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Category: Internationalization

Australia is Better than Canada

…at least as far as thinking through the implications of globalization on education.   And I’m not talking just about the trivial matter of attracting more students to study at their universities. About a week ago, the Australian government released a forward-looking White Paper called Australia in the Asian Century which charted a set of strategies to improve Australia’s chances of benefiting from the continuing Asian economic boom.  Some of those strategies were education-related; one was to get ten Australian universities into the world’s

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November 6, 2012 4 Comments

Canada’s Bologna Challenge

It may not be obvious why Canada needs to think much about Bologna – we already have a common higher education area, right? – but the fact is that we do. Partly, it’s a matter of long-term market-protection; as time goes on and elements of the Bologna approach becomes more common around the world (experiments with Bologna-like structures are occurring on more or less every continent, and even in the United States), institutions wishing to attract foreign students may eventually

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October 25, 2012 No Comments

Straight Thinking about International Education (4)

As the recent Task Force on International Education earnestly said, international education is about more than attracting fee-paying foreigners; it’s also about sending our own students abroad to gain international experience, learn new languages and cultures, etc., etc. As we wrap up our international education series, there’s only one problem with this argument: neither institutions not students actually seem to want to commit to the idea. There’s not a school in the country that won’t tell you how much more international they could be or

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October 4, 2012 No Comments

Straight Thinking about International Education (3)

If we’re going to get into this international education business seriously, then we need to drop a lot of the pretense and mythologizing that goes on in the field and take a really hard-headed look at what our strengths and weaknesses are. These come into two categories: things we say all the time that aren’t really true, and things which are true but which we are reluctant to say. The alleged “truth” that bothers me the most is the one

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October 3, 2012 1 Comment

Straight Thinking about International Education (2)

Yesterday, we looked at one of the big mismatches in Canadian international education; namely, that big-names schools simply don’t have the financial incentive to take many more international students than they do already. Today, we’ll look at another pervasive mismatch: the one between program demand and program capacity. Bluntly, international students tend to be less interested than domestic ones in programs like philosophy, women’s studies, fine arts, education, social work, etc. What they’re really interested in learning about is business,

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October 2, 2012 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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