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Category: Internationalization

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

Straight Thinking about International Education (1)

Over the past summer, we at HESA have been thinking a lot about international enrolment, and speaking to international student recruiters and advisers, and international students themselves. You’ll get to see some of the results of this in the coming months as we publish some of this research, but I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with you all now, while the federal task force report is still fresh in everyone’s minds. My main thought is this: we’re not ready to

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October 1, 2012 2 Comments

That International Education Report

The Federal Task Force on International Education reported last week. It was… how to put this? Very Canadian. In essence, the report reads as though the goal of keeping all major stakeholders sweet trumped the goal of providing clear, bold thinking about Canada’s internationalization strategy. It’s worthy without challenging any conventional thinking. It puts forward an ambitious goal without spending much time working out the details of getting it done (the phrase “stakeholders should co-ordinate” does too much work in this

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August 20, 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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