International education strategy.  Isn’t it possible, some asked, that this wasn’t about a new strategy to attract students, but a strategy to send students abroad?

(Small aside: that this question is still open five days after the announcement is a little bizarre. If the government had its act together on something like this, we’d know the answer by now.  Certainly, the usual suspects like Universities Canada and CBIE who lobby ceaselessly for this kind of stuff should have been briefed and spreading the word to all and sundry.  Something is off about this whole thing – one suspects that Global Affairs and ESDC might not have been entirely briefed about this idea before Morneau sprung it on them).

Still, let’s take the question seriously: could this actually be about outward mobility?  And if so, what might it look like?

The first problem is that a study-abroad strategy, if it is to make any sense at all, must align with a country’s foreign policy.  The Government of Australia’s “New Colombo Plan”, for instance, is a pretty good example of this.  This is both a student-attraction and a study-abroad strategy, the point of which is to increase inbound and outbound interactions with a set of countries Australia views as strategically vital to its future (basically all of East and South Asia plus a number of Pacific Islands).

In theory, Canada could do something like that, but presently, we don’t have a foreign policy that is geographically-focussed as Australia’s.  Are we an Atlantic nation? A Pacific one?  A pan-American one?  Who knows?  Basically, our foreign policy at the moment mostly consists of trying to avoid being clobbered by random Trump policy whims.  So, a comprehensive study-abroad strategy linked to a focused foreign policy is not likely now. In any case, one of Canadian study-abroad’s dirtiest secrets that we DO NOT TALK ABOUT is that most of our study-abroad program infrastructure caters to undergraduate students’ desire to have European excursions (ed: see the CBIE’s infographic for proof): there is so little student interest in Asia or Latin America as a destination that it would be extremely difficult to build a new strategy around either region in the short term.

Oops.

Anyways, we probably don’t need to engage in a lot of complicated theorizing to rule out the idea that last week’s announcement wasn’t a study-abroad announcement.  The tell is that the commitment was made in a section of the Update dealing with exports.  That’s easier to reconcile with a student-attraction strategy than a study-abroad strategy.  I mean, I suppose they could be taking the long view, and arguing that a study-abroad strategy is about increasing exports over the long term, but governments seldom think that long term, so I think we can rule it out.

That said, even if the new strategy is primarily about exports, there’s nothing preventing the government from throwing in a couple of goodies for colleges and universities for study-abroad.  I mean, if you buy the whole argument (and overall you should) that international students generate billions of dollars for the economy as a whole, it wouldn’t be crazy for institutions to ask for a bit of that money to get funnelled back to them via study abroad subsidies.

But their argument for doing so would be a whole lot stronger if institutions could prove the benefits of study abroad rather than just hand-waving about them and acting as if selection bias and counterfactuals didn’t exist.  It is possible to do; what’s missing is political will to do it.