Canada’s International Education Strategy: Implications of a New Policy Landscape for Synergy Between Government Policy and Institutional Strategy

Abstract

In 2014, the Canadian federal government announced its first-ever international education strategy. Referencing Cerna’s (2014) typology of interactions between national policies and university strategies, this paper examines the implications of this changed national policy context on institutional level internationalization strategies, particularly on international students’ recruitment and retention. We specifically examine how university strategies acknowledge governmental policies; what organizational changes they make in response to government policy and what opportunities and challenges university staff identify in meeting policy objectives. The paper presents results from a scan of universities’ websites and a survey administered to university staff from a representative sample of Ontario’s universities. It concludes that the government-institutional policies’ synergies are far more complex than Cerna’s (2014) typology suggests, reinforcing the need for newer models examining multi-level and multi-actor contexts within which both higher education and governments operate and develop international policies.