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Category: Politics

Canada’s International Education Strategy – How Did It Get So Bad?

When our Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD – not DFAIT as I said a few days ago; sorry) delivers something as bad as our new International Education Strategy, an inquest is in order.  But since self-reflection isn’t exactly an abundant resource in Ottawa at the best of times, it’s an inquest we’re going to have to undertake ourselves. Let’s start with the document’s basic failures: It’s not a strategy by any reasonable definition; It effectively ignores the

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January 24, 2014 3 Comments

International Education Strategies – How Others Do It

By now, a lot of you will have read – either on our Blog or at the Globe and Mail – my rant about the new International Education Strategy, released last week by the Government  of Canada.  A number of people said they agreed with me, but wanted to know what I would have recommended in its place.  I won’t do that (that’s the stuff I charge for, folks); instead, I want to contrast emerging international education strategies elsewhere, with our own. Take

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January 23, 2014 2 Comments

Canada’s Long-Awaited New Internationalization Strategy

It was released yesterday.  And it’s godawful. It’s a thirty-page document, but minus the cover page, colophon, table of contents, introduction, twelve pages of fact sheets, and another four pages to describe previous consultations and provide global context, it’s really just ten.  Of these ten, roughly half describes initiatives the government has already undertaken, (existing scholarship programs, Mitacs funding, etc).  So, then, five pages, maybe.  Part of this is spent re-hashing lines about Canada’s “brilliant” reputation for international education –

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January 16, 2014 6 Comments

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 Comments

The New Normal

Happy New Year!  Did everyone have a great vacation? The highlight of my vacation was going to Argentina and stumbling upon the world’s most unfortunately-named university in a suburb of Buenos Aires, named “Morón”.  It’s called – wait for it – Unversidad de Morón.  Seriously, their international marketing people must have the most difficult jobs in higher ed. Anyhow, I wanted to start the year by talking about what was a hopeful development from last fall – the Government of New Brunswick’s

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January 6, 2014 3 Comments

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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