All Posts Tagged With: "international"

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.”

Protesters want national government education reform

Hundreds of people have been arrested in Chile after students and professors took to the streets to protest new education reforms in the country. Local authorities report that 874 people have been arrested and 90 police officers injured after a series of peaceful protests turned to clashes between students and police. Chile has seen a series of street demonstrations emerge over the past few weeks in response to President Sebastian Pinera’s announcement that education spending will be slashed earlier this year.

According to a report by AFP, students are pushing for an amendment to the constitution to include the right to education, as well as increased financial assistance and government accountability in matters of education. Over the past several weeks, students have staged demonstrations that include a kissing protest and a superhero protest, though neither turned as ugly as Thursday’s rally, which saw police use tear gas and water cannons on crowds in Santiago.

Students and professors plan to file a complaint over police use of force at the demonstration.

Memorial University may invite him back to campus

Qiang Tang, the 23-year-old Chinese student who stabbed a fellow English as a Second Language student in March got a sentence of 12-months probation today, with a condition that he must stay away from Memorial University unless he’s invited back.

Tang stabbed the fellow student after being accused of talking too loudly in class. He had originally been charged with aggravated assault, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of assault causing bodily harm.

“The fact [that] this occurred on campus was an aggravating factor as assaults in schools have been treated seriously by the court,” Judge David Orr said in court.

Defence attorney Rosellen Sullivan told the court that Memorial University will decide whether or not to allow Tang back on campus after their own investigation is completed.

Citizen and Immigration Canada will decide whether to deport Tang after its own investigation.

Chinese citizen attacked fellow student at Memorial

A Chinese student taking English as a Second Language at Memorial University pleaded guilty to stabbing another student Tuesday in St. John’s, reports CBC News. Crown and defence lawyers jointly requested that Qiang Tang, 23, serve 12 months of house arrest, plus probation. Tang was arrested in March at Spencer Hall after the attack.

Must first fight $2-million tax evasion charges

The Chinese artist and dissident who disappeared for more than two months has been offered a post at a German University.

But it’s unlikely Ai Weiwei will be able to take the job at Berlin University of the Arts anytime soon. He must remain in Beijing to fight nearly $2-million worth of tax evasion charges, he told The Telegraph. Authorities allege he hasn’t paid corporate taxes since 2000.

Ai was secretly imprisoned by Chinese officials in April and then released on June 22 under strict conditions following world-wide political pressure. Many asserted that his imprisonment was the result of his criticism of the Chinese government for covering up the deaths of schoolchildren following the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008. He alleged that officials stole school funds and then built shoddy buildings. His blog listed the names of 5,000 children who died.

Is the hermit kingdom afraid of uprisings on campus?

University students in North Korea are preparing for a very long summer vacation — ten months of manual labour on farms, in factories or at construction sites in order to prepare for the 100-year anniversary of  their dead founder’s birth.

Peter Hughes, British Ambassador to North Korea, told University World News from Pyongyang: “I can confirm that students from all the universities in Pyongyang have been mobilised to work at construction sites in the outskirts of the city until April 2012.”

Universities are still open, but foreigners have noticed the very small number of students left studying there in recent months.

Hughes also said: “Some two years ago the DPRK announced that it would build 200,000 units of accommodation in the city to ease the chronic housing shortage. To date only some 10,000 units have been built, so the students have been taken out of universities in order to speed up the construction of the balance before major celebrations take place in April 2012.”

But analysts from Japan and South Korea told University World News that Pyongyang may have dispersed university students  for another more nefarious reason: they fear of demonstrations. They noted that North Korea purchased tear gas and batons from China earlier this month and has increased police levels on city streets.

British students will soon be able to answer that question

Britain’s government plans to rank universities using graduate employment rates and starting salaries in a bid to “name and shame” programs whose graduates aren’t finding good jobs, reports The Telegraph.

Students who want to pick a degree that will give them better job prospects currently have little to go on, said David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities. He explained that future students “will be able to see [that] ‘if I do biological sciences at one university, I have got a much better chance of a job in a pharmaceutical company than if I do biological sciences at a different university.”

Eventually, a website will allow students to comparison shop by letting them compare tuition rates alongside genuine salary and employment figures. The plan comes after the government faced protests for raising the cap on tuition fees, sending many up to the new maximum of $14,000 per year. (In comparison, average tuition in Canada is $6,500.)

