Category: Worldwide PSE

What Goes Up May Come Down

About six years ago now, when policymakers in Canada started to get excited about international education, many hoped that foreigners might be able to subsidize our expensive system of higher education.  I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but the thinking was: if the Australians could manage it, presumably so could we. To date, our results have been pretty good.  International enrolments keep rising. The money keeps on flowing, offsetting the weakness in government funding.  What

Read More »

Why Don’t we Have More Private Higher Education?

Here’s a puzzle:  In many provinces, the law allows for the establishment of new, private, degree-granting institutions.  So why don’t they do it? Why don’t disaffected lawyers set up a cut-price law school in central Toronto to compete against the expensive products offered by U of T and Osgoode?   Why doesn’t a brand-name private secondary institution, like the Bishop Strachan School, create its own liberal arts college, a la Bryn Mawr or Wellesley? In Canada, private higher education is often thought

Read More »

A Country that Actually Does International Education

Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases.  International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit.  International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries. (There’s an International Education 3.0, too

Read More »

Left Behind Again

One of the most interesting phenomenon in global higher education these days is a movement known as the Tuning Process.  And, surprise, surprise, Canada’s allegedly-globally-linked-in, ultra-internationalized universities are nowhere to be found. The Tuning Process is a process of detailing learning outcomes at the program-of-study level – a mostly faculty-driven process to determine what students should know, and be able to do, by the end of their degree.  What distinguishes Tuning from the kind of learning outcomes process we see

Read More »

Islamic Student Loans

READER’S NOTE: HESA does not have connections to any organizations that offer interest-free loans.    As-salaam Alaikum. Every once in awhile, someone in the student movement hears tell of interest in Islam being prohibited, thinks about student loans for a microsecond, and then comes up with the idea that student loans are “unislamic” and, hence, culturally inappropriate.  This, in the past, has led some in Canada to claim that the whole student aid system needs to be revised and made more

Read More »