Australia set to attract more overseas students than the UK

The UK has long been a favoured destination for overseas students, especially those from Hong Kong and mainland China. But according to research from University College London, Australia is overtaking the UK as the world's second biggest destination for international students. The UK is being pushed into third place behind the United States and Australia.

Australia has been rapidly expanding its international student numbers. The British Council says it shows the UK needs to "look again" at its policies towards overseas students.

Universities in the UK have warned that immigration rules after Brexit will need to be more welcoming for students.

The lead researcher warns that Canada is also catching up in taking a growing slice of the lucrative overseas student market.

Three years ago the UK was recruiting around 130,000 more overseas students than Australia but successive years of Australia having steady increases in overseas student numbers have seen it catch up and overtake the UK, which has been growing much more slowly.

Australia has been marketing itself as an English-speaking country with high-performing universities, with an attractive climate and a welcoming culture for overseas students.

This year's Best Student Cities rankings put Melbourne and Sydney in the top 10 - although London was the highest ranked of all.

Australia has succeeded in attracting students from outside Europe, particularly from China.

The research from UCL warns that the UK's future intake of international students will depend on keeping its appeal for European students.

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www.bbc.com/news/education-44872808

China set to be major ‘importer’ of international students

The higher-education industry in Canada has benefited tremendously in the last decade from the boom in international students worldwide – especially students from China.

But that trend is unlikely to be sustained in the current model as colleges in traditionally non-English-speaking nations, including China, are set to take up more market share in the next decade.

According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, 494,525 international students were studying in Canada last year, with China (28%) and India (25%) dominating the top spots in the rankings. Canada isn’t alone in benefiting from the wave of international students from Asia in the last few years; statistics show the total number of international students worldwide increased from 3.1 million in 2007 to 4.6 million in 2015, and about 75% of the group went to schools in high-income, industrialized countries like the United States, Great Britain and Australia.

But according to a Times Higher Education World University Rankings report, experts predict China will be hosting more than 500,000 international students by 2020.

In 2015, Beijing launched its Double First Class initiative for its top universities, throwing significant funds behind making Chinese universities and their intra-university disciplines into global leaders in their fields by 2050.

BCCIE executive director Randall Martin said some of that effort is already being reflected in an increasing number of students from Asia, Europe and Africa choosing China as an educational destination. China is now also the third most popular destination in the world for students to go.

Part of the attraction for international students to an up-and-coming destination like China is price. Those with low resources and ambition will be influenced by things like cheaper tuition.

The Times Higher Education school rankings report noted that groups like the China Scholarship Council have made “large pots of scholarship money available” on top of “extremely attractive” tuition costs.

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https://biv.com/article/2018/07/china-seeks-change-international-school-equation

More Canadian colleges are turning into universities

Many local Canadians teenagers have been missing out on taking their education further because universities are located far away from their hometowns. In response to this, a recent trend among Canadian colleges is that they are slowly transitioning into universities.

On February 22, Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt announced that Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) had been approved for degree-granting status, with a view to becoming a university. On March 1, Premier Rachel Notley appeared at an event to announce that Red Deer College (RDC) also had been approved to grant its own degrees. That same day, the education minister again went before the cameras to confirm that the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) had achieved university status.

The college-to-university transition is a recurring phenomenon in Canada. Two other Alberta colleges made a similar transition less than a decade ago, while British Columbia saw five post-secondary institutions (three university-colleges and two colleges) become universities back in 2008.

Like Red Deer, the City of Grande Prairie and its surrounding region, some 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, has experienced an exodus of residents seeking university-level education.

In Calgary, ACAD has been granting degrees for more than 20 years and recently graduated its first cohort of master’s students. The institution has essentially operated as a university in all but name for decades.

The Yukon government approved Yukon College’s request to grant degrees and change its name after more than 40 years of lobbying all levels of government. The plan is to fully transition to Yukon University by 2020. The team at Yukon College wants a new kind of system, one that suits a “hybrid university” with a range of trades, vocational, degree, postgraduate and applied research programs

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www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/across-canada-more-colleges-are-transitioning-to-universities/