Regional

Canada Works on Attracting Students from BRICS Countries

Later to the game than many other countries, Canada is a case study illustrating the reasons and the means by which governments are working to lure foreign students – especially from high-growth countries such as China, India and Brazil – and the obstacles to succeeding, reports Times Higher Education.

Now, more than a year after a report by Ipsos Reid found that a five-year, multimillion-dollar campaign called “Imagine Education au/in Canada” had failed to make inroads in those countries, the government has significantly expanded its efforts. What students in the sending countries wanted but didn’t get from Canada’s international education promotional campaign, Ipsos Reid found, was information about university rankings, leading programs and famous alumni of Canadian universities.

A new international education strategy, announced in January, will spend C$5 million (US$4.6 million) a year to brand and market Canada as an education destination to some of these prospective students in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam, plus C$13 million over two years to promote research and training links. The materials will be customized to each market. Those are places with which the Canadian government has been aggressively seeking closer trade and investment ties, and attracting international students from them is seen as a crucial way to help. The goal is to increase international student numbers to 450,000 by 2022.

Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, has visited Asia to work on strengthening economic connections, while in 2012, David Johnston, the governor general, took 30 Canadian university presidents to Brazil to promote Canadian higher education and research agreements. According to the OECD’s Education Indicators in Focus report from July 2013, Canada is the sixth most popular destination for international students, after the U.S., the UK, Germany, France and Australia, but still has a market share only a fifth the size of that of the U.S. and less than half that of the UK.

– Times Higher Education
February 20, 2014

100,000 Mexican Students in the U.S. by 2018

The February 19 summit of President Barack Obama with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada produced a little-noticed plan that may have a big impact on North America’s economic and cultural integration in coming years by dramatically increasing academic and student exchanges, as well as joint scientific research and innovation centers.

According to senior Mexican officials, at a U.S.-Mexico meeting during the summit, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto showed President Obama a poster with a graphic explanation of a new Mexican plan to increase the number of Mexican students in U.S. colleges from the current 13,800 to 100,000 by 2018.

The poster shows that Mexico plans to double its students in U.S. colleges to 27,000 this year, add 46,000 by 2015, 64,500 by 2016, 82,000 by 2017 and 100,000 by 2018. Currently, there are just 13,800 Mexican students at U.S. institutions of higher education. The Mexican plan, known as “Proyecta 100,000” also contemplates increasing the number of U.S. students going to Mexico from the current 4,100 to 50,000 between now and 2018.

Mexican officials say they plan to pay for the massive increase in student exchanges with public and private funds. The Mexican Congress has already earmarked an increase in funds for education exchanges this year, and the government will now ask Mexican and U.S. companies to contribute their share, as they will be the first to benefit from highly skilled scientists, engineers and technicians, officials say.

In coming months, Mexico will also ask several U.S. states to offer in-state tuition to Mexican students, in exchange for the same treatment to U.S. students in Mexican universities. Also, to encourage an increase of U.S. students going to Mexican universities Mexico has asked the Obama administration to change the State Department travel advisories to make it clear that many areas of Mexico are violence-free, Mexican officials say.

– Dallas Morning News
February 20, 2014

Chile

Education Reform Front and Center for New Bachelet Administration

Michelle Bachelet has promised wide-ranging reforms within the Chilean education system when she takes office as president again in March. Experts and those with a role in education say that it will not be sufficient to establish free higher education; the deep divisions in the system, from pre-school onward, also need to be tackled if students from poorer backgrounds are to enter higher education adequately prepared.

Chile is a country of 17 million people, and the economy has grown at an annual rate of 6 percent in recent years, yet at the same time it is one of the most unequal nations in the world. Nearly three million Chileans have to live on less than two dollars a day, and another million have incomes of less than one dollar a day. From the 1980s, access to higher education has increased significantly, but almost exclusively because of the opening up of the sector to private providers, which now account for over 60 percent of enrollments.

