Category: Internationalization

The New International Student Regime

So, the feds finally moved on the whole student visa thing.  And…it’s big. What I’m writing about today comes from a combination of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Marc Miller’s announcement yesterday and information passed to me about the briefing IRCC gave to university and college association heads last Friday.  It’s as up-to-date as I can make it, which is not easy because not everything I heard today was consistent with I heard over the weekend (which suggests

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The Central Asia Play

Today let’s talk about four countries in Asia: Japan, South Korea, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Japan, the first Asian country to modernize, went through a thoroughly transformative economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s. It currently has a population of 125 million, 10th largest in the world. South Korea was the next of the so-called “Asian Tigers” to follow, achieving “developed-country” status in the 1980s and 1990s. It currently has a population of 51 million. Though both have been to some

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A Deeply Unhelpful Federal Court Ruling

Just before Christmas, the federal court released a judgement with respect to the case of a Chinese student applying to a Mechanical Engineering PhD program at the University of Waterloo and whether or not an immigration official was justified in denying a visa on national security grounds.  The decision has some enormous and (I think) deleterious ramifications for graduate student recruitment in Canada.  The background to this issue, obviously, is the rising concern about espionage in universities, in particular by

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Global McGill

Welcome back, everyone.  Let’s jump in. You will recall that last fall the Legault government, reeling from a by-election loss to a suddenly resurgent Parti Québécois, decided to parade its nationalist bona fides by giving an unprovoked kicking to some major anglophone institutions: to wit, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.  This kicking – which was imposed on all universities but clearly had a disproportionate impact on the three anglo schools – consisted of two separate policies. Imposing a minimum $17,000/year tuition

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Crowding Out

In previous blogs, I discussed how Canadian colleges and universities are generating bad vibes by exacerbating various housing crises.  This has been bad for pretty much the entire sector.  These strategies have contributed to the impression that the leaders of our post-secondary sector are putting their own institutional interests ahead of the communities they inhabit.  It’s not a good look, but for the moment, I think it is survivable from a credibility/responsible neighbour point of view, if only because federal

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