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Category: Internationalization

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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November 4, 2016 1 Comment

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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September 14, 2016 1 Comment

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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September 13, 2016 1 Comment

How Many Canadian Students Study Abroad? How Many Should?

If you look at the current issue of Policy Options, there is a startling claim made in the sub-headline of an article by Universities Australia CEO Belinda Robinson; namely, that “five times as many Australian undergraduates are studying abroad as their Canadian counterparts”.  It’s not a claim Robinson herself makes – it seems likely that it’s been added by the editorial staff at Policy Options.  The problem is it’s not correct. The Canadian numbers come from a periodic survey Universities

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September 12, 2016 4 Comments

A tipping point for internationalization?

Over the last few years, my position about internationalization has been pretty consistent: the international student market is going to grow and grow.  Talk about a China bubble – one of the education press’s favourite “what-if?” doom and gloom scenarios – is almost invariably overstated.  Yes, political instability in a place might China might occur, but Chinese parents think of having students overseas as an insurance policy, a way to get out if need be – so frankly if anything

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August 3, 2016 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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