Category: Internationalization

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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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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Just Over the Horizon

Recently I was asked about what I thought the big upcoming challenges – beyond the regular budget stuff – were for universities and colleges. From the shortest-term to the longest-term, my answer was: Not Getting Ahead of the Metrics Game. A perennial topic, but no less important for that. In every recession, governments re-double their efforts to manage the system through metrics. The odds are very strong that government-designed metrics are going to be goofy in the extreme (anyone remember

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Hooked on School

What do Canadian students do when they’ve finished their university studies? And how do they differ from students in other parts of the world? We recently had the opportunity to examine country-level graduate surveys around the world. Now, there are important caveats – no two countries conduct the same survey among the same exact population of graduates at the exact same time (and international data agencies like the OECD restrict most of their graduate analysis to fairly basic indicators, such

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Chasing a Buck

There are a lot of institutions facing a demographic challenge over the next few years. Outside the GTA and the B.C. lower mainland, the youth population is in decline, and that means institutions in these regions are either going to have to start increasing their yields or find some new markets to exploit. (Or, I suppose, cut their budgets a bit, but that seems to be a last resort.) Though I can’t claim to have a lot of granular detail

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