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At least once a year, the University of B.C. shows up in the news, crowing excitedly about what an “international” university it has become and bragging about the high percentage of its students who are foreigners.

This occurred most recently on Monday when we learned that the Times Higher Education report had placed UBC 12th on a list of the most international academic institutions in the world, up from 40th place a year ago and well ahead of other Canadian universities on the list such as McGill (23rd), the University of Alberta (31st) and the University of Toronto (32nd), as my colleague Chuck Chiang reported.

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But it doesn’t take outsiders saying it to get UBC officials charged up about its high number of international students. A year ago, I recall the university announcing that nearly one in four of its undergraduate students was from abroad in purely glowing terms.

Today, 23 per cent of all UBC students are foreigners, including 28 per cent of this year’s first-year undergraduate students and about a third of the graduate students, according to a report in August by my colleague Douglas Todd. The largest proportion of international students at UBC was from China.