Regional

The University as a Multinational Corporation

A new report from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney Business School looks at how “some universities are considering transforming the branch campus model into fully fledged multinational universities by slicing up the global value chain in ways akin to multinational corporations.”

The report argues that “the goal of multinational universities in slicing up the value chain around the world through complex systems of supply, production and distribution of higher education and research, may mean using a developing country to do research because it is cheaper to build better infrastructure and hire researchers of similar quality to those at home. Or it may mean designing degrees in-country that are tailored precisely to what the market demands—in contrast to the largely one-size-fits-all of the branch campus system.”

Prepared by Sean Gallagher and Geoffrey Garrett, the draft report says many of these universities are focusing their efforts on China because of its scale and rapid development, and on Singapore because of its aggressive government policy and high level of development.

“China is attractive for several reasons: its world-leading ability to quickly roll out first-class infrastructure; central, provincial and local governments willing to make large financial commitments; Chinese research talent is high quality and relatively cheap; and Chinese demand for quality higher education will continue to mushroom as China transforms its economy from a low quality producer into by far the world’s biggest middle-class consumer.”

– United States Study Centre
August 2012

Free Online Course from Top US Universities Hugely Popular in BRIC Nations

One million students have signed up for college-level classes being offered online by California-based Coursera, with the vast majority registering from outside the United States. A recently released list of Coursera’s traffic shows that 61.5 percent of Coursera’s signups are coming from abroad, with Brazil, India and China showing the most interest, and registrations from all 196 generally recognized countries in the world.

Currently, after just five months of operation, Coursera offers 117 courses free of charge, covering everything from calculus to finance, world history and Greek mythology. Its faculty consists of professors from more than a dozen leading universities in the United States, Canada and Britain — including Duke, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Edinburgh. While Coursera doesn’t yet offer formal academic credit or traditional degrees, such credentials could be part of its expansion plans in years to come. Students can currently earn a certificate of completion for courses completed.

Course completion rates are currently running at about one in four registrants, according to estimates from Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer science professor who is a Coursera co-founder, in a June interview with Forbes magazine.

– Forbes
August 9, 2012

Canada

Government Looks to Tighten Student Visa Regulations

Canada’s federal government wants to tighten student visa regulations to crack down on fraud among foreigners who arrive on a student visa, but instead of school are using it to gain access to Canada’s labor market. There are also concerns that some are ending up at sub-standard institutions that ultimately hurt Canada’s international credibility.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said he also worries human smuggling groups are helping young people obtain student visas only to pull them into the sex trade once they arrive. He said he has heard this concern from some ethnic groups. Kenney said Canada is the only similar country that still has no checks to ensure those who arrive on student visas are attending legitimate institutions.

“We’re proposing to have provinces submit to us a list of credible post-secondary institutions which should benefit from the student visa program so that we can distinguish those institutions from schools that may not actually be offering quality programs.”

Citizenship and Immigration Canada, provincial governments and the national association of language providers, Languages Canada, will work toward limiting the number of Canadian schools allowed to accept international students. Under the new regulations, provinces would submit a list of approved post-secondary institutions. Only properly accredited institutions would be eligible to register foreign students.

At present, there is no system in place to ensure that people who come to the country on student visas are attending class. This would change under the new proposal. However, it is unclear whether the provinces, the federal government or the institutions themselves would be responsible for the monitoring.

Last year Canada issued more than 98,000 student visas, a 34 percent increase over 2007. A study released in July also found international students contributed nearly C$7 billion (US$7 billion) annually to the Canadian economy, created more than 81,000 jobs and generated more than $445 million in revenue for the government.

– Vancouver Sun
August 1, 2012

International Education Contributes $1.8 Billion to BC Economy, Province Launches Promotional Website

In 2010 international students contributed C$1.8 billion (US$1.8 billion) to the economy of British Columbia, making international education the province’s fifth largest export industry, while being responsible for approximately 22,000 jobs.

To increase the recruitment efforts of BC schools, the British Columbia Council for International Education (BCCIE) launched a website in August that will host and encourage peer-to-peer conversations with current and potential students about all study opportunities in BC—public and private accredited K-12, post-secondary and language schools. StudyinBC.com features student bloggers, photographers and videographers who will document their study in BC experience and share it with others considering the same path.

