>The universities are reaping the benefits of the Trump effect, with record levels of applications from overseas students seeing Canada as a North American alternative to the United States.
It's been record levels since the beginning of Obama's term in 2008 and climbing every year. Reason is immigration laws since then are incredibly lax for foreign students. If you want Canadian citizenship show up here for ESL private school, a hair academy, a university, any accredited course and you can obtain a temporary work permit while attending classes (and for a period afterwards). This allows a local company to offer to sponsor you for full time employment, which eventually leads to citizenship. Vancouver is filled with Brazilian accountants who got in this way, they came here to take ESL, and went to go work for some accounting firm like KPMG with their degrees they have from Brazil.
Edit: they changed the laws in 2014 to make this a little more difficult, but temporary work permits are still available for any student esp somebody going to university/college. These always lead to full-time offer and citizenship.
One of the things I always ask in these discussions is "so what did that do for them" Finland is also an education super-power but what does it really do for the country?
Unless all countries are underdeveloped, education is a hygiene factor and doesn't as such provide any benefits.
In Europe, Switzerland is one of the countries with the fewest academics. Instead they focused on technical educations (starting from something akin to trade school up to university level knowledge). The results while most European countries first now a waking up the the realization that academic education isn't the only education of value and is scrambling to make their tradeschools/technical schools working better, Switzerland is one of the few countries doing very specialized production that can't be outsourced (for now)
In other words education is important but the focusing on education especially higher but also on the elementary level as some sort of indication of how well a country is fairing is not really a useful metric.
> The OECD, trying to understand Canada's success in education, described the role of the federal government as "limited and sometimes non-existent".
Actually, the federal government did make one critical mandate[1]. It effectively ensures that we are all exposed to two languages in school, and creates a much more rigorous French immersion stream in the school system.
That immersion into another culture and language, at a very early age, has paid huge dividends in my ability to travel, to assemble and work in multinational teams, and to form constructive, even loving, relationships with people who are at first very alien to me. I believe that it is also to be credited for enabling several of us, all from the French immersion stream, to begin playing with algebra somewhere around Grade 3, by deeply reinforcing our awareness of multiple representations for single concepts or entities. This then segued into my first programming language, QBasic, a year later.
If you have kids, then based on my own experience and observation of my cohorts, I strongly recommend that you find a way to ensure that they learn a second language, while they are still learning their first. Throw them in the deep end, you can always pull them out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_23_of_the_Canadian_Cha...
This is good news, but it doesn't tell the whole story. What's important to remember is that each Canadian province has its own education system, so mileage may greatly vary depending on where you live in Canada.
In Québec, where I live, the drop-out rate is abysmal compared to other provinces, especially in french-speaking school boards [1] (which are much more numerous in Québec):
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-...
> Within three years of arriving, the Pisa tests show the children of new migrants have scores as high as the rest of their schoolmates.
> It makes Canada one of the few countries where migrant children achieve at a level similar to their non-migrant counterparts.
The high performance of migrant children probably comes from their motivated and educated parents due to Canada's immigration policy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/canada-immigratio...
> But the children of newly-arrived, migrant families seem to integrate rapidly enough to perform at the same high level as their classmates.
Quite the opposite, I think. I don't have the data to back it up, but it always seemed like the migrant kids excelled far more often in STEM courses (to the point where our classes were considered trivial or elementary) than their Canadian-born peers.
For those looking for the actual results, its the 2015 PISA results conducted by sampling 15 year olds. Heres a more relevant link:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canada-s-15-year-old-stude...
For more info from OECD on results: http://www.oecd.org/education/Singapore-tops-latest-OECD-PIS...
It seems to me like every second country is an education superpower now and feels quite special about it. What do we get if we combine this information with that most students don't feel they've learned in school the skills they needed after school, and also combine it with many scientists believing that science is not about generating knowledge anymore but about producing an endless, unchecked stream of papers?
If considered a market, I'd say these three things combined make it a likely bubble and an oportunity to start looking for what will come after.
I think it's important to point out that this rising tide does not lift all boats. The autonomy of individual provinces results in a divide between the provinces. While provinces like Ontario and BC rank in the top 5 globally, Prince Edward Island ranks 26th in the world. I'm from PEI, and when I arrived at university I noticed my peers from bigger provinces were simply taught more material, especially in math and science. Ideally there would be some more standardization nationally to reduce this delta.
> Another distinguishing feature is that Canada's teachers are well paid by international standards - and entry into teaching is highly selective.
Funny how this makes education level better, huh?
Are you listening, France?
I took an AP math in Canada and later graduated from CS department of U of Toronto. The schools in Toronto did at least one thing right: they didn't dumb down their courses.
I did well in my AP calculus, 98/100 or something like that, but I still felt the pressure in all the tests and exams, as there were just so many questions crammed in a single test. I had to keep writing, non stop, and barely had time to double check any of my answers. Contrast to my school experience before I went to Canada, I could usually use way less than half of the exam time to finish and double check every problem.
