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Category: Internationalization

How Many International Students is Too Many?

Everyone, it sometimes seems, wants more international students.  But is it possible to have too many international students?  And if so, when?  These days, it’s a delicate question: but where public dollars are at stake, it’s a question worth asking. There are three reasons why an institution might want to consider reining in the number of international students.  They are: Losing money. There are many good reasons why one might want to spend public money on non-citizens, but there are also

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February 2, 2018 3 Comments

The Canada-Is-Falling-Behind-on-Study-Abroad Fallacy

If there’s one drum Canadian universities love to beat on international education, it’s that Canada is falling way behind other countries in terms of students gaining international experience during their studies.  It’s a great story, except for one tiny thing: it’s not true.   It’s really not true. Check out, for instance, this data below, from the most recent OECD Education at a Glance, which shows the percentage of total students from each country who are enrolled abroad (Data is from Table C4.3, for

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November 2, 2017 1 Comment

Mega-Trends in International Higher Education – A Summary

Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at some of the big changes going on in higher education globally.  To wit: Higher education student numbers are continuing to rise around the world. This massification in many countries is being accompanied by stratification.  Getting a “distinctive” degree at a prestige university remains hard; going abroad remains a good way of getting it.  So increases in international student numbers are likely to continue, ceteris paribus. Institutions in developing countries are unlikely to

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March 3, 2017 No Comments

Four Mega-trends in International Higher Education – Economics

If there’s one word everyone can agree upon when talking about international education, it’s “expensive”. Moving across borders to go to school isn’t cheap and so it’s no surprise that international education really got big certain after large developing countries (mainly but not exclusively China and India) started getting rich in the early 2000s. How rich did these countries get? Well, for a while, they got very rich indeed. Figure 1 shows per capita income for twelve significant student exporting

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February 17, 2017 1 Comment

“Xenophobia”

Here’s a new one: the Canadian Federation of Students has decided, apparently, that charging international students higher tuition fees is “xenophobic”.  No, really, they have.  This is possibly the dumbest idea in Canadian higher education since the one about OSAP “profiting” from students.   But as we’ve seen all too often in the past year or two, stupidity is no barrier to popularity where political ideas are concerned.  So: let’s get down to debunking this. The point that CFS – and

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February 6, 2017 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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