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Category: Internationalization

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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January 17, 2024 No Comments

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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January 10, 2024 1 Comment

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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January 8, 2024 3 Comments

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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November 8, 2023 2 Comments

Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

Last Friday’s, Marc Miller, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship (IRCC), announced three changes to the International Student Visa program (link here).  You may have seen a small news alert about it (see here or here).  But it seems that almost nobody caught the full import of the announcement.  The announcement started out ok, with Miller again swatting down rumours of a cap on international student visas and comparing the idea to “performing surgery with a hammer”.  Miller

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October 31, 2023 2 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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