Category: Worldwide PSE

Turning Japanese? (We Really Think So)

Sometimes it seems as though Canadian higher education can only ever have one good idea at a time and everyone has to join the scrum around that idea. For the last couple of years in international education that idea has been grabbing international students from India, an idea which seems to have pushed out expansion pretty much everywhere else. (Ok, before anyone says it – yes, we at HESA are a bit guilty with that too, with our India Survey,

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Liberal Arts: A Global Trend?

One of the really interesting mini-trends in global higher education these days is the recent spread of Liberal Arts colleges into parts of the world where there is no tradition of such institutions. Singapore has invited Yale to set up a Liberal Arts college at National University Singapore, with the stated aim of creating an Asian model of Liberal Arts. In Europe, the newly-created Amsterdam University College has brought a new and very structured approach to Liberal Arts. And, as

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Many Bolognas

I spent part of October in Bucharest at the Bologna Future of Higher Education conference, trying, as I always do at these things, to get my head around what is happening in European higher education. Part of the problem of trying to follow the Bologna Process is that there are many Bolognas that exist side by side. There is the “formal” Bologna – which is actually a crashing bore, unless you’re really into diploma supplements and qualifications frameworks and quality

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New Markets

Let’s say you’re an institution interested in moving into new international markets. India’s been done to death, coastal China’s saturated and the Europeans aren’t interested in coming to North America. So what do you do? You look for new markets – preferably ones with weak post-secondary systems, rising family incomes, and yet to be seriously exploited by foreign recruiters. Here’s the three we’d pick right now: 1) Indonesia. Two hundred million people, an Asian tiger, and yet arguably one of

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Interest on Student Loans – Time to Go Dutch

News out of the U.S. suggests that one possible casualty of that country’s budget crisis is the in-school interest subsidy on student loans. Since Canadian governments almost always end up copying the Americans on student aid eventually (see: income-based grants, rules on institutional designation, workforce-related loan forgiveness, etc.), this seems like a good time for Canada to review its own policies on student loan interest. Some countries, like Germany and many developing countries, charge no interest at all on student

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