Category: Internationalization

Alarm Bells in China

So, in the midst of all the handwringing about the world’s major higher education student destinations all losing their damn minds (Trump, Brexit) and the implications this has for higher education internationalization, I think we’re in serious danger of missing a much bigger story going on in China. Don’t get me wrong.  Trump and Brexit are big stories, but on a global scale what they are going to do is shift mobility patterns a bit.  The precise English language destination countries

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Who’s More International?

We sometimes think about international higher education as being “a market”. This is not quite true: it’s actually several markets. Back in the day, international education was mostly about graduate students; specifically, at the doctoral level. Students did their “basic” education at home and then went abroad to get research experience or simply emigrate and become part of the host country’s scientific structure. Nobody sought these students for their money; to the contrary these students were usually getting paid in some

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Offshore Medical Schools

One of the most interesting (to me, anyways) facets of international higher education is the phenomenon of international medical schools. In North America, we associate these exclusively with medical schools in the Caribbean.  These mainly for-profit institutions have little research capacity and mainly teach students who are unable to get into mainstream domestic institution (they were most famously satirized in Doonesbury, when the famously dissolute Duke went to Port-au-Prince to open the Baby Doc School of Offshore Medicine in Port-au-Prince). 

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The Canadian Way of Study Abroad

A few years ago, I think around the time that HESA Towers ran a conference on internationalization, I realized there was something weird about the way Canadian higher education institutions talked about study abroad.  They talked about it as helping students “bridge the gap between theory and practice”, “increasing engagement”, and “hands-on learning”. That’s odd, I thought.  That sounds like experiential learning, not study abroad.  Which is when it hit me: in Canada, unlike virtually everywhere else in the world,

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Measuring the Effects of Study Abroad

In the higher education advocacy business, an unhappily large proportion of the research used is of the correlation = causation type.  For instance, many claim that higher education has lots of social benefits like lower crime rates and higher rates of community volunteering on the grounds that outcomes of graduates are better than outcomes of non-graduates in these areas.  But this is shaky.  There are very few studies which look at this carefully enough to eliminate selection bias – that

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