I need everyone to bear with me for a moment, because what I’m about to say makes perfect sense, but it sounds funny when you first hear it. In the

Canadians should think of higher education as an export industry

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-01 16:00:07

I need everyone to bear with me for a moment, because what I’m about to say makes perfect sense, but it sounds funny when you first hear it. In the short term, the influx of foreign students into our higher education system is creating all sorts of hardship for Canadians. This has led the government to intervene (in my view appropriately), in order to restore some semblance of order to the file. At the same time, it is important to ask ourselves – beyond the short-term objective of restoring order – what the long-term goal of policy in this area should be (so that we can, as the Great One put it, skate to where the puck will be).

Thesis statement: In the long term, our goal should be to sell higher education to as many foreign students as we feasibly can. Why? Because it is a high value-added export sector. Specializing in this area is a great way to move the Canadian economy away from our traditional role as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” and to avoid the pitfalls of economic globalization. Universities generate a huge amount of high-quality white-collar employment, as well as creating opportunities for regional development that are otherwise difficult to achieve.

Let me back up and explain a few things. First, most people do not think of international student enrollment at the University of British Columbia or George Brown College as an export product, because the goods don’t actually leave the country. But of course, from an economic perspective it doesn’t matter whether we move the goods to the foreigners or the foreigners to the goods. What matters is that, by selling things that are made in Canada, by Canadian workers, to foreigners, we earn foreign currency. This foreign currency is what then allows us to go out and buy things that are made by foreign workers.

Leave a Comment