All Posts Tagged With: "International Students"
Why Manitoban students are studying in Minnesota
Tuition is a deal. School spirit is an experience.
School spirit at the University of Minnesota by Mulad on Flickr
For Manitoban students, international study doesn’t require a transoceanic flight.
Manitoba has a 20-year-old reciprocity agreement with the State of Minnesota and at least 21 Canadians are currently studying at campuses of the highly-regarded University of Minnesota.
Continue reading Why Manitoban students are studying in Minnesota
International doctoral students can now apply to stay in Canada
Up to 1,000 a year will be accepted
Canada is making it easier for international Ph.D. students—who make up one-quarter of the total—to stay permanantly, Minister of State (Science and Technology) Gary Goodyear announced today on behalf of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Starting Nov. 5, international Ph.D. students can apply to be accepted as federal skilled workers, so long as they have at at least two years of study toward the doctoral degrees under their belt or have graduated in the past 12 months, and are in good academic standing.
Paul Davidson, President of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, said the announcement will give Canada a “competitive edge” in attracting international students.
Manitoba to offer free health care to foreign students
Taxpayer watchdog opposed
University of Manitoba by sanchom on Flickr
Starting next April, foreign students attending high schools or post-secondary schools in Manitoba will get free health care coverage for themselves and their dependents, reports the Winnipeg Sun. That will save them roughly $400 each annually on private health insurance.
But the Canadian Taxpayer Federation’s Manitoba director says it’s “madness” for the province to pick up the tab, citing a growing provincial debt.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health defended the decision, saying that providing free health care to the province’s 3,200 international students and their families will give Manitoba a competitive advantage in recruiting more students, who may eventually settle in the province. The official did not provide an estimate of how much the program will cost, but suggested it will be minimal because most students are young and healthy.
Continue reading Manitoba to offer free health care to foreign students
Foreigners flock to Norway for free tuition
But how long can it last?
University of Oslo photo by Josh Dehaas
Norway is one of the last remaining countries where foreign students can attend university without paying a cent of tuition money. But with free school increasingly rare, how long can it last?
Shocking as it may seem to many Canadians, Norweigians don’t charge any tuition to anyone—which was, until recently, normal in Scandinavia. Now, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all charge tuition fees, leaving Norway the only free option.
It should be unsurprising then to learn that foreigners are choosing Norway more often than ever. When non-European Union students were charged tuition fees for the first time this year in Sweden (up to $21,000 each), applications dropped 85 per cent. Meanwhile, Noway’s University of Oslo experienced a 60 per cent rise in popularity. Since 2008, the number of foreign students in Norway is up 27 per cent overall.
Continue reading Foreigners flock to Norway for free tuition
Cashing in on foreign students
Public schools compete for high-paying international students
Last year, Patricia Gartland, who works for a suburban Vancouver school district, brought in $16 million selling 1,700 B.C. classroom spots to foreign students, largely from China and South Korea. Gartland, who started her job as director of international education with the Coquitlam School District in suburban Vancouver over 10 years ago, has made the program in Vancouver one of the most extensive in Canada and the envy of the scores of districts across the country looking to cash in on the growing market for international students.
With international students paying $10,000 to $14,000 to attend Canadian schools, public school administrators across the country are setting up for-profit international student programs to compete for their dollars. One 2009 study estimated some 35,000 foreign students in the K-12 system contribute almost $700 million annually to the Canadian economy—a win-win for students, who get an invaluable leg-up when applying to North American post-secondary schools, as well as district administrators, who make up to 50 per cent profit on the tuition.
International student programs aren’t new to Canada, but at the K-12 level they’re rarely talked about, although most provinces have had programs for at least a decade. No province has been more successful at bringing in international students than B.C., with some 9,000. Capitalizing on the demand for a Western diploma and an English-language education, B.C. schools compete with Britain, the U.S. and Australia to recruit students overseas. School districts send staff abroad to meet foreign school officials and to attend trade shows. Domestically, the districts liaise with the Lower Mainland’s tight-knit Chinese and Korean communities, looking for overseas relatives. Once in Canada, the students live with extended family or billets. The students are offered supplementary language classes in tandem with regular studies, though eventually most opt for the standard curriculum.
