Category: Worldwide PSE

Four Megatrends in International Higher Education: Massification

A few months ago I was asked to give a presentation about my thoughts on the “big trends” affecting international education. I thought it might be worth setting some of these thoughts to paper (so to speak), and so, every Friday for the next few weeks I’ll be looking one major trend in internationalization, and exploring its impact on Canadian PSE. The first and most important mega-trend is the fact that all over the world, participation in higher education is

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American Higher Education Under Trump

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States (actually, the 44th person to be President: Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms screw up the count).  What does this mean for higher education? First off, let’s recollect that where higher education is concerned, the US, like Canada, is a federation where the main decisions about funding public education are made at the state level. Decreased state investment in institutions and consequent rises in tuition have

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Post-Brexit Options

One highly amusing by-product of the frantic Canada-EU-Walloon trade negotiation finale last fall was watching the UK government suddenly realize that negotiating agreements with a 27-country trade bloc is actually really difficult and that this Brexit thing is almost certainly not going to end well.  Which of course has some reasonably significant implications for UK universities.  But how exposed are UK universities to Brexit? Arguably, the bigger post-Brexit implications have to do with staff who may be denied residency, future

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Does Student Debt Matter If You’re Not Going to Pay It Back?

You can accumulate one hell of a lot of debt these days in the UK.  Just in an undergraduate degree, fees are ‎£9,000 per year plus you can get another ‎£10,702 in maintenance loans per year of you’re studying in London.  Over a three-year degree that’s ‎£59,106 or a tad over $100,000 (yes, really). So, at face value one can understand the spate of stories coming out of the UK these days talking about how their massive debt loads are

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Alarm Bells in China

So, in the midst of all the handwringing about the world’s major higher education student destinations all losing their damn minds (Trump, Brexit) and the implications this has for higher education internationalization, I think we’re in serious danger of missing a much bigger story going on in China. Don’t get me wrong.  Trump and Brexit are big stories, but on a global scale what they are going to do is shift mobility patterns a bit.  The precise English language destination countries

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