Category: Worldwide PSE

International Student Recruitment: Not as Good as We Think We Are

One of the most startling things about Canada’s recent success in attracting international students is how easy it has all been. Australia and the U.K. took decades to build up their position in international higher education, and in the former case it took decades of government-backed investment in developing overseas networks. Our recent extraordinary spurt of growth in international higher education – particularly in the Indian market – came in the space of about five years in a comparatively uncoordinated

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What the U.K. Tuition Fight Tells Us About Universities

The U.K. is a great country when it comes to higher education innovation – good or bad, they’re not afraid to take new policy ideas to their logical conclusion. Their most recent move – allowing tuition fees to rise up to £9000 – is a case in point, and it is already providing some valuable lessons with respect to the essential dilemmas of higher education policy. The government clearly thought that this kind of “big bang” deregulation of tuition would

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America – the Exodus

As we watch our southern neighbours slide into seemingly perpetual budget crises and many state universities undergo some brutal austerity, it’s worth thinking about the American crises’ global impacts on higher education. Scientific talent is not distributed evenly around the world. If there’s one thing that the Shanghai rankings show, it’s how unbelievably deep the scientific talent pool is at American universities. But talent can move. Twice in the twentieth century, countries suffered major exoduses of scientific talent. In 1930s

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Pick a Number Out of the Air… Any Number Out of the Air

So I see that Colleges Ontario has released its wish list for the provincial election campaign. Some of the recommendations are interesting (e.g., the recommendation to give colleges a greater management role in apprenticeship training), some of it is run of the mill (more money for underfunding, etc). But one recommendation in particular is completely baffling: the suggestion that the government should guarantee that students that switch between public institutions within the province should be able to carry two-thirds of

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