B.C. has offered an international student program since the ’80s, but recruitment intensified after 2001, according to the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, when the government made cuts to the education system. “School boards were short $275 million,” says BCTF president Susan Lambert. New legislation, she says, “encouraged them to find alternative sources of funding.”
In 2002, Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government passed the School Amendment Act; the bill, seen by some academic experts as a move to embrace a marketized version of public education, cast school districts as business corporations, they say, and parents and students as consumers. By 2007-08, international student enrolment in B.C. peaked at 9,500 students, with an associated revenue of $129 million. But critics say that what’s emerging is a two-tier public education system that punishes the districts that need the most help.
Larry Kuehn, research director at BCTF, reports international student programs exacerbate existing inequalities in the public system by making the richest districts—those that can afford to invest in overseas recruitment—richer, and leaving poorer districts in the dust. Ultimately, says Kuehn, the programs are outside equalization factors in the provincial funding system built to circumvent such wealth disparity. Take Coquitlam, Gartland’s school board, where international student money has kept enrolment high and schools open, and afforded new development opportunities for staff and “very robust” student services, including a Confucius classroom and the first bilingual Mandarin kindergarten class in the province. “I’m wondering at the irony of an education system that says if you’re a for-profit school we’re not going to give you any funding at all but as a public school we’re going to allow you to sell to foreigners,” says Peter Cowley, education policy researcher at the Fraser Institute. “We have seen school districts in B.C. establishing for-profit companies.”
The B.C. Ministry of Education, however, rejects the notion that district inequality is an issue. “Each district has the choice of whether to offer such programs,” wrote B.C. Education Minister George Abbott in an email to Maclean’s. “Our school districts have both the autonomy and the responsibility for international student programs.”
So the districts that can recruit international students hope to emulate Coquitlam or West Vancouver, where foreign students bring in the equivalent of 16.4 per cent of its operating budget. It may not be the traditional portrait of public education, but it could be the future. In Ontario, for example, the number of international secondary students increased by six per cent between 2007-08 and 2009-10.
Back in Coquitlam, Gartland is developing student markets outside of Asia. But for now, she’s sanguine. :Suddenly everyone understands all the great benefits of this,” says Gartland. “Our mayor of Coquitlam says our program is bigger than the casino.”
Concordia senate debates thesis secrecy
University plans to give $3 million in tuition wavers to international students
Judith Woodsworth wasn’t the only topic of discussion at a Concordia Senate meeting a couple weeks back.
The university’s highest governing body also discussed new rules governing thesis secrecy. The new rules state that in some cases “all participants to a thesis defence” will be required to “sign an undertaking of confidentiality.”
The new rules will also require professors to inform students if they have “contractual obligations” with companies which “require that research results are not publicly disclosed.”
The rules were established by Concordia’s council of the school of graduate studies in October. The university’s 2010-2011 graduate calendar contains no references to confidentiality when it comes to theses or research. Theses are generally public documents.
While senate has no say on the new rules, they were still the subject of debate. Several senators questioned whether a public university should be getting so cozy with corporations.
“Let’s not kid ourselves, [corporations] are not doing us any favours. They are gaining access to cheap labour and the minds of the next generation,” said film studies professor David Douglas.
But provost David Graham maintained that students do benefit from the experience and connections gained from working on corporate projects.
Mourad Debbabi of the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering also pointed out that there were situations when researchers might have access to information that they cannot legally divulge.
Student senators also questioned whether secrecy is becoming too prevalent when it comes to theses and research.
That’s really the thing here, these rule changes are just acknowledging what’s already going on. While it’s probably better to have some rules rather than no rules, as was the case at Concordia, the new changes are pretty vague. Other schools, like Waterloo, have highly specific rules on when and how a thesis can be defended confidentially.
Concordia is also planning to give out $3 million in tuition wavers to international PhD and MFA students over the next three years.
