Courting foreign students: Canada is lagging in the push to internationalize our campuses.

Courting foreign students: Canada is lagging in the push to internationalize our campuses. Canada's Universities Go Global Roopa Desai Trilokekar, Glen A. Jones and Adrian Shubert, editors Lorimer 424 pages, softcover ISBN 9781552770412 The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping theWorld Ben Wildavsky Princeton University Press 248 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781400834235 INTERNATIONALIZATION IS ALL THE rage at, universities these days.Europe s never-ending Bologna process is to a substantial degree aboutencouraging a greater degree of student and faculty mobility. Excellenceinitiatives in Japan, Germany and France (not to mention Canada'sown International Research Chairs Initiative) are specifically aboutturning particular institutions into talent magnets. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Meanwhile, cross-border initiatives in education are rapidlyexpanding. No longer is it simply a matter, as it used to be, ofattracting students from point A (often in the developing world) topoint B (nearly always in the developed world). For one thing,developing countries themselves are rapidly expanding their highereducation systems, both for their own students and also to becomeregional education hubs capable of attracting foreign studentsthemselves. For another, institutions from wealthier countries have goneon a serious binge of constructing campuses abroad, particularly in theGulf countries and southeast Asia. These two trends together create someinteresting outcomes: a couple of years ago, while travelling inTanzania, I noticed a newspaper advertisement which read: "Comestudy in Malaysia ... at some of the best U.S. and UKuniversities." The old patterns of North-South academic cooperationand assistance simply no longer apply. Clearly, there is quite a bit going on in the world ofinternationalization of universities. Ben Wildavsky's new book, TheGreat Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, takesreaders on a tour of this transformational process by bringing them tothe institutions and countries where these changes have gone thefurthest. Wildavsky, it should be said, is not a theorist or anacademic. In a book composed of six 30-page chapters, each tackling adifferent aspect of globalization with an introduction and conclusiontacked on, his is a very Atlantic magazine style of writing (as probablybefits his background as a former editor at U.S. News and World Report). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Because internationalization is such an enormous topic, Wildavskyhas a lot of ground to cover. The chapters on the internationalizationof curricula at universities and on the development of overseas campusesin places such as Doha and Abu Dhabi are particularly intriguing,although sometimes one feels that the approach of focusing on "thenext big thing" means that too much time is spent looking atoutlier institutions rather than at the ones most professors andstudents inhabit. This can give a needlessly breathless tone to bits ofhis book. Sure, if John Sexton's attempt to turn New YorkUniversity into a global liberal arts school with a number of coequalcampuses around the world (starting with one in decidedly illiberal AbuDhabi) succeeds, that would be pretty interesting and noteworthy. But itis also likely to be a one-off; it will not immediately herald thearrival of chain universities with "glocalized" brands. In away, this book is reminiscent of skimming through an issue of Wired inthe mid 1990s. It tells us about all the many, many interestingexperiments going on all over the world; most of these might never turninto mainstream trends, but one can still learn something from thefailures. One of the striking things about this book is the proportion of theauthor's examples of "advanced internationalization" thatare occurring at U.S. private universities. Although Wildavsky himselfdoes not raise it as an issue, the fact that the global movement isbeing led by these institutions is highly significant and is not solelya byproduct of the fact that these institutions generally have a lotmore money to throw around than their publicly funded counterparts. A small part of what is motivating these schools is the desire tocreate a more distinctive and cosmopolitan brand to attract thebrightest domestic students. At a deeper level, however,internationalization strategies are essentially hedges against thepossible fall of American scientific hegemony. These privately fundedinstitutions rely for their well-being on being plugged into highfinance and the most advanced technological research circles; iftechnological leadership ever passes out of North America, theseinstitutions will be in serious trouble unless they pre-emptively reachout to those centres to which the innovation torch will be passed.Public universities, whether in Canada or the United States, do notcompete with the same intensity partly because they do not have themoney but partly because as state-supported entities they feel somewhatinsulated from these competitive pressures. As a result, what is striking about Wildavsky's book is howforeign it all seems. Canada has been very slow to adapt to the newworld of internationalization. While a few schools do have campusesabroad, they are viewed by most as unnecessarily high-risk investments.Many schools have partnership