The same pattern continued in U of T. The class average of courses like algorithms often went below 40/100. I usually had to keep writing until the last minute to finish every single question in an exam. Assignments were usually time consuming and required lots of thinking. I still remember the tremendous satisfaction when I finally proved a theorem about universal hashing (an exercise from CLRS, IIRC). And past success on assignments and tests didn't guarantee good grades in the final exam. I was actually dumbfounded when I did poorly in my AI course, even though I did extremely well except for my final exam.
Looking back though, I am very grateful for the struggles my professors put me through. They made me. What I learned then carried me a long way, even today. Without the high standards imposed by the schools, an ordinary student like me would not be able to do as well. As I kept telling friends, schools MUST keep their students in discomfort zones to help them learn and improve - the very thing that US schools, in particular SF bay area public schools, have been failing miserably.
I'm reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile at the moment. His explanation of how Switzerland operates as municipalities, with little central government intervention - except collecting taxes - is strikingly similar.
In this context: Let smaller education decision making groups decide what is important for their local area. Any failure is of benefit to all, while the negative impacts of the actual failure are localised.
PISA results are a good indicator how well a particular educating system prepares students for PISA tests.
Looking at the charts in [1], Canadian performance seems to be slightly declining (esp. Maths).
My father taught college in both Canada and the United States around 40 years ago. When I asked about the differences between the two countries he said they were basically the same, except that Canadian students worked harder and complained less.
This will be self-congratulatory, but teachers deserve a huge amount of the thanks for these results. We deal with increasing student complexity, bureaucratic requirements and degraded infrastructure to not only get the job done well, but to get it done to some of the highest standards in the world.
Note too that we haven't just done well on the most recent PISA tests, we've been a consistent top level finisher across the three subject tests since PISA started over a decade ago.
Something else to add ... there was an influx of draft dodgers from the Vietnam War, and a lot of those became teachers. Canada was investing in their education system at that time whereas the U.S. was trying to choke off campus protest movements. Fast forward half a century, and that investment has paid dividends.
It's obviously because of Jordan B. Peterson.
Oh look, yet another article about a country that's doing education better than us here in the US. And the funny thing is that they all seem to do things in different ways.
You know what I think the problem is? Americans on the whole just don't care about public education. Either in terms of quality or equity.
When it comes to fairness and equality. No doubt, Canada is doing wonderful job. System treats everyone the same. Any country interested to improve should certainly investigate Canadian system.
Non-AMP version: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421.
Articles like this put me off because it is blatant propaganda.
Canada isn't an education superpower. The silly international ranking of kids' test taking abilities is meaningless.
Real education superpowers are those with top universities which in turn produce economic gains/growth/etc.
If canada was a true economic superpower, we'd see them producing Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
Frankly, there is only 1 education superpower - the US. Go check a list of top 100 universities. It's almost entirely US colleges. Britain is the next far distant competitor. The only other nation who may challenge the US to become an education superpower in the future is china as they are building tons of universities. This is something we did in the US in the 1800s. Build a incredible number of universities as our economy grew. The only question is whether china will be able to match our quality because they are going to surpass our quantity by a large margin.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35776555
Also, if the BBC journalist did any bit of research, they would know that Canada's "150th anniversary" is fake propaganda itself. Canada isn't 150 years old. They gained their independence in 1983.
Canada will be the world super power in the next 5 to 10 years. By then, the USA will lose its access to cheap credit and will become a cesspool for haters of high skilled and legal immigrants
Speaking as an Indian, I think Canada is well poised to be the next big super power, replacing the USA. The only other country that looks like can pull this off is Germany.
Education together with freedom and tolerance always gives the best return for the money you invest. These days its a given that most Indian students who originally opted to go for US to do their MS degrees are now flocking to Canada. Also a whole range of working professionals are going to Canada to work, start companies and contribute to the economy of Canada.
Your economy and overall national ecosystem always benefits when you get highly trained, hard working people with a strong work ethic as immigrants. Not only do these people contribute to the economy disproportionately in return for a good life, they also impart similar values to their kids.
At the same time its sad to see US take such a protectionist and anti-immigrant stance, totally forgetting the important role immigrants have played in the rich and success journey so far.
More dangerous than all these awesome immigrants not coming to your country is they going else where. There is no infinite supply of great talent in the world, and given how priorities align not everybody can be trained to be good enough among your existing citizen-pool. The only real way of having a disproportionate set of awesome people in your country, is to create an environment where you can attract them from outside. Without these awesome people no country can last a long time in front of a competition.
> Migrants coming to Canada, many from countries such as China, India and Pakistan, are often relatively well-educated and ambitious to see their children get into professional careers.
> Prof Jerrim says these families have an immigrant "hunger" to succeed, and their high expectations are likely to boost school results for their children.
Speaking from personal experience as a native Canadian, this can also motivate non-immigrant children to work harder. When half of your peers have an immigrant's work ethic it can be a real positive influence.
Disclaimer: this is an anecdote, my personal experience may not generalize, etc.