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Category: Internationalization

The Dilemma of Western Education in Saudi Arabia

I see that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne recently took offense to the fact that Algonquin College is operating a male-only vocational college in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, calling the arrangement “unacceptable”. What should we make of this? First of all, let’s be clear about women and higher education in Saudi Arabia.  There are a lot of them; in fact, far more women attend post-secondary education than men in the country.  They just don’t – for the most part – attend the

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February 5, 2016 2 Comments

Political/Economic Risk and International Student Recruitment

A couple of big events occurred internationally over the last few weeks, which will matter to folks in the international recruitment field.  Briefly, they are: 1) The Saudis are pulling back.  Things are moderately bad in the kingdom right now.  Their gambit of driving down the price of oil in order to run the American fracking industry out of business is not working as quickly as they hoped, and may have re-established an era of cheap, $50 (or sub-$50) oil for the foreseeable future. (And

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January 15, 2016 No Comments

The Dollar: What Everyone in Higher Ed Needs to Know

Issues run in cycles.  Remember the skills gap?  It was a big deal back when the price of oil was over $80 a barrel.  We haven’t heard so much about it since – and judging by the way oil futures markets are behaving, it may be awhile before we hear it again. But don’t be dismayed: as one cycle disappears, another pops up somewhere else.  With the dollar having dipped slightly below 70 cents US on Tuesday, I think it’s almost certain that we’re

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January 14, 2016 No Comments

Visible Minority Numbers Rise Sharply

I was poking around some data from the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium the other day and I found some utterly mind-blowing data.  Take a look at these statistics on the percentage of first-year students self-identifying as a “visible minority” on the Consortium’s triennial Survey of First Year Students: Figure 1: Self-Identified Visible Minority Students as a Percentage of Entering Class, 2001-2013               Crazy, right?  Must be all those international students flooding in. Er, no.  Well,

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September 15, 2015 4 Comments

International Speed-Dating in Boston

I spent part of last week at the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers (NAFSA) meeting in Boston. It was my first time at what is really quite an extraordinary event and I was pretty blown away by it all. If you want to understand all the glory and nuttiness that is higher education internationalization, I highly recommend a visit. In theory, NAFSA is a traditional professional conference. And from a certain angle, it still resembles one, despite having 11,000

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June 3, 2015 No Comments

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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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