Category: Internationalization

Coronavirus (11) – The International Student Imperative

Whatever the manifold benefits of a more internationalized student body, at many institutions in Canada, one reigns supreme: money.   It’s a problem everywhere in Canada, but in Ontario, British Columbia and Cape Breton in particular, international student fees make up huge portions of the institutional operating budget: rarely lower than 20% of income and in some cases reaching over 50%.  Partly through government neglect and partly through institutional avarice, institutions became hooked on international student money. And then came a crisis

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Coronavirus

Good morning and welcome back.  I thought I would start the week off with a really cheery topic, like a global pandemic and how it will affect higher education. There are lots of ways to talk about the effects of coronavirus on higher education, but broadly, they come down to two different strategies to contain the spread of the virus: travel restrictions and social distancing.  Obviously, the most important travel bans concern full self-imposed quarantine zones in places like Hubei province

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Silliness About Asian Higher Education

For the last decade or so, “the rise of Asia” has been a common refrain.  It alludes to the region’s economic rise (which is undeniable) but then goes on to equate the region’s higher education offerings with this economic rise, usually in a way that poses a threat to “western” higher education.  The most recent example came in this week’s edition of University World News and an op-ed entitled Will the 2020s See Asia Pull Ahead in Higher Education? As these

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Welcome to the 2020s

Hi all.  Hope you all had a restful set of holidays. At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector.  Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand.  What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. The first big challenge

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Ontario Doubles Down on Dodgy Colleges

Remember about a month ago when I noted how several Ontario colleges now had international student numbers above 50% of total enrolment?  And about how in some cases this was being done by small town colleges establishing “partnerships” with private vocational colleges in the Greater Toronto Area?  How they were effectively warehousing international students at these locations, charging them full tuition, and paying the private college to teach some allegedly bespoke curriculum while pocketing the difference? Two pieces of news.

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