Courting Foreign Students

Internationalization is all the rage at universities these days. Europe’s never-ending Bologna process is to a substantial degree about encouraging a greater degree of student and faculty mobility. Excellence initiatives in Japan, Germany and France (not to mention Canada’s own International Research Chairs Initiative) are specifically about turning particular institutions into talent magnets.

Meanwhile, cross-border initiatives in education are rapidly expanding. No longer is it simply a matter, as it used to be, of attracting students from point A (often in the developing world) to point B (nearly always in the developed world). For one thing, developing countries themselves are rapidly expanding their higher education systems, both for their own students and also to become regional education hubs capable of attracting foreign students themselves. For another, institutions from wealthier countries have gone on a serious binge of constructing campuses abroad, particularly in the Gulf countries and southeast Asia. These two trends together create some interesting outcomes: a couple of years ago, while travelling in Tanzania, I noticed a newspaper advertisement which read: “Come study in Malaysia … at some of the best U.S. and UK universities.” The old patterns of North-South academic cooperation and assistance simply no longer apply.

Clearly, there is quite a bit going on in the world of internationalization of universities. Ben Wildavsky’s new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, takes readers on a tour of this transformational process by bringing them to the institutions and countries where these changes have gone the furthest. Wildavsky, it should be said, is not a theorist or an academic. In a book composed of six 30-page chapters, each tackling a different aspect of globalization with an introduction and conclusion tacked on, his is a very Atlantic magazine style of writing (as probably befits his background as a former editor at U.S. News and World Report).

Because internationalization is such an enormous topic, Wildavsky has a lot of ground to cover. The chapters on the internationalization of curricula at universities and on the development of overseas campuses in places such as Doha and Abu Dhabi are particularly intriguing, although sometimes one feels that the approach of focusing on “the next big thing” means that too much time is spent looking at outlier institutions rather than at the ones most professors and students inhabit. This can give a needlessly breathless tone to bits of his book. Sure, if John Sexton’s attempt to turn New York University into a global liberal arts school with a number of coequal campuses around the world (starting with one in decidedly illiberal Abu Dhabi) succeeds, that would be pretty interesting and noteworthy. But it is also likely to be a one-off; it will not immediately herald the arrival of chain universities with “glocalized” brands. In a way, this book is reminiscent of skimming through an issue of Wired in the mid 1990s. It tells us about all the many, many interesting experiments going on all over the world; most of these might never turn into mainstream trends, but one can still learn something from the failures.

One of the striking things about this book is the proportion of the author’s examples of “advanced internationalization” that are occurring at U.S. private universities. Although Wildavsky himself does not raise it as an issue, the fact that the global movement is being led by these institutions is highly significant and is not solely a byproduct of the fact that these institutions generally have a lot more money to throw around than their publicly funded counterparts.

A small part of what is motivating these schools is the desire to create a more distinctive and cosmopolitan brand to attract the brightest domestic students. At a deeper level, however, internationalization strategies are essentially hedges against the possible fall of American scientific hegemony. These privately funded institutions rely for their well-being on being plugged into high finance and the most advanced technological research circles; if technological leadership ever passes out of North America, these institutions will be in serious trouble unless they pre-emptively reach out to those centres to which the innovation torch will be passed. Public universities, whether in Canada or the United States, do not compete with the same intensity partly because they do not have the money but partly because as state-supported entities they feel somewhat insulated from these competitive pressures.

As a result, what is striking about Wildavsky’s book is how foreign it all seems. Canada has been very slow to adapt to the new world of internationalization. While a few schools do have campuses abroad, they are viewed by most as unnecessarily high-risk investments. Many schools have partnership and twinning agreements abroad, but they are more often than not seen as ways to funnel students to Canada through so-called “two plus two” arrangements (in which a student spends two years studying in their home country receiving full credit toward a degree at a Canadian institution at which they spend their final two years), rather than a way to export Canadian teaching methods and curricula. For us, overwhelmingly, internationalization simply means old-fashioned point-to-point importation of students. Yet despite eschewing internationalization à la Wildavsky, and focusing on this inward-migration version of internationalization, we are not especially good at it. In comparative terms we are blessed with a culture welcoming of newcomers and quite a good system of higher education, yet we continue to lag behind countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany in terms of bringing international students to our shores.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Our Nordic winters are not for everyone, for starters. More seriously, we have trouble as a country underlining to potential students what in their eyes would be one of our biggest draws, namely that we are English speaking. Internal political realities mean that even if we had a pan-Canadian body pushing our institutions abroad, it would be politically incapable of promoting one of our most important positives to potential customers.

But in any case, we do not have one of those national entities selling Canada abroad. Centralists tend to look at this as a case of troublesome provinces thwarting a benevolent central government doing what any normal central government would do, but it goes deeper than that. Institutions themselves could have put together consortia to market the country abroad, but, not to put too fine a point on it, Canadian universities have difficulty playing nicely with one another when it comes to internationalization. The largest and most prestigious universities, with some justification, do not see the need to subsume their identities in larger, pan-Canadian efforts, and so choose not to participate in them; the smaller ones have never found the money or courage to do it without them. Thus, while it is quite true that we have no equivalent of agencies like the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) or Australian Education International (AEI), it is wrong to pin the blame on failed federalism.

But there is another very important reason why we are behind places like the UK and Australia. Simply, we are not hungry enough. For all the moaning one constantly hears from Canadian universities about underfunding, it is worth considering that per-student funding here is about 40 percent higher than it is there. Institutions in Australia and the UK were given explicit incentives to go and get as many international students as possible, because they were worth a lot of money—international student fees were substantially higher than the resources available for domestic students, so they became a kind of profit centre for institutions, one that could be milked to keep universities running at a higher academic standard than would be possible with domestic resources alone.

