Category: Internationalization

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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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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Waterloo, Core Strengths and Foreign Campuses

One of the things that marks Canada out among major countries with international education ambitions is the fact that we do very little in terms of establishing campuses abroad.  There’s a reason for that: basically, our institutions are so well-funded that they mostly don’t seem to see the need for such a high-risk activity.  And they are indeed risky: Waterloo tried to set up a branch campus focussed on math and engineering in Dubai, and it crashed only a couple

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CAUT on Foreign Professors

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Executive Director, David Robinson, made some interesting statements recently about the way universities hire foreign professors.  He made them in response to an announcement that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) had negotiated an agreement to be exempted from certain rules of the new Temporary Foreign Worker program.  To quote in full from CAUT’s press release: The national organization representing Canada’s professors says that special exemptions from the temporary foreign worker

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Who Owns Internationalization?

One of the first things you realize when studying how institutions deal with the process of internationalization is how fragmented authority actually is in Canadian universities – to the point where you sometimes have to wonder whether anyone’s actually in charge of the whole operation. Part of the reason for this fragmentation  is that internationalization isn’t a single activity, but rather a process that affects a whole range of other activities in which universities normally engage.  To the extent that internationalization

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