Report calls for international education strategy

An advisory panel says the federal government should align a proposed international education strategy with Canada's S&T Strategy, boosting and re-grouping grants and scholarships aimed at international students under one brand. The recommendation is one of several made in the report, commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), that calls for coordinated effort and increased investment to double the number of international students in Canada to 478,000 within 10 years.

Chaired by Dr Amit Chakma, president and vice-chancellor of Western Univ (formerly Univ of Western Ontario), the six-member panel argues that greater international education is essential to enhancing Canada's innovative performance and can be achieved despite competition from nations such as the US, UK, Australia and Brazil.

Entitled International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity, the report says the prime minister should assume the role of "unifying champion for international education" with DFAIT best suited for overall operational management of the strategy.

It says all international scholarships should be re-grouped under a single brand such as Canada Scholarships, using new and existing funding to provide 2,000 international graduate scholarships/grants and 1,000 post-doctoral fellowships annually. Such an initiative should be closely aligned with the S&T STrategy which has already established key bilateral R&D relationships with target nations.

"The panel recommends that these elements be incorporated into more comprehensive, country-specific bilateral agreements with a focus on all aspects of graduate education and research and that appropriate levels of funds be allocated to support such a strategy," states the report.

Other recommendations include:

* provide co-funding for 8,000 new Canada scholarships for top foreign students to study at Canadian institutions;

* re-evaluate priority markets every three years; and,

* introduce mechanisms to maintain and enhance Canadian education and work with Council of Ministers of Education, Canada to embed education, innovation and trade into ongoing policy development.

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