“Most other Quebec universities currently offer tuition waivers to international students at the PhD level and so clearly we have been in an uncompetitive situation or a less than ideally competitive situation in the past,” Graham Carr, dean of graduate studies, told senate. “This is a very significant step forward, I think, in addressing that.”
The university says the wavers will benefit 35 students each year.
Smaller schools shouldn’t target international students
They serve should serve niche domestic markets
Often times, so much of our attention into post-secondary issues is focused on the large research-intensive schools that it’s easy to forget there’s a whole other world out there of mid-level universities, focusing on the undergraduate level, where changes in policy affect just as many students. Which is why a little nugget from Thompson Rivers University (TRU) caught my eye.
“I would like to see an improvement on the domestic side in the next few years,” said Ulrich Scheck, Provost and VP Academic, to Kamloops this Week. The numbers bear out that TRU has seen international enrolment rise 15 per cent in the last year, while domestic numbers have slightly dropped. These changes make sense from a pure market perspective—TRU became a full university in 2005, and is undoubtedly more attractive to international students than before. And at the same time, the fees for internationals ($450 per credit, as opposed to $121.15 for domestics) makes it attractive for the university, even discounting the built-in subsidies received by TRU for domestic students.
But does it make sense? UBC is a giant school, a key economic driver for all of British Columbia, and has spent 20 years building connections throughout Asia to ensure bright international students come to Canada. Increasing international seats while keeping domestic enrollment static make sense. TRU, on the other hand, serves Kamloops, the fifth largest city—in British Columbia. It simply serves a different niche than UBC, and just because it’s called a university doesn’t mean it should be pursuing the same strategies.
This isn’t to say that international students shouldn’t be welcome at smaller schools. But a heavy push for them only really makes sense in the context of a globally competitive university—your Waterloos, Toronto, et al.
The enrollment controversy*
Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada
When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”
Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.
Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”
Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.
Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”
That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to university. Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes, alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than integration.
The dilemma is this: Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately, however, many in the education community worry that universities risk becoming too skewed one way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been more or less out in the open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here. And that puts Canadian universities in a quandary. If they openly address the issue of race they expose themselves to criticisms that they are profiling and committing an injustice. If they don’t, Canada’s universities, far from the cultural mosaics they’re supposed to be—oases of dialogue, mutual understanding and diversity—risk becoming places of many solitudes, deserts of non-communication. It’s a tough question to have to think about.
*This article was originally titled “‘Too Asian’?” For our response to the controversy it has generated, click here.
McGuinty’s solutions aren’t in China
Tuition out-of-control, system unstable, and Ontario wants to bring in more students
A series of tweets earlier today from Ontario MPP Jim Wilson make a valid point about the direction Premier Dalton McGuinty is taking post-secondary education in the province.
In Hong Kong on Wednesday, the premier announced the new Ontario Trillium Scholarship, which will see 75 international students receive $40,000 annually for four years to study towards a post-doctorate in Ontario. New students will be added each year, with 300 receiving the scholarship at the program’s height. Taxpayers will be shelling out $20 million of the $30-million project, while universities are planning to kick in the rest.
“Foreign students win while Ontario students get left behind. McGuinty has clearly lost touch,” tweeted Wilson, the Progressive Conservative critic for colleges, universities, research and innovation. “While Ontario families struggle to pay for school, electricity, auto insurance and sales tax hikes, the McGuinty Government is focussed on paying the tuition of students who don’t even live in this country, let alone this province.”
Both the PCs and the provincial NDP are calling on the government to scrap this program immediately. NDP leader Andrea Horwath says the program is unfair to Ontario students.
“It’s quite disconcerting,” she told the Toronto Sun, adding that Ontario students already pay the highest fees in the country. “I have concerns when we have students here in Ontario that are not able to access post-secondary education because of the skyrocketing cost . . . I think [the program] needs to be reviewed.”
This new program is not only a slap in the face to students studying in the province, but it’s also an insult to the taxpayers. Rather than educate the next generation of Ontarians, McGuinty’s program is saying that bringing in international students, who may or may not stick around long enough to contribute to the economy, is more important.
