Author: Nicole

A recent report by the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) emphasizes the benefits that international students bring to the Canadian economy and to campuses across the country. It has also put together a list of recommendations on how these students can be better recognized and rewarded for their contribution.

Read more on CASA’s website.

Most people reading this blog will already be well aware that Trump has had a negative effect on the international student enrollments in American colleges. An interesting article in Inside Higher Ed takes a larger look at political changes around the world and how they have altered the choices that international students have been making in their study destinations.

Read the article in Inside Higher Ed.

While politicians and administrators at post-secondary institutions regularly extol the many benefits of international students, a recent study shows that domestic students in western institutions are generally not enthusiastic about studying alongside them. Concerns include that international students “require more attention”, “slow down the class” and that because of them “academic discussions are of a lower quality”.

Read more in Inside Higher Ed.

While provincial governments across Canada have encouraged post-secondary institutions to boost their international student enrollments for numerous reasons including promoting the fostering of “global citizens”, it is clear that the most important reason is to compensate for funding shortfalls. Indeed, it is estimated that international students will account for 20% of the student body of Ontario post-secondary educational institutions by 2022 .

Mel Broitman, who recruited international students for the University of Windsor for 15 years, claims that these educational institutions do not care about international students except for their money. While international students contribute substantially to the coffers of the post-secondary education system, there are not sufficient extra programs and support put in place to service the needs of these students.

Read more on CBC.

 

A survey conducted recently of DePaul University professors revealed that faculty believes the greatest challenges international students face are limited language proficiency and different cultural expectations of academia.

“On the one hand, faculty have good things to say about international students and they appreciate their presence, but at the same time they don’t know what their role is or they don’t know how to make changes in the classroom to adjust to these students,” Jason Schneider, an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul, said in summarizing the results of a literature review on the topic.

The results go much further than this. Read a report in Inside Higher Ed.

A student from China paid $3000 for another person to sit the TOEFL test on her behalf and was accepted to Penn State on the basis of the resulting score. The woman could have faced as long as five years in jail but was sentenced to time served as she agreed to immediate deportation.

Read more on Reuters.

As of 2019, all public elementary schools in Seoul will be required to have at least one native English speaking teacher on staff. This change has been made to address the public outcry that resulted from an earlier ban on after school private English classes for grade 1 and 2 students.

Read more in the Korea JoongAng Daily.

A study was recently conducted of pay along gender lines in the major international chains of private English schools. EF actually came out ahead with a 4% gap in favour of women. Furthermore, twice as many femals as male employees at EF received bonuses and those bonuses were on average 33% higher than the bonus that male employees earned.

Read more in the EL Gazette.

While there are often caps on the percentage that a domestic student’s tuition can increase from year to year (in Ontario, for example, it is capped at 3%), such caps are much less common when it comes to international student fees. There have been some rumblings lately, especially in British Columbia and Ontario, about how this is not right. A report recently released by the Ontario government says that it would like to see caps implemented on international student tuition increases.

Read more in The Globe and Mail.

International student enrolment bonanzas, that is. While many schools, especially in the US, are trying to cope with dwindling international student enrolments, some schools have the opposite problem… and it can be a problem.

Recently, for example, 75 students “just showed up,” according to College of New Caledonia president Henry Reiser. There was no availability left in the programs that the students had originally been accepted into. Apparently, because of the delays between being accepted into the college and in receiving visas, students general failure to pre-register in courses, and the requirement that students be enrolled full time in order to keep their visas, the students were left being told that their only option was to change their course of study.

Read more in the Prince George Citizen and even more in the Prince George Citizen.