Category: Internationalization

Good Lord Cape Breton

Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities.  “Great news!” it said.  “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!”  That’s pretty good, I thought to myself,  given the demographic crunch and all.  So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data (I always do this, because it’s always good to see how your clients are doing.) Hm…OK, NSCAD up 8.3%, that’s good (guess our work

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National Strategies on International Education

This post is co-authored by Robert Burroughs, HESA Research Associate.  A few years ago, when the Government of Canada released its “Strategy for International Education”, I gave the document a lot of stick because it wasn’t really a strategy, possessed no serious logic model and generally didn’t link resources to expected outcomes.  It was more of a laundry list of things attached to a relatively arbitrary target more than anything else. Having recently had occasion to read a few other countries’ international

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Student Mobility in Asia

Typically, people in North America and Europe think about international student-mobility as either something which is internal to their geographic sphere (for example, circulation between Canada and the US, or within Europe through programs like Erasmus), or something in which students from outside Europe and North America (mostly Asia, a little bit from Africa and Latin America) move to our countries to attend university. But for the last five years or so, maybe one of the biggest trends in global

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Never Let Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story

Just as I finish writing about the huge boom in STEM enrolments, along comes the Financial Post’s Diane Francis with a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers op-ed effectively arguing that international students are stealing all the spots in Science and Engineering. She contends that Canadian university STEM programs should only be for Canadian students because foreign students all return home and this leaves us defenceless in a world of massive technological change.  This article is such a grab-bag of bad arguments I decided to answer it immediately; the

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The End of Internationalization?

Some of you may have seen an article earlier this week from Phil Altbach and Hans De Wit (the former and current Directors of the Centre for Higher Education at Boston College).  Do read the whole thing, but in brief, the authors are wondering whether or not higher education’s “era of internationalization” is coming to an end, citing a variety of issues popping up across around the world including: Donald Trump becoming President and a consequent cooling of interest in the US

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