McGuinty’s Liberals just authorized universities to raise tuition by five per cent per year for the next two years. That’s more than twice inflation. Costs for post-secondary students in the province are spiralling out of control, and all the government can think to do is inject more students into an unstable system.
If Dalton wants to help post-secondary education in Ontario, he would be better off investing that money in reducing costs for all students and introducing legislation that will help curb steadily rising costs to students, which have risen 60 per cent in the past ten years, and more than 380 per cent in the past twenty years.
The system is broken, and it’s going to take more than a few dozen foreign students to fix it.
Photo: Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Canadian Press
Some guidance for international students?
As soon as I know what the CICIC does, you’ll know too
A couple of days ago I wrote a quick piece titled “No guidance for international students.” Shortly thereafter, Mr. Yves Beaudin, the National Coordinator for the Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials (CICIC), showed up to correct me. I sent him some mail to suggest an interview and he’s accepted. As soon as something can be arranged we’ll have the results.
Here’s what I know now. The CICIC is primarily focused on supporting the recognition and portability of qualifications and educational credentials. It seems to work both ways–helping Canadians to navigate foreign systems and helping those foreign to Canada to navigate our domestic systems. And for that reason alone I’m already happy to promote them. This is a real need for all concerned and has been the subject of considerable attention. Apparently CICIC was conceived as a response to Canada’s obligations under a UN Convention on the subject. If you really want to read up on that you can do so here.
What I don’t yet know, and what I’m eager to find out, is whether or not CICIC is the answer to the other problems I was initially writing about. Credential assessment and recognition, while very important, is only one challenge for international students. As for the rest of it? Well, the jury’s still out.
I will say this much. The CICIC and Mr. Yves Beaudin are fast on the draw when it comes to their email. And I wouldn’t fault them for solving just one piece of the puzzle while the rest remains, if that turns out to be the case. But I guess we’ll all know soon enough. In the meanwhile, for international students who can’t wait, you can contact them here.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
No guidance for international students
Coming to Canada, you’re pretty much on your own
I recently received yet another email from a concerned international student looking to study at a Canadian school. The details don’t really matter, but suffice it to say that this student dug up a year-old article of mine from On Campus about a lawsuit happening at this school but unrelated to his proposed program, and wanted to know if he should reconsider. And oh yeah, could I recommend another program that might be better for his purposes — anywhere in North America.
I get this sort of mail fairly regularly. While I’m usually able to say at least something useful, I’m always stumped by just how little international students know about post-secondary education in Canada. To begin with, for example, this fellow was looking at a college program. Does he know and appreciate the difference between “college” in Canada and “college” in the U.S.? He was, at least, looking at a reputable public college. But quite often international students get sucked into the (largely unregulated) private career college system. Seeing the difference between the two systems, from half a world away, must be darn near impossible. And all of that is before we even start to talk about money questions, visa issues, professional licensing, etc. It’s frustrating for me when I get so many questions I can’t answer, or where I can only scratch the surface of these issues, but I can’t blame international students for mailing me. They have few enough options.
Often, when we talk about Canada’s obligations to our international students, we seem to speak in terms of sharing the opportunities we enjoy here, creating jobs and scholarships, expanding work visas, and so on. But the truth is that many international students really do just come here to get their education and intend to return home with it. They are pursuing foreign credentials for any number of reasons, but most of them would be recognizable to any Canadian student. It’s a way for those who can afford it to combine travel with school. It’s an opportunity to prove or to polish fluency in English. It may be a gateway to an international career. It could simply be a way to distinguish one’s credentials from out of the pack of job applicants when the day comes. But really, any of these reasons are very similar to why a Canadian student might choose to study in France rather than Toronto.
