Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases. International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit. International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries.
(There’s an International Education 3.0, too – one which involves institutions in different countries actually merging some parts of their operations to become a genuine, multi-national single-entity. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but as I said last year, it could be on its way relatively soon.)
The margins on “1.0 students” can be pretty significant – which, of course, is why it’s tempting to stick with them. The margins on “2.0 students” tend to be a lot smaller, but, in general, you can attract a heck of a lot more customers if you don’t require them to pick up and move halfway across the globe in order to consume your product. And that’s the thing about countries that really do international education: they go where the customers are.
So, do Canadian institutions do this? At most institutions, it usually doesn’t amount to much more than teaching a few extension courses, or professional programs in Africa, or (if you’ve got an MBA program) some joint programming with an institution in Europe or Asia. There are some exceptions: Calgary and CONA have campuses in Doha. Waterloo had one in the Gulf, but that crashed and burned this fall (memo to Waterloo: publishing the post-mortem would be a favour to everyone). UNB, with campuses in Egypt and the Caribbean, is the leader in this field, but even there the total number of foreign students barely runs into the thousands. Meanwhile, almost nobody has really got into the business of licensing courses, which is where the real numbers are.
Compare this to the UK for a moment. Last year, UK institutions taught over 920,000 international students. Of these, only 46% were actually studying inside the UK itself; the rest were outside the country, the majority of which (291,000 in total) were not even registered at UK institutions but rather were at “overseas partner institutions,” delivering programming leading to the award of a UK degree.
Distribution of UK International Students
So, if that’s what it looks like for a country to be serious about international education, how does Canada compare? I’d show you if I could, but apart from students who actually show up here to go to school, no one even counts the numbers for Canada. And this, in some ways, probably tells you more about our efforts than any actual statistics ever could.
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Alex:
Nice article and yet once again you have completely left out the work our Ontario Colleges are doing in International Education. They are involved in 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 operations and, within reason, at an equal or greater capacity than the universities you cite. When you talk about Higher Education please let’s not forget that our public colleges are an important piece of this sector in Ontario.
Fair point. My impression is that lately a lot of effort has been going on the 1.0 stuff (e.g. centennial), but there are certainly a number of campuses abroad (I;d be interested in learning more about the 3.0 stuff, though – not sure i’ve heard much about it).
For secondary schools, there are several provinces offering high school diploma programs here in China. It’s said that BC’s largest school district is in China! The 3.0 route is definitely one which should be expanded.
Prior to my promoting Canadian institutions in China, I taught high school students bound for the UK. When a few of them were unsure about which school – and even country – to choose, I found them programs in universities there that offered joint programs in third countries.