Ken Steele is president and chief futurist at Eduvation, where he monitors trends and innovation in Canadian higher education. A renowned expert on the subject, here he takes a look at some of the factors shaking up the country’s international education sector and sheds some light on why so few Canadians study abroad.
The PIE: Tell me about what you do.
KS: I’m a former academic who now consults with colleges and universities, I facilitate a lot of board retreats and work with recruitment marketing teams on branding and recruiting students to universities and colleges, mostly across Canada.
The PIE: You’re a big advocate for study abroad, and I was interested to hear you say at the CBIE conference that the factors that encourage international students to come to Canada are the same ones that keep domestic students in Canada.
“NAFTA has been a source of contention, it hasn’t really facilitated mobility. Homeland has made sure the American border is tighter than ever”
KS: I think so, because the top findings from CBIE‘s [A World of Learning report], talking to international students, were that we had the right quality education system, a nondiscriminatory and accepting environment.
I was contrasting that to high school students in India who hadn’t yet left to go abroad but were contemplating it and the push factors that would lead them to leave were about quality of education, the possibility of getting in, the employment prospects, the attitude of employers to the credentials and reputation and the opportunity to work when they graduate.
There’s also the issue that especially as more and more of our young population are new to Canada, or their parents came and they are first generation Canadians, Canada was the land of opportunity that they just got to, so why would they leave? In Toronto we are now at 75% of kids in K-12 who are new to Canada or at least one of their parents are new to Canada.
Canada tends to be a bit insular, we define ourselves as not American. There is no adjacent country you want to spend time in, this big country all by itself, there is so much of Canada to explore, why would you have to leave? Only 10% of students go between provinces. NAFTA has been a source of contention in Canada, it has been economic and it hasn’t really facilitated mobility at all. Homeland has made sure the American border is tighter than ever; you don’t feel free to travel as result.
The PIE: What are the other challenges in getting Canadians to study abroad?
KS: We’ve got all the research to tell us that the main challenges start with finances, that students perceive this as luxury expense they can’t afford – frankly, Canadian airfare rates are outrageous. They also see the risk academically of taking a term or a year away from their programme to do coursework that may not be fully transferable. Students are anxious that it will delay their graduation, thereby costing them another year of living expenses and tuition in order to complete their degree.
“Students are anxious that it will delay their graduation, thereby costing them another year of living expenses and tuition”
Then we can see signs of a rising tide of anxiety to the point where I think we’ve got a generation of students in North America who are overly anxious about regular day-to-day life and the idea of going abroad doesn’t feel safe enough to the majority of them. So we’ve then got the psychological barriers about anxiety and fear, about a tendency to stay within comfort zones, and I fear that those things may well be global, that they are not specific to Canada.
Frankly, unlike the EU, here in North America leaving the country means you are going to the United States or you are leaving the continent so it is a fairly big decision to go across the planet, whereas in the EU you can go for a little drive and get an international experience?
The PIE: Do you think these are things that universities are addressing at the moment?
KS: I believe that universities and colleges – at the top level they often believe exchange and study abroad are worth promoting and encouraging students to do, that they lead to good educational outcomes.
I think the reality of day-to-day at those institutions is that there is not a budget to spend on this, we don’t have staff to support students and help them complete the paperwork and get through the hurdles, we don’t have campaigns to raise student awareness of the existence of these programmes, much less to encourage them to think about it and help them through the process, because there is no financial incentive to the institutions to do anything. You encourage a student to study abroad, you lose money. And if you are giving them scholarships to study abroad to address their financial issues then it is costing you even more money as an institution every time a student goes abroad.
“There is no financial incentive to the institutions to do anything. You encourage a student to study abroad, you lose money”
That’s unfortunate, and I think government has got to change that; it can’t come from within the institution, other than through generosity and donors. What we need is governments that recognise the importance of a globally aware youth so that they are willing to put the money into scholarship programmes and some kind of incentive programme, maybe it is just allowing budget money for institutions to promote these programmes, because there is no incentive now.
The PIE: Are you optimistic that with the change of government last year, we might see some of those changes?
KS: I think that the economic realities are not going to be easy for the foreseeable future. There is sort of a 400-year process ahead of us here, in which standards of living are going to drop, government revenues are going to drop, over the next few decades the demands for healthcare are going to rise and the money for education is going be pressured across the developed world.
I am nonetheless confident that a shift from the right of the political spectrum to Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government, it is going to move to a much more generous stance about universities especially. The Tories fund colleges much more aggressively than universities, the Liberals are likely to be more generous with the universities, to loosen up some of the chokehold financially those institutions have been under and I think they have a more open, global attitude, witnessed by their attitude to Syrian refugees.
Justin Trudeau has reserved the portfolio he created of the Minister of Youth for himself, to signify that the Prime Minister of Canada believes this is a critical priority for him, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see the federal government putting some money into the sorts of scholarship which we are seeing in Germany and the EU to help fund students study abroad.
The PIE: What do you think have been the biggest factors affecting Canadian international higher education in the last couple of years, policy-wise?
“Trudeau has reserved the portfolio he created of the Minister of Youth for himself, to signify that the Prime Minister believes this is a critical priority”
KS: I know that student visas can have a big impact and the difficulty of getting into the country for an international student can matter quite a bit. I think getting into Canada that has been a major issue and most of the institutions I have spoken to over the last few years, there’s two big levers that they have no control over that affect their ability to bring international students in. One is currency fluctuations, where if the Rupee drops against the Canadian dollar, you’re going to lose Indian students and there is nothing you can do about it.
The other is visa paperwork, visa processing backlogs, wait times and regulation. In the past, the majority of international students coming into Canada have been drawn here in particular because of our liberal approach to allowing them to seek employment off campus while they are here and in fact after graduation more students stay here than in any other OECD country.
The America Homeland security folks throw you out of the country the day you have written your exam. So if you compare the attitude there to the attitude in Canada it isn’t surprising that international students look at Canada as a place to come to get a foothold in North America, to get a job and then potentially they move onto the United States afterwards because they hear the economy is wonderful there.
The PIE: How do you see the English and French language training industries fitting into Canada’s overarching international education strategy?
KS: I think that bridging or pathway programmes are going to be critical if Canada’s colleges and universities are going to achieve their goal, and the government’s goal, of doubling international enrolments in Canada. Many institutions don’t have the internal expertise, and don’t want to develop it, so “outsourcing” or partnering with Languages Canada member schools would make a lot of sense. It seems to me there should be real opportunity for them.