The challenge of accommodating these students in our system is more one of information than resources. The resourcing decision, for good or for ill, was made some time ago. Aside from whatever merit-based scholarships may exist for the top cut of students, international students are expected to bear the full cost of their education in Canada. In some cases they may even supply positive revenue (what we would otherwise call profit) for the schools that host them. And this is a point of contention for some people, but it seems what’s most important at this stage is to ensure that students who are investing very significant sums of money here at least have the opportunity to invest wisely. And here’s where we fail.
I will observe that some individual schools are doing a pretty good job with international student services. I want to compliment those efforts. The issue I’m talking about, however, occurs before students commit to an individual school, and when they’ve decided to study in Canada but aren’t sure where they should start. Before these students commit to a school there’s very little available in the way of help, and if they commit to the wrong school or act on bad information it may be too late afterward. And of course there’s always the fact that sometimes these students need to be warned away or protected from the schools themselves, and in these cases we can hardly rely on internal services to do that.
For a student coming over from South Asia (or equivalent) it may well be the case that any destination in the country (or on the continent!) is equally convenient. What that student wants is a good education with good opportunities to follow. And there is simply no centralized resource to which that student can turn for information. Anything to fill this void would be a serious undertaking — probably one requiring cooperation between the federal government and the governments of the various provinces and territories — but considering how much money comes into Canada each year from foreign study and how important these markets are to our international identity, I’d argue it’s an important investment to make. Not to say we need to be in the business of actively marketing ourselves to foreign students. The strength of our system seems to speak for itself. But once we’ve decided to accept their enrolment and their tuition, you’d think we’d offer them more in the way of guidance to ensure they leave Canada with good memories and a positive experience, rather than feeling like they’ve been duped, neglected, or simply ignored.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Photo: Getty Images
International students flock to Canada
As belts tighten on campus, post-secondary institutions are increasingly keen to tap into the international students revenue stream
Lise de Montbrun was a teenager in Trinidad when Canadian university recruiters descended on her high school. Armed with pamphlets and descriptions of Canadian campus life, they wooed de Montbrun and others to come study up north. “I didn’t need much convincing,” said de Montbrun, now a 22-year-old architecture student at Toronto’s Ryerson University. It seems more young people around the world are thinking the same way.
Related: The sneaky way universities are privatizing teaching
Lucrative international students are flocking to Canada in record numbers–almost doubling in the last decade–as universities woo them to bolster their shrinking budgets. The number of international students in Canada has ballooned from 97,300 in 1999 to just over 178,000 in 2008. One-quarter of those students are in Ontario while the majority settle in large cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Canada drew de Montbrun from the very beginning. Since Trinidad didn’t offer architecture programs, de Montbrun knew she would have to study abroad. Now, she said she’s earning a degree which is internationally valued, all the while being exposed to a different country and culture. But, she’s paying for it. Since most provinces deregulated tuition fees, post-secondary institutions can charge international students more than three times the fees Canadian students pay. In de Montbrun’s first year, she was paying $14,000 in tuition. Now, her annual bill is closer to $17,000.
“Every year, it increases,” she said. “The university can increase it at any rate they want.”
As belts tighten on campus, post-secondary institutions are increasingly keen to tap into the international students revenue stream. Robert White, senior policy analyst for international affairs with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, said there are more international students looking for education away from home. He said universities are increasingly competing for the best and the brightest, recognizing that those students don’t always have a Canadian passport.
“(With) the ease of travel and, greater prosperity across the world, the potential for going and studying outside of their home country has just grown,” he said. “We’ve benefited from that.” But the increasing reliance on students like de Montbrun has many concerned. While some say international students are just a Band-Aid solution to chronic underfunding, others worry the growing population could cause universities to lower their academic standards.
David Robinson, associate executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said relying on such “cash cows” brings its own set of challenges. Some have difficulty with English or basic academic skills like essay writing. And given the desperately needed cash the students provide, Robinson said there have been cases where the administration is reluctant to uphold academic standards by expelling or failing such lucrative students.
“To expel those students means you are essentially cutting off a potential supply of revenue,” said Robinson, pointing to Australia where about one-quarter of students come from outside the country. “If we end up in a situation where we’re going to become more dependent upon the revenue streams international students provide, it does create potentials for conflict of interest where academic values may conflict with commercial values.”
