I had been noodling for a couple of weeks about how nation states use higher education as a soft power tool, when all of a sudden last Saturday morning stuff starts popping up in my feed about how Canada and India have just announced a joint “Talent Strategy” as part of Prime Minister Carney’s visit to India over the weekend. This announcement was so weak and superficial, I thought I should write a little bit about it, just to show how
Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward. The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in
The world of transnational education – that is, the provision of education in one country by universities based abroad – is getting very interesting these days. In particular, branch campuses have returned to the centre of the industry’s activities in a way they have not been for well over a decade. Canada’s post-secondary system – which has always been a laggard in this area – risks getting left even further behind, unless institutions up their game substantially in the next
The following is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Conference of the Americas on International Education (CAEI), sponsored by the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE), in San José, Costa Rica last month. My thanks to David Julien and the organizers for the invitation. There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking when it comes to international student flows. There are some consultants – and some media outlets out there – who think it’s possible to predict these flows, but
Since last Tuesday, there have been a lot of stories (like this one and this one) talking about how the federal government is reducing the number of new student visas and, as a corollary, how this will negatively impact college and university finances. Many people have asked me why the HESA budget blog didn’t make a bigger deal out of this last week. The answer is: we did in fact write about it in the full Budget Commentary (pages 7-8),
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