Selling out the Public University? Administrative Sensemaking Strategies for Internationalization via Private Pathway Colleges in Canadian Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of agreements between private pathway colleges and public English-medium institutions represents a new development in internationalization that further challenges the public higher education landscape. While these institutional arrangements are controversial and often criticized, university senior administrators have been successfully able to advocate for and authorize them. This paper takes a closer look into the reasoning that administrators use in order to legitimize formal agreements with private pathway colleges in Canada. Drawing from the sensemaking literature within organizational theory, the following strategies are traced and analyzed: 1) normalization, 2) authorization, 3) rationalization, 4) moralization, and 5) narrativization. Through content analysis of 50 institutional documents, supported by nine semi-structured interviews with senior administrators representing two public universities and one private provider in Canada (Navitas), the paper demonstrates how neoliberal ideologies in internationalization are actively enacted in public spaces by administrators representing the public higher education sector.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".