Others worry Canada is limiting education to all but the wealthiest of international students while relying on them as a stop-gap measure. Katherine Giroux-Bougard, chair of the Canadian Federation of Students, said international students can bring much-needed diversity to Canadian campuses but the increasingly steep tuition is putting that experience out of reach for all but a few. Universities are also quick to bring international students here but don’t provide them with much financial assistance once they arrive, she said.
“The fundamental problem is . . . a lack of funding for institutions in Canada since the 1990s,” she said. “Trying to attract international students and charging higher fees, is really a Band-Aid solution to a much greater problem.”
The Canadian Press
Long live social science
Gender imbalance persists and social science continues to dominate, says Stats Can.
Students graduating from Canadian universities increased by 43 per cent between 1992 and 2007, according to a Statistics Canada report released today. The study revealed few demographic shifts among Canadian students and what they studied. There were a few notable changes in the gender distribution and in the share of international students graduating from Canadian institutions.
The proportion of graduates aged 22 to 24 has held steady at 44 per cent. Graduates between 25 and 29 increased slightly from 22 to 25 per cent, while graduates over 30 decreased slightly from 25 per cent to 23 per cent.
The gender imbalance on Canadian campuses has persisted, as the share of women graduating increased to 61 per cent from 56 per cent. Data on international students prior to 2000 was inconsistent across the provinces, but between 2001 and 2006, international students graduating from Canadian schools increased to 7.4 per cent from 4.7 per cent.
There has been virtually no change in the fields that Canadians study, with the social and behaviourial sciences and law accounting for a little more than a fifth of all graduates. Additionally, the top three fields including business and public administration and education, as well as the social sciences account for more than half of all graduates.
Health related fields are almost exclusively female, with 82 per cent of all graduates in 2007 being women. In fact, women dominate in all fields except for three: architecture and engineering, math and computer science, and protective and transportation services. However, the only category that saw a decrease in the share of women is math and computer science, which has been accompanied by a similar decline among Canadian males pursuing those fields. It is a trend that has been offset by a greater proportion of international students, mostly male, studying math and computer science.
Statistics Canada says data for 2008 will be released next year.
PhDs a hot commodity
University recruiters in Beijing to attract doctoral students–education Canada’s largest export to China
Representatives from 14 Canadian universities will try to attract Chinese doctoral students to their schools during a recruitment mission in Beijing starting Friday. They will be competing with institutions from eight other countries.
And while diversity on Canadian campuses is one reason behind the recruiting drive, putting more money into cash-strapped university coffers is another.
Dozens of institutions from various countries, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Germany and France, were invited to the PhD Workshop that runs Friday through Sunday, organized by the China Education Association for International Exchange and the Association of Chinese Graduate Schools.
The Canadian schools will meet with some of the 500 doctorate students attending the workshop and discuss areas of research, opportunities for innovation and the benefits of pursuing a PhD in Canada, a Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said.
Heather Kelly, director of student services with the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, said in an email from Beijing she plans to meet with more than 100 students.
“The University of Toronto recognizes that the key to innovation is collaboration, partnership, and co-operation with leading global institutions,” said Kelly. “So, our interest in working with top Chinese institutions is to develop targeted initiatives with universities, whether that be researcher to researcher, educational experiences, student internships or graduate student projects.”
Concordia University, Dalhousie University, McGill University, McMaster University, Queen’s University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, Universite Laval, the University of Manitoba, Universite de Montreal, Universite de Sherbrooke, the University of Waterloo and York University will also participate, Foreign Affairs said.
Canada increasingly training its own doctors, finds report
When trained domestically, graduates are more likely to stay in the country
Canada is becoming more self-sufficient when it comes to its supply of doctors, a new report suggests.
Foreign-trained physicians practising in Canada make up a smaller proportion of the country’s doctors than they used to, says the report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The number of internationally educated doctors grew between 1972 and the late 1980s, reaching a plateau of 13,500 that has held ever since.
