Farleigh Dickensen Goes to Canada

The move north, I guess, is some­thing of a nov­elty. Accord­ing to this story, FDU from my old stomp­ing ground in Madi­son, NJ is ope­ing a cam­pus in Van­cou­ver, BC to enroll Asian stu­dents. It’s funny, hav­ing been work­ing on recruit­ing for a US-based insti­tu­tion in Van­cou­ver, BC for the last sev­eral years, we just call them stu­dents.


I kid. I kid because they’re right. And not to be snotty, but what admin­is­tra­tors at FDU have real­ized over the last four years of reg­u­la­tory clear­ance is that it’s really, really hard to get into the states any­more from some coun­tries — coun­tries whose res­i­dents call Canada a nice new home away from home. The impli­ca­tions of the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tions stran­gle­hold immi­gra­tion poli­cies post-[gasp] 9/11 hap­pen to be bear­ing the fruits of eco­nomic rust.


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Appar­ently, it’s not some­thing that’s gone unno­ticed in con­gress, either. On June 1, the Sen­ate approved leg­is­la­tion includ­ing a shiny new pol­icy on H-1B visa hold­ers, actu­ally allow­ing them to work in the US after they get their degrees here, among other things.


It’s a more com­pli­cated story than just talk­ing about sci­ence and engi­neer­ing tal­ent the higher edu­ca­tion sys­tem has been bleed­ing over the last four years. The FDU arrange­ment is punc­tu­a­tion on it, and it’s pro­gres­sive think­ing from a tra­di­tional edu­ca­tor, even if they are just down the street from my alma mater. No hard feel­ings there.


Even more laud­able is the posi­tion of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Uni­ver­si­ties and Col­leges of Canada to even con­sider such an arrange­ment. Typ­i­clly, the Cana­dian provin­cial edu­ca­tion sys­tem is more parochial than this, oper­at­ing from a dis­tinct posi­tion of mis­trust and fear. More than any­thing else, this is a sign of great advance­ment from a group that’s been oper­at­ing behind the times for the last ten years.