Reporters from the Globe and Mail and the Manitoban are the 2011 recipients of CAUT’s Excellence in Post-secondary Education Journalism awards. The awards were presented last month during CAUT’s council meeting in Ottawa.

Rod Mickleburgh, a senior writer for the Globe, along with colleague Mark MacKinnon, won the professional reporting category for the Oct. 16, 2010 news story, “Chinese pay dearly for Canadian ‘education’; Some recruiting agencies promise far more than they can deliver to foreign scholars eager for university placement.”

Talking to students and former teachers in Canada and China, they exposed the dark side of corporations like Navitas Ltd. and Study Group International, which are promoting their for-profit college model to Canadian universities as a way of attracting more international students, and the higher tuition fees they pay.

In particular they investigated the Aoji Education Group, used to recruit Chinese students for two for-profit colleges operated by Navitas in Canada — the Fraser International College, affiliated with Simon Fraser University and the International College of Manitoba, affiliated with the University of Manitoba.

They found that Aoji was using its affiliated institutes’ reputations to take advantage of Chinese families who are anxious for their children to get an education overseas, and willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the investment.

The student media award went to University of Manitoba student Ashley Gaboury, a copy editor for the Manitoban and former Canadian University Press bureau chief, for last year’s series on the funding problems plaguing First Nations University of Canada.

Gaboury spoke with students and faculty throughout the struggle, and asked questions of both the provincial and federal government that forced out the story beyond the attempted spin.

CAUT’s annual $1,000 reporting awards support the work of journalism in any medium on significant post-secondary education subjects in the public interest. This year’s submissions were judged by James Compton, a professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, and journalism professors James Winter of the University of Windsor and Lisa Lynch of Concordia University.