and twinning agreements abroad, but theyare more often than not seen as ways to funnel students to Canadathrough so-called "two plus two" arrangements (in which astudent spends two years studying in their home country receiving fullcredit toward a degree at a Canadian institution at which they spendtheir final two years), rather than a way to export Canadian teachingmethods and curricula. For us, overwhelmingly, internationalizationsimply means old-fashioned point-to-point importation of students. Yetdespite eschewing internationalization a la Wildavsky, and focusing onthis inward-migration version of internationalization, we are notespecially good at it. In comparative terms we are blessed with aculture welcoming of newcomers and quite a good system of highereducation, yet we continue to lag behind countries such as the UnitedKingdom, Australia and Germany in terms of bringing internationalstudents to our shores. There are a variety of reasons for this. Our Nordic winters are notfor everyone, for starters. More seriously, we have trouble as a countryunderlining to potential students what in their eyes would be one of ourbiggest draws, namely that we are English speaking. Internal politicalrealities mean that even if we had a pan-Canadian body pushing ourinstitutions abroad, it would be politically incapable of promoting oneof our most important positives to potential customers. But in any case, we do not have one of those national entitiesselling Canada abroad. Centralists tend to look at this as a case oftroublesome provinces thwarting a benevolent central government doingwhat any normal central government would do, but it goes deeper thanthat. Institutions themselves could have put together consortia tomarket the country abroad, but, not to put too fine a point on it,Canadian universities have difficulty playing nicely with one anotherwhen it comes to internationalization. The largest and most prestigiousuniversities, with some justification, do not see the need to subsumetheir identities in larger, pan-Canadian efforts, and so choose not toparticipate in them; the smaller ones have never found the money orcourage to do it without them. Thus, while it is quite true that we haveno equivalent of agencies like the Deutscher Akademischer AustauschDienst (DAAD) or Australian Education International (AEI), it is wrongto pin the blame on failed federalism. But there is another very important reason why we are behind placeslike the UK and Australia. Simply, we are not hungry enough. For all themoaning one constantly hears from Canadian universities aboutunderfunding, it is worth considering that per-student funding here isabout 40 percent higher than it is there. Institutions in Australia andthe OK were given explicit incentives to go and get as manyinternational students as possible, because they were worth a lot ofmoney--international student fees were substantially higher than theresources available for domestic students, so they became a kind ofprofit centre for institutions, one that could be milked to keepuniversities running at a higher academic standard than would bepossible with domestic resources alone. In Canada, however, more (relatively) generous funding of domesticstudents means international students are not the profit centre they areelsewhere. Average fees for international students at the undergraduatelevel are a little under $16,000. That sounds like a lot until oneconsiders that in Ontario--among the stingier provinces overall--afull-time domestic undergraduate student is worth roughly $12,000 ingovernment grants and student fees. The "bounty," if you wantto call it that, is thus about $4,000 per student. But of course,attracting foreign students is not costless, either. There areadvertising costs, payments to agents abroad, the extra costs onregistrars and international student offices, the costs of trips abroadfor university staff. Remarkably, a thorough study of how much net income internationalstudents provide to Canadian institutions has never been done (or if ithas, the authors have been keeping it quiet). Rather, it has simplybecome an article of faith that international students mean money. Butit is not hard to see that when all the costs of international studentsare factored in, they may not generate as much in the way of extraincome as they are often believed to do--at least not as long asprovincial governments keep funding domestic students at current rates. This puts the recent decision of the McGuinty government in Ontarioto encourage institutions to attract more international students in aninteresting light. With the provincial government now running annualdeficits of over $20 billion per year, cuts of up to 15 percent intransfers to universities seem almost inevitable if the budget is to bebrought back into balance any time before mid decade. It is not hard tosee how the Ontario government (or any other provincial government whosebudget is under pressure, for that matter) might be intrigued by theAustralian experience in which international students become a partialsubstitute for public funds. The search for international students takes on an even more urgentcolour, though, at institutions facing a declining youth demographic.This includes almost everywhere in Canada outside the Greater TorontoArea, although it is most urgent in the Atlantic provinces andSaskatchewan. Here, the choice is not between a cheap-to-recruitdomestic student worth $12,000 versus a