Higher Education in Canada

Welcoming the World

Canada clearly signaled its determination to strengthen its links with Asia when Prime Minister Stephen Harper made high-profile visits to both China and India last December.

Although investment and trade issues were high on his agenda, he strongly emphasized the field of higher education, where the North American country has a keen drive to enhance its global outreach and connections, especially in Asia.

At federal, provincial and local levels, the educational sector is working hard to encourage Asian students to broaden their international outlook by completing their studies in Canada.

For young Asians keen to take full advantage of the growing interrelationships between the world’s Eastern and Western societies, Canada certainly offers impressive attractions.

Although it is slightly larger than China, Canada has a population of less than 35 million. Yet it is a modern, vibrant country with immense economic potential. Furthermore, it is one of the world’s most multicultural, multiethnic societies, and yet it experiences far fewer of the conflicts and societal problems that trouble many more densely populated parts of the world.

Approximately 200,000 immigrants from all parts of the globe settle in Canada annually – that’s the highest number per capita in the world. They are drawn by the quality of life and Canada’s reputation as an open, peaceful and caring society that
welcomes newcomers and values diversity.

In the past 15 years, more than half of the country’s immigrants have come from Asia. According to the 2006 census, the roughly 2.3 million residents of Asian origin made up over a third of the total immigrant population of 6.5 million.

Nearly a quarter of the 2.5 million citizens of Toronto, the provincial capital of Ontario and the financial and cultural capital of Canada, are said to be immigrants – 70% of them originating from Asia.

“Toronto can be the gateway to North America because more American consumers are closer to us than to any other city,” says Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, who emigrated from England.

The city accounts for 11% of Canada’s GDP and is home to Canada’s five largest banks, 50 foreign bank subsidiaries and 112 securities firms.

More than 76,000 Toronto-based businesses export more than US$65.8 billion in goods and services worldwide, and internal retail trade is worth $44.2 billion annually.

In educational terms, Miller adds, Toronto offers students institutions of world stature.

“We have very substantial strategies to work with universities and private companies to attract and retain foreign students,” he says.

There are 22 universities in Ontario, five of them in Toronto, while the country’s largest private boarding preparatory school, Columbia International College, is situated in the port city of Hamilton.

Columbia International is very popular with Asian parents, especially those from the burgeoning middle class, says Ron Rambarran, the principal. “This is because they are very practical people. They ask who can help my child enter the best university in Canada or North America, and we can say we have a 100% success rate of admission to universities, and 97.5% go to the top seven universities in Canada.”

The school has partnerships with schools in China, which provide summer camps teaching English and mathematics.

This arrangement, says Rambarran, “is working out very well, as it gives students a Canadian experience without having to leave home.”

The school also has partnerships with schools in Thailand and Korea, as well as China, that enable teachers to learn the school’s methods of instruction.

Columbia International has a current maximum capacity in Hamilton of 1,500 students. Its three residences can accommodate a thousand students, but the school is planning to expand by another 400 beds by the spring of 2011.

The biggest challenge, from a nonacademic point of view, says Rambarran, is providing the food service when there are students of more than 60 different nationalities.

Equal Opportunity

Another of Ontario’s schools, Centennial College, is also popular with Asian families. Centennial is the oldest of the province’s community colleges – a term used to describe publicly funded institutions that provide two-year courses.

Centennial has long had a strong relationship with China and has also developed partnerships in India, says Ann Buller, the college’s president and chief executive, who started there in student recruitment.

“One of the reasons we’re so attractive,” she says, “is that if you walk into a classroom in the first year, more than 50% of students don’t speak English as a first language. They might be international students or they might have immigrated here.

“One of our really important strategies is preparing people for a global economy and a global world,” she adds. “It’s about providing an education that prepares students to work in a number of different places, not an education that isolates them.”

What differentiates Centennial from other colleges, she says, is its focus on global citizenship.

Buller has a missionary’s zeal for the sort of education that community colleges deliver, having attended one herself.

While Canadian universities tend to educate society’s wealthier citizens, colleges in Canada educate almost equally across communities, she says.

In Québec, CEGEP – a French acronym for Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel – is the first level of post-secondary education, broadly known as community colleges elsewhere in Canada.

The first CEGEPs were founded in 1967 to offer Québec’s students broader access to public post-secondary learning by providing pre-university and technical programs. Today, there are 48 CEGEPs, five of which are English-speaking, located across Québec, with a mission that has evolved over the years.

CEGEPs aim to contribute to the development of their regions, and to design and carry out innovative technological projects, conduct research and provide services to the community. In association with more than 20 industrial sectors, they also manage 43 collegial technology-transfer centers that conduct applied research, provide technical assistance to businesses and disseminate information.

Cégep International was created with the support of the Fédération des Cégeps as an agency to promote CEGEPs internationally, encourage dialogue and partnerships with foreign institutions, coordinate international activities, and facilitate exchanges between Québécois and foreign students.

Montréal: A Head for Business

Three hundred miles to the northeast of Toronto, in predominantly French-speaking Québec, Montréal – Canada’s second-largest city – claims the highest concentration of post-secondary students of all major cities in North America and has 5,000 Chinese among its student population.

A number of them attend HEC Montréal, one of Canada’s leading business schools.

“HEC Montréal is probably the most European of North American business schools and the most North American of European business schools,” says Dr. Michel Patry, the school’s director.

“Our curriculum has always been influenced by the European ‘grandes écoles’ [graduate schools]. We believe in the importance of a strong social sciences background in our courses. However, we also have a strong problem-solving approach that normally characterizes North American business schools.”

HEC Montréal has had a presence in Asia for almost 25 years, and in recent years it has increased the number of its “passeports pour le monde” partnerships from two to 20 top schools in the region.

“Our idea is to attract more Asian students in all programs and to make sure that they are well integrated in the classroom,” says Patry.

Engineering the Cutting Edge

Another of the city’s schools is the École Polytechnique Montréal, which provides nearly a quarter of all university research in engineering in Québec.

It is regarded as avant-garde in such fields as aeronautics, computer engineering, telecoms, bio- and nanotechnology, environmental science, artificial intelligence and many other high-tech domains.

“Polytechnique is a research-intensive university, so we have an interest in developing contacts and collaborations and getting the best graduate students to do a Ph.D. here,” says Christophe Guy, the school’s CEO. “We recruit from all over the world, and of course Asia is a place where you can find really good students.”

The school has collaborative agreements with some of the best Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Indian universities.

“We have research projects in telecoms with China and aerospace with India, involving the exchange of students and researchers with Canadian and foreign companies,” says Guy. “Our partners are usually big multinational companies, and we have had traditional university collaborations with Asia for a long time.”

First-Rate in the Arts

On the other side of Canada, five colleges in the province of British Columbia were reclassified as universities in September 2008. One of them, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design is the oldest post-secondary institute in British Columbia and one of the most prestigious.

Established in 1925 as the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, Emily Carr University is dedicated to fostering an educational environment that is professional, practice-oriented and rooted in history and critical theory.

It offers three undergraduate degrees in visual arts, media arts and design and a two-year master of applied arts degree that focuses on the specialized design, media and visual arts skills needed to pursue a career in cultural and creative industries.

The Emily Carr faculty consists of working artists and designers who encourage experimentation, and the curriculum is flexible and multidisciplinary. Students have the opportunity to participate in an exchange program with other art and design schools in Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Europe.

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