– BCCIE
June 24, 2012

New Regulations Concerning International Recruiting Agents

In 2011, the Government of Canada passed new legislation—Bill C-35—that makes it illegal for anyone other than an accredited immigration representative to provide advice or otherwise represent a client during an application or proceeding with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). This is applicable both to agents operating in Canada and to those based outside the country. Supporting information posted on the CIC website summarizes the impact of C-35 on education agents as follows:

“In terms of student recruitment, education agents who, for example, provide advice exclusively related to educational matters and/or services, such as directing someone to the CIC website to find information on immigration programs or to access immigration application forms, will continue to be able to do so. However, people who previously provided paid advice on immigration matters related to student recruitment—such as applying for a study permit, re-entry visa, or status extension—without being recognized as an authorized immigration representative will need to either become authorized or refer relevant cases to an authorized representative.”

– ICEF Monitor
August 8, 2012

Chile

Accreditation Rescinded for U.S.-Owned For-Profit University

Chile’s only university owned by the global arm of U.S. for-profit education giant Apollo Group has had its accreditation withdrawn. In mid-July, following an unsuccessful appeal, Chile’s National Education Council confirmed a decision by the National Accreditation Commission to stop accrediting the University for Arts, Sciences and Communication (UNIACC).

The university’s students will no longer be eligible for the Chilean government’s state-backed student loan system, which allows borrowing at below-market interest rates.

In its decision, the council said the university’s goals and planning lacked clarity, and it criticized internal quality assurance mechanisms. It also expressed uncertainty over the institution’s long-term sustainability and concern that its large projections of growth in e-learning would not guarantee adequate levels of quality.

The cost and the quality of for-profit universities were among the targets of the student movement whose protests last year brought much of the country’s capital, Santiago, to a halt. The loss of accreditation is only one of several recent problems for UNIACC. In 2008 it was accused by the government of profiting from a fellowship program for victims, and descendants of victims, of human rights violations during Chile’s military dictatorship. Apollo Global purchased the Santiago-based institution in 2008.

– Times Higher Education
August 9, 2012

Ecuador

Overseas Scholarship Program Seeks to Reverse Brain Drain

A new government scholarship program aspires to convert Ecuador’s economy into a global competitor. In exchange for each state-paid year of schooling, the scholarship recipients guarantee to work at least two years in Ecuador. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa says that through the program he hopes to create a brain gain for the country.

“Without human talent Ecuador won’t advance,” Correa said in a speech in June. “We lack the minimum critical mass of top-flight professionals needed to spur the country’s development.” Ecuador’s deputy minister of science and innovation, Hector Rodriguez, said the goal is “a radical transformation” from a country whose exports are 77 percent raw materials, chiefly oil, to one that exports technology.

The scholarships for professionals will benefit as many as 2,000 Ecuadoreans this year, twice as many as last year and up eightfold from 2010. The government will also pay as much as $250,000 to fund undergraduate education at the world’s 50 top universities for secondary school graduates who pass a qualifying exam. The top qualifiers will get to choose their field of study. Others will have their specializations assigned. For the undergraduate study-abroad program, 713 students were selected from 154,000 who took the qualifying exam. A third part of the program imports talent already abroad; responsible already for the return of 100 mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists and other scientists, half of them Ecuadorean nationals and half foreigners.

In order to ensure that beneficiaries honor the agreement to return, they or their relatives must sign contracts promising to repay scholarships costs if a student doesn’t come back, or drops out, and putting up collateral such as a home. When students return home, they will be placed in jobs in universities and state institutions, generally teaching and doing research.

– Associated Press
July 13, 2012

Mexico

A Plan to Increase University Enrollment 50% By 2018

Mexico’s president elect, Enrique Pena Nieto, has said that he plans to increase university enrollment by 50 percent by creating 1.5 million new places at universities and colleges by 2018. His announcement comes in response to figures that show his country has one of the lowest university participation rates in the region.

Currently, the Mexican government allocates just 0.65 percent of GDP to higher education – well below the country’s legal mandate of 1 percent. Through improving tax collection and eliminating wasteful spending, Nieto hopes to redirect more money to universities, calling the additional funds “an investment, not an expense.”