Program-specific salary and employment data is not readily available in Canada. In Ontario, schools must release information on how many students are employed, but there are no details available on whether they’re working in their chosen field — or how much they’re being paid.

That lack of information may have contributed to unrealistic expectations about what students will make five years after starting work. A 2010 survey of 24,000 Canadian students found that university students were expecting an average salary of $70,000 within five years of graduation. In reality, those aged 25 to 30 average $45,000 and those aged 31 to 35 average $51,000.

Rhode Island legislators say Facebook causes bullying

The U.S. state Rhode Island has passed an “anti-bullying” law that creates a state-wide ban on the use of social networking sites anywhere on school property. As The Huffington Post points out, that means students won’t be able to access the legislature’s own Facebook page, which could make it difficult for the government to extend its fan-base beyond the eight people who have “liked” it so far.

Academics debate whether to accept Chinese cash

Photo courtesy of IvanWalsh.com on Flickr

When he first heard from a university administrator about a new Confucius Institute (CI) proposed at the University of Manitoba, Asian Studies professor Terry Russell asked for a meeting with the dean in charge. At that meeting, he asked her to carefully consider who was offering to pay for it. The money would come from the Hanban, an arm of the Chinese government that’s chaired by the minister of education. That’s the same government, as Russell put it, that jailed Nobel-prize winner Liu Xiaobo for 11 years, the same government who took the University of Calgary to task after it gave the Dalai Lama an honourary degree, and the same government that employs 50,000 citizens to scour the Internet in search of dissent. Russell says that Canadian universities shouldn’t take money from an education ministry that does such things.

Less than six months later, the university has announced that it will join a short-but-growing list of institutions that have decided against taking Chinese government money to set up CIs on campus. The university’s spokesman, John Danakas, says that “overtures were made” by Confucius Institutes earlier this year, but that “conversations have ended… for logistical reasons.” Pennsylvania State University, the University of British Columbia and the Republic of India, have also decided against CIs on campus.

But in the same month that Manitoba declined funding from China, the University of Regina and Brock University both inaugurated their new Confucius Institutes, bringing the total number at Canadian post-secondary schools to eight. More than 320 exist worldwide. China says that the funding of CIs—$150,000 initially and up to $200,000 per year after that— is meant to promote cultural understanding. But along with the money, schools, including Brock, have signed constitutions that says that “institute activities must … respect cultural customs, and shall not contravene concerning laws and regulations in Canada and China.”

Quite what that means is open to interpretation.

Russell says that means employees will feel dissuaded from mentioning Taiwan, Tibet independence, Falun Gong, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. If that’s true, the result could be an unrealistically positive view of China among the students who pass through the free language and history courses that they offer on Canadian campuses. He goes even further than that. “They’re nothing more than a propaganda and public relations exercise within the legitimizing framework of a university,” he says.

Sheila Young, Director of Brock International, takes the opposite view of their new CI. There isn’t any propaganda, she argues, but instead a fantastic opportunity for academic exchange with the world’s next superpower. “We’re in complete control of the curriculum and always have been, always will be,” says Young. The Chinese government offered to provide textbooks to them during at the Confucius Institutes Conference that she and other administrators attended in Beijing in December, but Brock has not decided which materials it will use. “Nothing has been shipped to us, where they said, ‘here these are prescribed texts,’” says Young.

Young stresses that the CI will allow them to offer many more Mandarin courses than they would be able to otherwise, plus teacher-training certification and possibly Chinese history and political science courses in the future. “There are a lot of cutbacks in the economy we’re in now,” says Young. “So the idea of getting some funding to teach in an area that hasn’t been taught [in] before is appealing.”

Master’s specifically targets Indian and Chinese students

The University of Windsor’s student body includes 10 per cent international students, but they pay more than a quarter of the tuition.

That’s why the school will add a new medical biotechnology master’s program that is designed specifically to appeal to the growing Indian and Chinese education markets.

They’re unlikely to have trouble finding applicants. The number of Chinese students studying abroad has been growing by an average of 26 per cent per year for nearly three decades and reached 285,000 in 2010. The number of Indian student visas tripled in Canada between 2008 and 2010, reports Statistics Canada. In total, there were more than 178,000 foreign students in Canada last year.

Canadians are encouraged to take the program too, but most would balk at the between $25,000 and $30,000 fee for four semesters, Windsor chemistry professor Bulent Mutus told the Windsor Star. Mutus says the program will benefit undergraduates by helping to cover the costs of expensive labs that aren’t otherwise used in the summers. The program will launch in 2012.