Category: Internationalization

A Brief Look at International Students in Canada, Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at what and where international students studied in Canada. Today, I want to zero in a bit on where international students are from. Let’s start with the issue of country of origin.  Care is required because the data gets a bit tricky: there are something like 135,000 students in Canada who are of dual origin. They are Canadian students, but they also have citizenship in another country.  In this post I will focus on the nation or

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A Brief Look at International Students in Canada (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, I realized that I’ve never really written a good blog on where and what international students study in Canada.  Think of today’s blog as my way of making amends.  (Note: this is Statscan enrolment data and so refers to enrolments in the fall of 2020, roughly 36 months ago.  Assume that things have changed somewhat since then). Let’s start with the question of what international students study and how this has changed over time.   Figure 1

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Education at a Glance 2023

The OECD’s annual Education at a Glance (EAG) report came out last week.  It’s a One Thought tradition to go through this report in detail for the latest international comparisons on institutional income and participation rates, but I’m going to mostly forego that this year.  That’s partially because I have a doozy of a piece coming out on finance in a week or two, but also because this year’s EAG contains some interesting special topics worth looking at, particularly with

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Visa Caps “Lite”

Last week, it was revealed that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is trending towards using “Trusted Institution Status” instead of caps on visas.*  The idea is not to decrease the number of visas overall, but to allow “trusted” institutions to access expedited visa processing.  Why is this important?  One, visa processing isn’t really a 12-month thing. Processing clusters during certain points of the year and IRCC doesn’t want to hire seasonal staff to compensate for these points. Two, several

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Caps on Student Visas

Over the past few weeks, a weird idea has been emanating from Ottawa: a hard cap on student visa numbers.  This is a pretty foolish idea, as even a cursory examination of the issue will show.  It’s not entirely impossible – there is a narrow way to make it work – but I absolutely do not trust the present federal government to pull it off. First, let’s start with why people think a cap on student visas is necessary.  As

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