Since 2014, the University of Ottawa in Canada has offered all international students keen to study in French the chance to pay the same fees as local Canadian students for undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
And a surge in students applying from Africa has been an unexpected result of the policy change. Students from Niger, Senegal, Morocco and Tunisia are among those students who have become most likely to enrol on French medium courses at the university, according to Lise Bazinet, assistant director at the OLBI at the university.
Bazinet told The PIE News that the decision was taken to adjust the fees to enhance University of Ottawa’s ambition to be a balanced, bilingual campus.
“We hope to have a bilingual campus that reflects our priorities of teaching in both English and French in equal numbers and we have to do a little catch-up on the French side,” she said.
“The international students help to balance out our numbers – they are still allowed to take some courses in the English language if they so desire or they can study entirely in French.”
Adding that these students benefit the university by widening the diversity of its students and bringing “a special flavour of French to the classroom”, Bazinet nodded to a similar scheme that universities in the province of Quebec had previously run.
“The province of Quebec used to have differential fees for out-of-province applicants and for international students but they had waived the differential for students who were citizens of France,” explained Bazinet. “So a lot of students from France went to study in Quebec in either English or in French, I believe.”
Lise Bazinet explains what a bilingual campus really means
“It’s something that has been abolished in the last few years, ironically when U Ottawa decided to set it up because we thought it was a good idea.”
Bazinet explained that overseas promotion of this opportunity is carried out by an experienced liaison officer who attends study fairs and meets with representatives of governments abroad.
“We do welcome diversity in all of our classrooms”
“He is used to meeting students, their parents and decision makers such as guidance counsellors in order to talk about our academic programmes and the advantages of studying with us, both for the student and the student’s family, but also for our university, because we do welcome diversity in all of our classrooms.”
