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, but at least we’ve got plans to do another 19 countries as well.)

But apart from problems of portfolio risk, is India really the international market we want to be tapping? Why wouldn’t we want to spend more effort attracting students from more developed countries, with better secondary schools (meaning more able students), and with families better able to pay international student dollars? It would have to be a country whose higher education system was undergoing problems of its own, of course, and one where there was already wide acceptance of spending big dollars for top education.

Think such a country doesn’t exist? Well, it does: Japan.

One consequence of the twenty year-long recession in Japan has been a fall in the number of Japanese students going overseas. The reason: hiring season for the big Japanese companies starts in April, which put foreign-educated students at a serious disadvantage in a difficult labour market. But an over-reliance on local university talent hasn’t turned out so well for Japanese companies, who are increasingly unhappy with the kinds of graduates local institutions are churning out.

As an article in a recent edition of The Economist points out, demand for foreign-trained graduates is growing, and firms are altering their hiring practices to better include them. This could be the spur to a sea-change in attitudes, and institutions that get in early will have an advantage in coming years.

But to really attract top candidates, institutions will need to make a credible case that they can provide modern, high-tech, professionally-oriented education that is relevant to the Japanese economy. Forming an advisory committee consisting of representatives from some key Japanese employers to help tweak program offerings before heading into this market could be an important part of institutional success in the area.

Sake, anyone?