The main idea of my news story is to
- show the trend of the share domestic and international students at BC universities over a 5 year period. Ultimately, the percentage of international students at BC universities is increasing while the share of domestic students remains virtually flat.
- illustrate the concentration of international students to two specific schools: UBC and SFU, and discuss what that could mean for domestic students who want to apply to these schools.
This chart illustrates the first above mentioned point:
I received some quotes from Feng Hou, who works for Statscan. In regards to the influx of foreign students from 2008-2013, he says there is one obvious reason:
"Canadian federal government, provincial governments and universities have been aggressively recruiting foreign students in order to bring in much needed revenues and more fully use the under-utilized educational resources existed in Canadian institutions."
In regards to the main countries Vancouver is receiving international students from, Hou says "in recent years, the main source countries are China, India, and Korea", and that Vancouver and Toronto are among the most popular choices for students coming to study. Hou says there are a few reasons for this:
"First, the universities are prestigious, large, and well-known in the world. Second,most foreign students, like recent immigrants, came from large metropolis in their home countries and prefer to live in large metropolitan areas once they come Canada."
As well, Hou's studies have found that another thing that makes Vancouver (and Toronto) so attractive to students is that "[they] have a large Asian immigrant population and well-developed ethnic business and social networks. This certainly is also an important attraction".
One question that I cannot answer is "what programs are most attractive to foreign students" that bring SFU and UBC to the forefront for these students. Given that schools such as Emily Carr have virtually no foreign students, perhaps more general, academic programs are the target for these students. The only dataset I could think of that might answer this is some sort of list of all of the international students enrolled (or graduated from) each individual program, for each school, over the same 5 years.