In Canada, however, more (relatively) generous funding of domestic students means international students are not the profit centre they are elsewhere. Average fees for international students at the undergraduate level are a little under $16,000. That sounds like a lot until one considers that in Ontario—among the stingier provinces overall—a full-time domestic undergraduate student is worth roughly $12,000 in government grants and student fees. The “bounty,” if you want to call it that, is thus about $4,000 per student. But of course, attracting foreign students is not costless, either. There are advertising costs, payments to agents abroad, the extra costs on registrars and international student offices, the costs of trips abroad for university staff.

Remarkably, a thorough study of how much net income international students provide to Canadian institutions has never been done (or if it has, the authors have been keeping it quiet). Rather, it has simply become an article of faith that international students mean money. But it is not hard to see that when all the costs of international students are factored in, they may not generate as much in the way of extra income as they are often believed to do—at least not as long as provincial governments keep funding domestic students at current rates.

This puts the recent decision of the McGuinty government in Ontario to encourage institutions to attract more international students in an interesting light. With the provincial government now running annual deficits of over $20 billion per year, cuts of up to 15 percent in transfers to universities seem almost inevitable if the budget is to be brought back into balance any time before mid decade. It is not hard to see how the Ontario government (or any other provincial government whose budget is under pressure, for that matter) might be intrigued by the Australian experience in which international students become a partial substitute for public funds.

The search for international students takes on an even more urgent colour, though, at institutions facing a declining youth demographic. This includes almost everywhere in Canada outside the Greater Toronto Area, although it is most urgent in the Atlantic provinces and Saskatchewan. Here, the choice is not between a cheap-to-recruit domestic student worth $12,000 versus a hard-to-recruit international student worth $16,000; it is an international student or nothing. For schools off the beaten path, it is often easier to recruit students from Thailand than from Toronto. And over the past few years, it has been these schools that have been leading the charge toward internationalization in Canada.

But, over time, these schools will be putting themselves in a somewhat difficult position. Take a university like Lakehead or Brandon or Prince Edward Island: in the short term the choice is between taking in more international students or shrinking, with all the heartache that downsizing entails. In the short term, this is a no-brainer; in the long term, it is creating a hostage to fortune. As competition for these students increases among western schools and as higher education improves in developing countries, these schools are going to face increasingly difficult choices in the struggle to keep these students. Offering price discounts would undermine the whole rationale for attracting them in the first place. So instead, they will have to compete specifically on quality in providing education to students from abroad. That may mean substantial changes and adjustments to the curriculum to suit foreign students’ tastes. This will leave institutions in an uncomfortable quandary—do they continue their current practice of teaching to the median, local student and risk losing the valuable international student, or do they change practice to teach to the students bringing in the crucial income at the margin?

Disappointingly, these kinds of topics are not discussed in what should have been a timely new book on the topic of internationalization as it applied to Canada, entitled Canada’s Universities Go Global and edited by Roopa Desai Trilokekar, Glen A. Jones and Adrian Shubert. While the book contains a decent introduction and a solid concluding chapter by Jones, outlining the historical reasons why Canadian higher education has been reluctant to embrace internationalization (briefly, we never got over the nationalist backlash that followed the large wave of U.S. academic immigration in the 1960s), much of what lies between these two chapters is weak. Too many of the articles use the internationalization of universities as an excuse to hammer at tired themes of post-colonialism, race, gender and power structures (it should come as a surprise to no one to learn that contributors from York University far outnumber those from other universities in this volume). What this contributes to an understanding of how internationalization is proceeding at Canadian universities is marginal at best. That is not to say that there is not some reasonable scholarship amid it all; Linda Steinman’s essay “Contrastive Rhetoric and the University Classroom,” for instance, is an engaging piece about how writing styles vary across cultures. But the subject is essentially tangential to the purpose of the book, and no real attempt is made either by the author 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 on the Australian and German experiences (written by Simon Marginson and Ulrich Teichler, respectively) are chock full of statistics on internationalization, of detailed descriptions of how policy has responded to changing circumstances and of how changes in outcomes have resulted from changes in policy. Yet one searches in vain for any similar statistics in the Canadian chapters. In some cases this lack of attention to data is deliberate because, to be honest, data just get in the way of good post-colonial rhetoric. In other cases, it is because data do not exist; no one, for instance, counts international faculty in a systematic way, nor are campuses abroad or twinning of programs with foreign providers tracked. Finally, there are a few articles that do produce their own data, but that, due to limitations on the collection procedures (a reflection, perhaps, of how little attention institutions and governments pay to monitoring and quantifying their own internationalization efforts), do not rise much higher than anecdote; these would be fine in a small-scale program performance review, but are less than what would typically be expected of a book of peer-reviewed essays.

Much like the Canadian internationalization efforts it attempts to describe, this book could have done with a bit more foresight and organization. The introduction, for instance, makes the excellent point that the Canadian experience in internationalization has been remarkable for being essentially the only instance (outside the United States) where the process has largely been led by institutions rather than governments. Yet the volume contains three chapters of case studies of government policy and decision making in international higher education (one of which only barely rises above the level of rephrasing provincial press releases) and none on institutional decision making. By the editors’ own criteria, that has to be counted as a serious lacuna.

Higher education is a multi-billion-dollar industry and its increasing globalization, as Wildavsky shows, both provides opportunities and poses threats to Canadian institutions. What is needed is some kind of guide to these opportunities that can make sense of the various strategies and their potential costs and benefits. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for that book.