Canada is the only country in the OECD to not have a national strategy for international education. In 2011, the Canadian federal government announced plans to develop and launch Canada's first international education strategy, including the creation of an advisory panel. The panel's 2012 report outlines a balanced strategy to increase international student recruitment while also supporting the international mobility of Canadian students. Coordination of international education policy within a highly decentralized federal system remains a core challenge. Key words: International branch campus, cross-border higher education, internationalization.
University in Greece provides a fine example of why oversight at a distance does not work.Accreditation is a minimalist exercise, conducted for the purpose of limited quality control-although it is better suited for financial oversight than for academic quality assurance. Even on the financial side, I am aware of a case in another state in which an accredited institution moved millions of dollars into its accounts before a reapproval and afterward moved the money right back out again. That review was one of the regular evaluations conducted by a state government; states, not accreditors, have the power to decide whether institutions can operate within their borders and what degrees they can offer.
This paper examines the pattern of decision-making, lobbying, and influence that led to the landmark series of federal student assistance policies introduced by Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in the late 1990s. The package of new initiatives—dubbed the Canada Opportunities Strategy—not only partially reversed an earlier period of fiscal restraint but also brought a new emphasis on direct forms of student assistance such as grants, bursaries, and tax credits. However, programs such as the Canada Millennium Bursaries and the Canada Education Savings Grants, despite their focused approach and innovative structure, came to be regarded as weak policy tools when measured against their ostensible goals of widening access to post-secondary education and efficiently targeting student assistance on the basis of need. The new policy regime also failed to fulfil nearly two decades of previous efforts by policy-makers to transform Canada’s student debt program into a systematic income-contingent loan program. We offer explanations of this pattern of policy inconsistency and incoherence by examining the awkward challenges of intergovernmental relations in the Canadian federal system as well as the fragmentation and competing goals now evident in student assistance policy networks. We contrast the student finance policy regime with the arguably more coherent set of research and innovation policies established by the federal government during the same period. We use policy network analysis as our theoretical framework, and we use data from our extensive interviews with higher education stakeholders and policy-makers to provide empirical support.
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