With only 2.5 million students enrolled in Mexico’s universities, the country’s participation rate of 30 percent falls far behind several of its Latin American competitors, including Argentina (68 percent), Uruguay (65 percent) and Chile (55 percent).

Under President Felipe Calderon, enrollment grew from 24 percent to 30 percent, and 92 new institutions of higher education were created. Yet, there is still much to be done. Nieto has said that he will focus his efforts on the creation of a National Digital University and online learning when he comes into power in December.

– University World News
July 29, 2012

Private For-Profit Education in Mexico: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The for-profit education sector in Mexico exploded in size in the early 1990s in response to radical cuts in public spending per student, and the sector continued to grow during a decade of stagnant investment in the 2000s. As the population expanded and public universities, with limited funds, were forced to become more selective, students flocked to private education providers. Between 1990 and 2010, for-profit education led a surge in the private education sector, which nearly quadrupled in size to 1,740 institutions. The private sector now accounts for 32 percent of the nation’s total student enrollment of 2.85 million.

In a feature length article, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the for-profit sector, pointing out that with so many institutions there is great variety in the quality of education offered. One of the institutions featured in the article, the International College for Experienced Learning, or Universidad ICEL, a for-profit university in Mexico City, where tuition is 10 percent of what it is at the city’s elite nonprofit universities, 16,000 students are enrolled, taking classes night and day. ICEL is widely considered to be among the better for-profit universities in Mexico. Many other for-profits are much smaller — the so-called patitos or “junk universities” — often serving a couple hundred students out of just a small office, with little equipment and poorly educated instructors. Some are altogether fraudulent, offering degrees that have no accreditation from the government’s Public Education Secretariat. Since accreditation is needed for students to acquire professional licenses, their degrees are worthless.

ICEL and other for-profits have clearly filled an unmet need in Mexico, but like their counterparts in the United States they have drawn critics who say they focus too much on efficiency and making money rather than on the quality and breadth of their educational offerings. Most of them, including ICEL, provide few courses in the natural sciences, where laboratories and equipment are expensive, and hire few full-time professors or instructors with Ph.D.’s. For-profits tend to draw from a pool of lower- and middle-class students from weak high schools who can neither pass the exams for entering the elite and free public universities nor afford the tuition at the private, nonprofit institutions.

One institution that seems to get good reviews among education experts is the University of the Valley of Mexico, or UVM, which has 90,000 postsecondary students spread among 37 campuses throughout Mexico, along with 30,000 students at its high schools. Its owner, Laureate International, operates throughout Latin America and earns half its revenue from Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.

Supporters of for-profits argue that they can help low-income students find decent jobs and compensate for deficiencies in government funds—all while earning reasonable returns. But complaints similar to those in Mexico can be heard in many other Latin American countries. In Brazil, for example, for-profit institutions emerged in the 1960s to fulfill the aspirations of poor and working-class students, many of them new arrivals in the cities from the countryside. As in Mexico, those students typically were unable to enter the public system.

Critics say that governments could enforce higher standards at the for-profits, which would give their graduates better credentials. But in Mexico at least, the accreditation process for degrees in the private system is widely considered lax. The independent Federation of Private Mexican Institutions of Higher Education awards a voluntary and more rigorous accreditation. But only 108 private institutions, or 6 percent of the total, have qualified or are in the process of doing so.

– The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 30, 2012

Peru

Top University in Battle with Catholic Church Over Name

A recent order from the Vatican is demanding that the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) change its name by eliminating references to the pope and the church. The fight over the name of what is considered one of the top universities in South America is part of a fierce battle over academic freedom and the authority of the Vatican. La Católica, as the school is known, is the alma mater of many of Peru’s elite, including President Ollanta Humala.

The school, closely associated with the teaching of liberation theology, a movement that emphasizes Christianity’s connection to the poor, has refused to change its name or to enact other changes that would give the church more control over its operations, including the elimination of courses not considered in line with church doctrine. School officials say that if the church gets control, it will scrub liberation theology from the curriculum, eliminate a gender studies program that includes courses on feminism and homosexuality, and take other steps to align teaching with religious doctrine.

“They’ve told us, ‘Hand over your money and obey,’ ” the university president, Marcial Rubio, told a gathering of students and faculty members in the school gym in July, casting the fight as a battle over the school’s valuable real estate and financial holdings.

