Immigration and work opportunities key for Mexican students
- We continue our “From the Field” interview series today in conversation with Han Steen, the director general of Universo Educativo in Mexico City
- The interview highlights the most popular destinations for Mexican students, and the growing trend in the market toward longer-term programmes that combine language and career studies with opportunities to gain work experience abroad
Mexico is a key Latin American sending market – second only to Brazil in terms of the size of its population and economy – and a growing number of institutions and schools in Canada, the US, Australia, and Europe are expanding their recruitment efforts in the region.
With that in mind, we thought it was a good time to check in with Han Steen, the director general of Universo Educativo, a prominent education agency based in Mexico City.
Our conversation opens with Mr Steen highlighting the continuing strength of Canada as a destination for Mexican students, especially those interested in language or study and work programmes. “Many Mexicans want to get work experience,” he says. “But also they want to check to see maybe if Canada might be the right place for them to emigrate to.”
In our first interview excerpt below, he expands on this point and explains how longer-term career training programmes have grown in popularity among Mexican students who would have been more likely to go abroad for shorter periods of language study in the past. This applies for those interested in study in Canada but in a number of other destinations that have also grown in popularity in recent years, including Australia, Germany, and Ireland.
Some of these same themes also feature – along with an update on Mexico’s current political climate – in our second interview excerpt below. “People are choosing more programmes through which they might emigrate,” says Mr Steen. “That is the biggest trend because those are programmes that are at least six months up to one year.”
In our final video segment below, Mr Steen provides some advice for educators planning to expand their recruitment activities in Mexico: “My advice for many language schools is to develop long-term courses, not just short courses.”
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