Canada Starts a 'Branding' Campaign to Help Universities Recruit More

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/11/828n.htm
Thursday, November 29, 2007


Canada Starts a 'Branding' Campaign to Help Universities Recruit More
Foreign Students
By KAREN BIRCHARD


Ottawa

Canada will soon have something the country's internationally-focused
educators have long sought: a national marketing strategy to help them
recruit more students from abroad. The new "education brand" was the focus
of one of the final sessions of the annual conference of the Canadian
Bureau of International Education, which concluded here on Wednesday.
While the strategy is still being created and won't be formally unveiled
until Mayat the annual conference of Nafsa: Association of International
Educators, in Washingtonacademics and administrators heard preliminary
details of the plan here at a session led by officials of Canada's
Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

One idea for the campaign, the federal officials said, is for Canada to
position itself as an alternative destination to the United States and
Britain for international education. Such a strategy would emphasize
differences that make Canada attractive to foreign students, including the
promise that a Canadian education will help them "change the world." That
suggestion, the federal officials said, was among the ideas advanced by
Bang Marketing, the Montreal-based company that is creating the campaign.
Exactly what Canadian universities intend to play up about their system
will be hashed out in the coming months.

Wednesday's session also included discussions of what other countries are
doing to attract students and why Canada has slipped as a destination for
international students (The Chronicle, November 14, 2006). The biggest
problem, many educators say, is that Canadian higher education does not
speak with one voice.

The reason for that lies in the country's Constitution, which makes higher
education a provincial matter. Canada does not have a federal office for
education, yet the federal government is responsible for helping market
education and sets immigration policy.

For years, Canadian educators have said they felt that they were at a
marketing and recruiting disadvantage because countries like Australia and
Britain have successfully branded their higher-education systems when
promoting them abroad. In response to those concerns, Canadian federal
officials and the provincial ministers of higher education have held
meetings to work on the issue, with the branding campaign as the result.

The federal officials who described the campaign on Wednesday said use of
the Canada brand would be tightly controlled to weed out fly-by-night
operations and to provide an assurance of educational quality to students
in other countries.

Canada's identity problem has been a hot topic throughout the conference,
both at the microphones and in private hallway chats.

"The situation now is a very fragmented approach; even some provinces
don't have a strategy," Vianne Timmons, vice president for academic
development at the University of Prince Edward Island, said earlier this
week at a session for senior administrators.

"We feel that it's broader than just getting students here, that it should
include research and collaboration," she said of the efforts to develop a
national strategy. "We're so far behind that we can only get ahead."

To some, it seemed ironic that Canada's education brand would be unveiled
in Washington rather than at the gathering here of educators who want
their universities to have the brand.

Jean-Philippe Tachdjian, one of the federal officials who discussed the
plan on Wednesday, saw nothing unusual about the venue for announcing the
brand. "It's not going to be used domestically," he said in an interview.
"It's going to be used in foreign countries."

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http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/11/828n.htm