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The Globe and Mail's Anita Flash writes about how Québec is successfully attracting students from the heavily immigrant-populated Paris suburb and department of Seine-Saint-Denis to its universities.
Second-year business major Zine Rekik has been saving the euros he earns as a part-time supermarket cashier for two years so he could study abroad.
So when Mr. Rekik encountered Quebec university recruiters in the rough and tumble Paris suburb of Seine-Saint Denis last month, it was a match made in heaven.
It was the first time any foreign university had come searching for students in the Seine-Saint Denis or 93 region, an area that most French postsecondary schools ignore and most foreigners know as the centre of riots by disadvantaged minority youth 3½ years ago.
After a day of visits with students in the battered halls of the region's two universities, the recruiters had persuaded more than 40 young people, including Mr. Rekik, that Quebec was the place where they could "live the difference."
Mr. Rekik, 19, hopes to attend University of Quebec in Montreal this fall, where he wants to earn a master's degree in business. After that, he hopes to start his career in Quebec as a manager.
"It will be so good," he says of his hoped-for stay in Montreal. "I will go to class in the morning with a big smile. Then I will study in my little room in the student residence, then I will do some sports and I will make a lot of friends and maybe I will travel. I know I am going to blossom."