hard-to-recruit internationalstudent worth $16,000; it is an international student or nothing. Forschools off the beaten path, it is often easier to recruit students fromThailand than from Toronto. And over the past few years, it has beenthese schools that have been leading the charge towardinternationalization in Canada. But, over time, these schools will be putting themselves in asomewhat difficult position. Take a university like Lakehead or Brandonor Prince Edward Island: in the short term the choice is between takingin more international students or shrinking, with all the heartache thatdownsizing entails. In the short term, this is a no-brainer; in the longterm, it is creating a hostage to fortune. As competition for thesestudents increases among western schools and as higher educationimproves in developing countries, these schools are going to faceincreasingly difficult choices in the struggle to keep these students.Offering price discounts would undermine the whole rationale forattracting them in the first place. So instead, they will have tocompete specifically on quality in providing education to students fromabroad. That may mean substantial changes and adjustments to thecurriculum to suit foreign students' tastes. This will leaveinstitutions in an uncomfortable quandary--do they continue theircurrent practice of teaching to the median, local student and risklosing the valuable international student, or do they change practice toteach to the students bringing in the crucial income at the margin? Disappointingly, these kinds of topics are not discussed in whatshould have been a timely new book on the topic of internationalizationas it applied to Canada, entitled Canada's Universities Go Globaland edited by Roopa Desai Trilokekar, Glen A. Jones and Adrian Shubert.While the book contains a decent introduction and a solid concludingchapter by Jones, outlining the historical reasons why Canadian highereducation has been reluctant to embrace internationalization (briefly,we never got over the nationalist backlash that followed the large waveof U.S. academic immigration in the 1960s), much of what lies betweenthese two chapters is weak. Too many of the articles use theinternationalization of universities as an excuse to hammer at tiredthemes of post-colonialism, race, gender and power structures (it shouldcome as a surprise to no one to learn that contributors from YorkUniversity far outnumber those from other universities in this volume).What this contributes to an understanding of how internationalization isproceeding at Canadian universities is marginal at best. That is not tosay that there is not some reasonable scholarship amid it all; LindaSteinman's essay "Contrastive Rhetoric and the UniversityClassroom," for instance, is an engaging piece about how writingstyles vary across cultures. But the subject is essentially tangentialto the purpose of the book, and no real attempt is made either by theauthor or the editors to connect it to the rest of the volume. Part of the problem here is a simple lack of data. The articles onthe Australian and German experiences (written by Simon Marginson andUlrich Teichler, respectively) are chock full of statistics oninternationalization, of detailed descriptions of how policy hasresponded to changing circumstances and of how changes in outcomes haveresulted from changes in policy. Yet one searches in vain for anysimilar statistics in the Canadian chapters. In some cases this lack ofattention to data is deliberate because, to be honest, data just get inthe way of good post-colonial rhetoric. In other cases, it is becausedata do not exist; no one, for instance, counts international faculty ina systematic way, nor are campuses abroad or twinning of programs withforeign providers tracked. Finally, there are a few articles that doproduce their own data, but that, due to limitations on the collectionprocedures (a reflection, perhaps, of how little attention institutionsand governments pay to monitoring and quantifying their owninternationalization efforts), do not rise much higher than anecdote;these would be fine in a small-scale program performance review, but areless than what would typically be expected of a book of peer-reviewedessays. Much like the Canadian internationalization efforts it attempts todescribe, this book could have done with a bit more foresight andorganization. The introduction, for instance, makes the excellent pointthat the Canadian experience in internationalization has been remarkablefor being essentially the only instance (outside the United States)where the process has largely been led by institutions rather thangovernments. Yet the volume contains three chapters of case studies ofgovernment policy and decision making in international higher education(one of which only barely rises above the level of rephrasing provincialpress releases) and none on institutional decision making. By theeditors' own criteria, that has to be counted as a serious lacuna. Higher education is a multi-billion-dollar industry and itsincreasing globalization, as Wildavsky shows, both providesopportunities and poses threats to Canadian institutions. What is neededis some kind of guide to these opportunities that can make sense of thevarious strategies and their potential costs and benefits.Unfortunately, we are still waiting for that book. Alex Usher is president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, aconsultancy based in Toronto.