Bachelet has promised to establish education reform as the key tenet of her government program, in order to end excessive profit, improve quality, stop social segregation in schools and make substantial progress towards universal free education. The estimated cost of the reform will be between 3.9 and 5.2 billion dollars, equivalent to 1.5 to two percent of GDP, and its goal is to advance gradually towards universally free higher education over six years. Bachelet promised that by the end of her four-year term, the poorest 70 percent of Chilean students would have free access to higher education.

However, experts warn that without an equal focus on primary and secondary education in poorer municipalities, the reforms could fail. In Chile there are 25 traditional universities, both public and private, that belong to the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH). In order to attend a well-respected CRUCH university, students must pass a selection test on knowledge acquired in secondary school. A recent study showed that traditional universities recruited 71 percent of students with the highest scores in the selection test for 2014 admissions. Only 12 public high schools achieved an average of over 600 points, the minimum score required for entrance to some universities.

This is where the essence of segregation in Chile rears its head. What use is a free university if you can’t get into it? Many believe the greatest challenge facing the Chilean education system, therefore, is in improving public schooling at the primary and secondary level. Nowadays in Chile there are poor schools for the poor and rich schools for the rich. And the difference between them is not just infrastructure, but above all the quality of the teachers and of the education given.

For more on the education system of Chile, see this recent WENR profile.

– Inter Press Service
January 30, 2014

Haiti

Higher Education Reconstruction Efforts Mark Progress

Four years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, progress in rebuilding the Caribbean nation’s higher education and research system includes the installation of a distance education network in 12 universities, a medical studies project and two doctoral colleges.

A report by the Caribbean office of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), which has played a major part in Haiti’s university reconstruction process, describes initiatives since the devastating January 2010 earthquake. The report says an immediate response was an emergency project financed by the Fondation de France under the Solidarité Haïti appeal, which organized intensive programs so students could complete their 2010-11 university year. A total of 4,275 students followed 57 such programs.

In March 2010, two months after the earthquake, the French scientific community and Haitian members of the Conférence regionale des recteurs, presidents et directoeurs d’institutions d’enseignement universitaires dans la Caraïbe, adopted the ‘Declaration of Paris’ which laid the foundations of a reconstruction program for Haiti’s higher education and research system. The declaration set two urgent initiatives for the sector: a plan for digital distance education and research in Haiti, known by its French acronym PENDHA; and Haiti-Santé, a plan for medical and health education both in the classroom and digitally.

The most recent initiative, which started in 2011, is the Collège Doctoral d‘Haiti, a partnership with the Université d’Etat d’Haiti and the Université Quisqueya, with the support of the AUF. The initiative is designed to raise the status of Haitian academic and research staff, while adapting research to the needs of the country and region.

– University World News
January 31, 2014

United States

Kent State University to Offer Associate Degrees as Part of 4-Year Programs

Kent State University plans to start awarding associate degrees to students who complete the first two years of their bachelor’s programs. Most students seeking a bachelor’s degree complete 60 credit hours of courses in their first two years, and as such would qualify for an associate’s degree.

The thinking behind the initiative is that students who drop out after at least two years will still have a credential to show for their time, effort and money, while other students will be encouraged by their progress to continue on to complete the full four-year degree. In addition, university officials hope to qualify for more state funding as Ohio shifts its funding model for public higher education to one based more on degrees awarded than on net enrollment.

– The Plain Dealer
February 24, 2014

Tuition-Free University Earns Accreditation

Just in time for its first graduates, the University of the People, a tuition-free four-year-old online institution built to reach under-served students around the world, announced in February that it had received U.S.-government-recognized accreditation.

“This is every exciting, especially for the students who will graduate in April, with a degree from an accredited institution,” said Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur who invested millions of dollars to create the non-profit university. “This has been the big question for anyone who thought about enrolling. We have 1.2 million supporters on Facebook, I think second only to Harvard, and every day, there is discussion about when we will be accredited.”

Now, with accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council, a national accrediting group, Reshef said, the university will expand significantly. He expects to have 5,000 students by 2016, building from a current enrollment of 700 students from 142 countries.

– The New York Times
February 13, 2014