Good News For Canada: Overseas Spending on Education Huge

Toby Chu of CIBT Education writes in to alert us to a report about overseas spending on education, or how much money comes into an economy from education-seeking overseas students. It's skewed towards Canada, but:

The report shows the amount of spending by international students and the economic impact it has on the Canadian economy. From “China market” alone, international education services accounted for $1.31 billion to Canada’s export revenue, ranked no 1 on all other export of goods from Canada to China (table 15, Page 31). Total revenue from the Top 10 Student source countries amounted to $5.5B dollars of direct education spending (tuition). Yet, Canada is far behind from Australia, Japan or New Zealand ranked only 4th place in global market share at an annual growth rate of 8% (22% for New Zealand).

The good news is: Canada has the resources and attraction that are appealing to international students, plenty of room for growth and the competition is still light when compared to the big picture. Recent announcements by the Canadian federal and provincial government indicated their strong support on the international education which is also encouraging news for Canada’s international education sector.

At CIBT, our two core business objectives are, from our corporate mission statement:

"1) using Canada as our solid base to export western education to emerging Asia, and

2) using our growing infrastructure in Asia to attract international students to study in North America”.

I am not aware of any other for-profit education player that offers the same service and business model as CIBT, or has the same level of infrastructure ``both in Asia and North America`` that is ready to capture this growing market. Finally, among the Top 10 International Student Source Countries in the world, CIBT & Sprott Shaw has operations or student recruitment teams located on the grounds of 8 out of 10 countries.

Toby Chu will be speaking at the Education Industry Investment Forum.

CGI Boosts Teacher Procurement Process in Canada

California company Ariba is helping out with a procurement system for the entire Ontario school system.

In the first phase of the marketplace, CGI will assemble an electronic retail environment in which educational institutions can order various goods and services. In the second phase, procurement groups will be enabled to issue and execute requests for proposals for major purchases.

"CGI was selected as our partner because it has demonstrated an understanding of OECM's vision and has the depth of experience that comes from successfully managing other electronic marketplaces in both Canada and the United States," stated Frank Erschen, acting president of the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace.

There's a non-profit in China that is doing this for the energy industry. I know that's not education, but I'd thought I'd put that out there.



CGI to build and run Ontario public education 'marketplace' in $40M contract