Compared to the total physician workforce, however, there has been a decline, the report says: from a peak of 33.1 per cent in 1976 to 22.4 per cent in 2007.
The decline comes as physicians trained in the U.K. and Ireland in earlier decades age and retire, and as fewer new doctors who trained beyond Canadian borders begin practising here.
The percentage of foreign-trained doctors has dipped across all provinces and territories, though Newfoundland and Saskatchewan have the highest proportion and Prince Edward Island and Quebec the lowest.
“So what we’re seeing is that overall, Canada is training more people locally,” said Yvonne Rosehart, program lead in Health Human Resources at the institute’s Ottawa office.
Training physicians domestically is a good long-term strategy because graduates are more likely to stay in the country, she noted.
The report also says more than one-quarter – 27 per cent – of the country’s foreign-trained doctors actually grew up in Canada.
Doctors who were not raised in Canada and did not get their medical education here made up only 14 per cent (plus or minus 0.8 per cent) of the total number of doctors in Canada.
Regardless of national origin, doctors who studied abroad got their medical education from a wider array of countries than in the 1970s.
“We used to find that the majority of internationally trained physicians were from the U.K. and Ireland. Now, that’s not the case and they tend to be from more developing countries,” Rosehart said.
“We’re really seeing it go from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) or British-centric to more of a global recruitment.”
Concordia raises tuition fees paid by international students
Concordia University’s Board of Governors voted Friday to raise tuition fees paid by International students. The 10 per cent increase is effective immediately. The increase follows a summer long game of cat and mouse between the university and the Concordia Students’ Union. The university attempted multiple times to pass the increase and suffered repeated setbacks [...]
Concordia University’s Board of Governors voted Friday to raise tuition fees paid by International students. The 10 per cent increase is effective immediately.
The increase follows a summer long game of cat and mouse between the university and the Concordia Students’ Union.
The university attempted multiple times to pass the increase and suffered repeated setbacks as the CSU filibustered the attempts.
In the end, you can always create a better mousetrap, but eventually a better mouse comes along to defeat the contraption.
Canada needs to improve aboriginal education to survive in global economy: Stewart-Patterson
Business leader says that university and colleges need to reach out to adult learners, new immigrants
Canada must improve the educational outcomes of aboriginals and new immigrants in order to prosper in the global economy, according to the executive vice-president of The Canadian Council of Chief Executives.
“It is clear that Canada cannot rest on its laurels,” said David Stewart-Patterson in a keynote speech at an international conference regarding higher education access. “If we want to continue enjoying steady growth in our standard of living, we need to do better.”
The conference, titled “Neither a moment nor a mind to waste,” took place this week in Toronto and explored ways to improve student access and educational outcomes.
Canada’s economy has undergone a period of rapid growth in the last fifteen years from an economy “in which we did not have enough jobs for our people to one in which we cannot find enough people for the work that needs doing,” explained Stewart-Patterson. He added that ensuring access to higher education was once a moral imperative but is now an economic necessity.
“Far too many Aboriginals are not finishing high school,” he said, pointing to research by the Caledon Institute of Social Policy showing that Aboriginal people who complete high school have almost the same post-secondary participation rate as non-Aboriginal high school graduates. Stewart-Patterson called on the federal government to seize the “critical opportunity to demonstrate leadership and work with First Nations to find solutions that work.”
“This is the one group of students for which the federal government, rather than the provinces, bears primary responsibility,” he said.
Stewart-Patterson’s words are particularly relevant in light of the current dispute between the federal and Ontario governments over responsibility for the First Nations Technical Institute. The federal government recently withdrew funding for the institution, arguing that education is a provincial responsibility. After months of uncertainty as to whether the school would remain open, the provincial government stepped in with emergency one-time funding. But the province still maintains that the institution is the federal government’s responsibility.
Stewart-Patterson says that as Canada’s largest growing demographic, aboriginal youth are very important for the future of Canada. With the overall youth demographic expected to peak in 2012, Canadian universities must reach this group of potential students in order to maintain current enrolment levels.
