ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Janet De Silva is at the centre of an education transformation. The dean for the Hong Kong campus of one of Canada’s top business schools has a bird’s-eye view of a bustling city that everyday welcomes more of the fiercest competitors her university faces.

From her modest classrooms tucked in a convention centre, Ms. De Silva, dean of Ivey Asia, a branch campus of the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business, is battling the likes of Columbia, Harvard and the London Business School for student enrolment and revenue.

“A lot of people are out here in a very, very serious way. It’s a challenge as a Canadian educational institution,” Ms. De Silva says. “The minute you go into Asia, a very brand-conscious market, they simply believe schools out of the U.K. and U.S. are best, and Canada just isn’t as visible as an education brand.”

For Canada, observers say, the new reality in education has been much too late to sink in – the country might as well wave a white flag. The problem lies in a risk-averse way of thinking that has led us to having only 2 per cent of international branch campuses. In the 21st-century education climate, where universities compete for students and name recognition globally, it’s not only about bringing students to your home, but also about building standalone campuses in their homes.

The emerging Asian and oil powerhouses in the Middle East, when not creating their own institutions, are courting Ivy League names for their corner of the world, by providing space and, in some cases, money. Meanwhile, a federal advisory panel released a report in August that recommended Canada double its number of international students by 2022, a worthy goal, but one that, critics say, misses the true international challenges.

Canadian universities have only considered the prospect of expanding abroad as public funding declines, said Alex Usher, president of the consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates. “Now that we are getting a little bit hungry,” said Mr. Usher, “we shouldn’t turn around and be surprised that our institutions are not good at this.”

full text of the article: The Globe And Mail