ENGINEERING BULLETIN

On 14 August the final report of a panel charged with advising the Canadian government on its first international education strategy was released. The report provides a roadmap for achieving the panel’s vision for international education, including doubling the number of full-time international students in Canada from 239,000 in 2011 to more than 450,000 over the next decade.

The report was released by the minister for international trade, so the the fact that it focuses largely on the economic advantages of increasing Canada’s international education activities is not surprising, although the panel does not simply see international students as a source of revenue.

Given the demographics of the Canadian population, the Canadian labour market needs to attract top talent through immigration; international students are both a source of revenue and potential citizens. Another goal of the strategy is to increase the international education of Canadian students by expanding mobility programmes.

Canada has already established a moderately successful track record of attracting international students, but this has largely been a function of the work of individual schools and post-secondary institutions.

To date, Canada’s share of the international education market has been obtained in the absence of a national strategy or any substantive government investments in marketing.

The report correctly notes that Canada’s advantage is that it offers a high quality of education at a reasonable cost in a safe, multicultural environment.

The historic assumption that the quality of an undergraduate education is roughly the same across Canadian universities has meant that there has been limited pressure for a comprehensive approach to quality assessment, and the decentralised nature of higher education policy has left issues of quality in the hands of the provinces.

The report recommends that the provinces work together to develop a national quality assessment framework to ensure that the across-the-board quality of Canadian programmes is maintained – a recommendation that is far easier to write than implement.

Other challenging issues include the relationship between international education and internationally focused research, and the impact of phasing out the international Canadian Studies initiative that has long played an ambassadorial role for Canadian international academic relations.

Source: University World News