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Category: Internationalization

What Goes Up May Come Down

About six years ago now, when policymakers in Canada started to get excited about international education, many hoped that foreigners might be able to subsidize our expensive system of higher education.  I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but the thinking was: if the Australians could manage it, presumably so could we. To date, our results have been pretty good.  International enrolments keep rising. The money keeps on flowing, offsetting the weakness in government funding.  What

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January 18, 2013 No Comments

A Country that Actually Does International Education

Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases.  International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit.  International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries. (There’s an International Education 3.0, too

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January 10, 2013 3 Comments

If I were a Human Trafficker…

… I might be looking at Canadian immigration and student visa policies and thinking that there were some pretty nice loopholes to exploit. Because there are some fairly juicy ones out there. The most obvious loophole – which, in fairness, the government is already moving to close – is that student visas don’t currently require students to attend a particular institution. Hence the stories of students arriving but never attending a school, or of some Ontario institutions “stealing” visa students

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November 21, 2012 No Comments

Au Revoir, UVPs (Sayonara, Language Departments)

Marketing 101: if you’re trying to sell something, you need to have a “Unique Value Proposition,” or UVP. What is it, exactly, that your product has that no other one has? What’s the combination of quality, price, niche features, etc., that you can provide that no one else can? What’s interesting (to me at least) in the world of international higher education is how few Canadian institutions actually have a UVP, or at least one they could consciously enunciate. Usually

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November 16, 2012 6 Comments

“Mainly, it is confusing”

A colleague (and frequent reader) pointed me in the direction of a highly entertaining document about Canada’s international education pretensions. It’s an executive summary of some qualitative research (i.e., focus groups) that Ipsos-Reid conducted in Brazil, India and China on DFAIT’s behalf with respect to “Imagine Education au/in Canada”, the Canadian education “brand” which is famously unpronounceable in either language. Now, you might think that research of this nature might have informed the drafting of that report of the Advisory Panel on

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November 15, 2012 3 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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