During my brief trip to Asia, I spent a fair bit of time chatting with people who one way or another are in the international education business.  Two somewhat connected thoughts:

1. Canadians Continue to be Not Very Good at the Whole International Campus Thing.

  I spent a couple of days in Dubai, where there are now somewhere on the order of 100-odd institutions operating, a substantial portion of which are international.  The only “semi”- Canadian one is an outfit called the “Canadian University of Dubai”, which is a fascinating little organization. It is private, for-profit, and entirely locally-owned but it began life under some sort of sponsorship deal with Centennial College (it was briefly known as “Centennial University Dubai”) before just adopting the Canadian name and signing a number of “partnership agreements” of various sorts with a dozen or so major Canadian universities, though none, as far as I know, have any actual management or pecuniary interest in the place.  The Brits and Australians, of course, have a coupe of dozen institutions between them in the Emirate, many of which are thriving.

It’s interesting to speculate why this is.  I mean, aren’t we always told “the World Need More Canada”?  But it seems to me to be a simple outgrowth of two factors.  First, Canadians generally are not very good at operating in foreign markets: we never bring our A game and generally assume foreign operations can be run by remote control from somewhere in Ontario (read Andrea Mandel-Campbell’s excellent Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson for more on this).   Because of this, we misjudge markets (which is what seems to have happened when Waterloo made a foray into the Emirates) or we misjudge partners (a polite way of describing what happened when Algonquin decided to try its hand at operating a campus in a remote corner or Saudi Arabia, without realizing the Saudi government has a track record of reinterpreting the terms of deals when they feel like it).

Second, quite simply: Canadian universities just don’t need to go abroad.  UK universities are busy setting up campuses around the world largely because the UK government is making it difficult to recruit students to attend UK campuses (and who wants to be in the UK if it’s not going to be in the EU anyways?  This is why smart UK universities are setting up shop in places like Malta).  Canada, on the other hand, is widely seen as a very desirable location (in fact, it is the preferred destination for international students worldwide, according to ICEF’s Agent Barometer).  We just set out the welcome mat and people show up.  Why put in all that work and take on extra risk when you don’t need to?

(The answer, of course, is twofold.  First, we aren’t always going to have an operating environment this easy and we might need to think ahead to when the UK and the US, among others, regain their senses.  And second: sure we do well right now – but we could also do better if we were more at the forefront of transnational education.  And what kind of message does it send when institutions devoted to “excellence” rest on their laurels when faced with genuine opportunities?  A bit pathetic, you ask me.)

2. Canadian Margins on International Students are Insanely Good.

A related point: I got chatting with a representative from one of Middlesex University’s non-European campuses.  And as she began explaining to me what the infrastructure for international students looked like, it suddenly occurred to me what an insanely advantageous position Canada is in with respect to international students.

Take a look at Middlesex’s infrastructure for recruiting international students.  Here’s their list of international contacts.  Now a fair number of these seem to be just local agents, but in India – a country from which they get maybe 400-500 students a year, they directly staff three local offices in Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai.  That’s a lot of overhead to be carrying.  Their margins per student must be pretty low as a result.  Compare that to, say, Centennial College, which has untold thousands of Indian students, and houses exactly one office in India (though it also has several offices in China and a smattering in Korea and Latin America as well).

I’ve noted before that Canadian institutions charge international students substantially less than their counterparts abroad and maybe they should consider raising them.  But then it occurs to me: Canadian institutions can get away with lower fees because our overheads are so low.   Thanks to people like Agent May, Canadian institutions are so popular that they don’t actually need to put any effort into recruitment and so can make fantastic margins even with relatively low fees.  This doesn’t detract from the argument that periods of high demand like this are the perfect opportunity to raise fees, because – hey! we can! – but it does show that if we want to keep playing the cut-price destination game, we can, largely safe from being at a disadvantage to foreign competitors. However, there is still the question of whether we are providing education at or below cost, which a number of provinces – in particular Newfoundland and Alberta – would do well to think about.

Anyways, the lesson here is the same as before: Canadians have it easy on international students.  Maybe too easy.  Maybe if it were harder, we’d actually have to really work at international education. That might not be such a bad thing.