Senior Catholic officials in Peru have said that if the school continues to resist the church’s demands, they would be forced to consider a range of sanctions, the most serious of which would be excommunication. The church says the school is under the jurisdiction of canon law, which gives church leaders the right to approve the appointment of the university president and oversee its finances. The church also says that the will of a major benefactor who died in 1944 gives it additional claim to the school’s holdings, which include a profitable shopping mall and other real estate.

University officials say the school is independent.

– The New York Times
August 1, 2012

United States

U.S. Oversight of Student Visas Criticized in Report

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report to Congress in July that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has not done enough to oversee the student visa system through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

The GAO report states that the agency has inadequate processes in place to investigate, identify and combat fraud, while it has not done enough to ensure that 10,000 schools and colleges that enrolled a total of 850,000 foreign students as of January have done so legitimately.

“SEVP does not have processes to (1) evaluate prior and suspected cases of school noncompliance and fraud and (2) obtain and assess information from … field offices on school investigations and outreach events,” the GAO report said. “Without a process to analyze risks, it will be difficult for ICE to provide reasonable assurance that it is addressing high-risk vulnerabilities and minimizing noncompliance.”

The report notes that the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, agreed with its recommendations, which focused on strengthening its procedures.

– GAO
July 2012

House Bill Requires Accreditation of Colleges Enrolling International Students

The U.S. House of Representatives approved in August legislation requiring colleges and universities that enroll foreign students to be accredited, in a bid to close a major loophole in the student visa system.

According to the bill, HR 3120, all higher-education institutions that enroll 25 or more students on non-immigrant visas would be required to have national or regional accreditation recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. If approved by the U.S. Senate, the measure would eliminate a significant shortcoming in visa law that has allowed fraudulent universities to take in thousands of foreign students and essentially sell them the right to work in the United States. The legislation was introduced in response to the raid and closure of one such institution in California, Tri-Valley University.

If the measure becomes law, colleges will have a three-year window to meet the new accreditation requirement, although the secretary of homeland security would have the authority to waive the mandate if an institution is found to be making a good-faith effort to earn accreditation and is otherwise in compliance with visa rules. Seminaries and other religious-education institutions would be exempt from the accreditation provision.

Currently, only independent English-language programs are required to hold accreditation in order to enroll foreign students.

– Chronicle of Higher Education
August 2, 2012

Another California University Leader Charged With Visa Fraud

The future of an unaccredited Silicon Valley school that attracted foreigners with student visas, but allegedly offered them limited or no academic instruction, is in doubt after the CEO was taken into custody and charged with visa fraud in early August.

The 15-count indictment against Jerry Wang, 32, could send him to prison for up to 23 years and amount to more than $1 million in fines. The indictment said Wang and others at Herguan University submitted false documents, false transfer letters and made false statements to federal regulators. The case could throw into question the immigration status of about 450 students enrolled at Herguan, most natives of India. Federal investigators found more than 550 students enrolled at the institution were registered as living at the same address: a two-bedroom apartment on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. If the school closes, these students will either have to rapidly transfer to a new university or return to their home countries without a degree.

The indictment marks the second time federal officials have raided a San Francisco area university in a growing effort to catch up with institutions that allegedly rake in millions of dollars as so-called visa mills. The charges come a year after Tri-Valley University was shuttered under similar charges of misrepresenting information on federal applications, which allowed them to sponsor overseas students for student visas. A majority of those students attended no classes.

While not accredited, the university operates three masters programs with approval of the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which does not accredit universities.

– San Jose Mercury News
August 2, 2012

No Accrediting of Overseas Law Programs

The accrediting body of the American Bar Association voted in August against widening its mandate to foreign law schools following an American educational model, a decision that directly impacts the four-year-old Peking University School of Transnational Law.

The school, which graduated its first class of 53 students this year, is the first law school in China to offer an educational program modeled on the U.S.-style J.D. degree. The school, located at the university’s branch campus in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, was the first foreign law school to seek ABA accreditation, a step that would have made it easier for its graduates to practice law in the United States.

While J.D. programs in the United States typically take three years to complete, Peking’s is a four-year program that grants graduates both a J.D. degree and a Juris Master degree in Chinese law. Classes are held in both English and Chinese.

– The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 6, 2012