I spent part of last week in Orlando, Florida at the annual NASFA Conference, which is a treat I get to enjoy every two or three years. But unlike many people, I am not really there for the conference sessions and workshops (though I did participate in a very fun one put on by ApplyBoard) – no, I go for the Expo.
The Expo is a kind of higher education fantasyland. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people on the expo floor. On the one hand, you have institutions who have booths, usually but not always arranged into national groupings by the national rector’s association, or national ministry, or an equivalent of the Canadian Bureau of International Education. Mainly, these booths house people who want to meet and explore connections with other universities around the world. It’s like a huge in-person Tinder for universities interested in broadening their portfolio of partners. Swipe right for an MOU.
But that’s only half the story: the other half of the Expo floor is made up of vendors, that is companies trying to sell things to institutions. There are big companies that focus on international mobility (e.g. IDP), others organizing tours and educational fairs (e.g. Quacquarelli Symonds), owners of websites that act as funnels for institutional leads, AI companies who want to automate and improve your chatbots’ ability to talk to potential students in multiple languages, companies that want to help institutions build student housing, or sell them risk insurance, or manage study abroad programs, etc. You also get some mom-and-pop agents (mainly from India and China), or tchotchke manufacturers who want to make your swag. You name it, they are there. It’s a real mix.
(And of course, everyone has a ton of pamphlets and swag. My favourite is always the Turkish institutions that bring along Turkish Delight for guests, but of course, it’s the Saudis who beat everyone for sheer luxury. You used to reliably be able to acquire a year’s worth of free pens on the Expo floor, but the quality of those seem to be going down…North American exhibitors, however, are getting better at producing sticker swag).
So that’s the setting. What did I learn this time? Well, five things.
1) First of all, from what I could tell, attendance is some ways off pre-COVID highs. Certainly, the Expo floor seemed less full than it was a decade ago: fewer companies trying to sell student housing solutions, and fewer flat-out batshit speculative ventures (the Ras-al-Khaimah Education Free Zone was one of my favourites, as was the obviously Russian mob-backed attempt to turn a small distressed campus just outside San Sebastian into a multinational work-and-learning centre for students from elite universities…the mid-10s were kind of wild). All of this implies downsizing in the sector in the US as well as Canada.
2) Part of the problem here is that NASFA was in Florida. So, in addition to various folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to the United States (there was almost no one there this year from Africa, for instance, which was a bit of a change), I’m told that a lot of universities from the US Northeast had reservations about travelling to Ron DeSantis’ Florida. It wasn’t quite a boycott, but the lack of senior representation from that part of the country was notable. Anyways, the point is, location seems to have weighed on US participation as well as international.
3) The other thing going on is that the declines in international student numbers in the US are pretty significant. Not at the top institutions, of course, but certainly regional universities which have been dealing with local enrolment declines by switching to international students (sound familiar?) have been getting their brains beaten out by the Trump Administration’s destructive policy chicanery and its effects on international student demand. People are scared about the effects of all this, possibly more so than Canadian institutions are. And this is probably driving the weakness both in attendance and expo vendors.
4) If you leave out the Americans, though, the atmosphere was pretty bullish. There were dozens of universities represented from Türkiye, Korea, and Japan. The Saudis were a bit more ebullient than normal. I think China had a bigger presence than they did the last time I was there (a rep from one of their Double World-Class Universities asked me some very good questions about why Canadian policy on international students was so self-sabotaging and why Canadian universities didn’t seem to be interested in joint TNE ventures…I have her contact info if any of y’all want to follow up). European and Latin American contingents were out in something close to full force. For these places, the push for internationalization continues unabated.
See for yourself! Some of these delegations go all out!
5) And then there is Canada, which had – and I am not exaggerating here – the worst national booth in the whole place. Canada actually owns one of those fancy booths like other countries have – it’s been a mainstay at NAFSA for over a decade now. But here’s what we put up instead.
Most years, almost every province would send a delegation. This year, I could only see Alberta participating (Quebec was there too, but as you’d expect they have their own separate booth, just as Catalunya and Bavaria do). I think I saw four universities there, one college and a high school. And the booths were amateurish, just black curtains and bargain-basement chairs.
We got shown up by Ecuador, for God’s sake.
This all made zero sense to me. Both the feds and the big universities are in theory back to being all in on attracting international graduate students. They are in theory all in on TNE ventures (heck Mark Carney even said so in a recent Monocle interview). So why aren’t we present in force at the world’s biggest trade convention for making international education happen? And regardless of the extent of our institutional and provincial presence, why did we make a deliberate decision to make the booth look like shit? Seriously, some of the tchotchke vendors had better storefronts than we did. It was a full-on advertisement for Canadian lack of ambition. In a word: embarrassing. It would arguably have been better not to have gone at all rather than put on a show this mediocre.
Anyways, that was my NAFSA. If you were there as well, please do leave your impressions in the comments.
