Viral videos of an Indian student living under a bridge in Toronto, long lines of students desperately seeking entry-level jobs at strip malls and concerns over poor education quality at some colleges are among the many factors that prompted the federal government to impose caps on international students.
In turn, Ottawa has left it to provinces to determine how many permits each school receives. Ontario, home the most international students by far, has allocated new admissions based largely on previous enrollment. This has rewarded the worst actors in the education sector and caused admissions chaos for high-quality research universities looking to recruit top talent.
Last year, more than one million international students lived in Canada, a 60-per-cent increase from 2019 and a nearly 250-per-cent rise over 10 years.
This influx exacerbated public concerns about housing affordability and access to health care. Individual students – often cash cows for colleges and universities –certainly can’t be blamed for bad policy before the federal government was prodded into action.
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While many universities and colleges in Canada face steep budget cuts, only some have resorted to vastly increasing their enrolment of international students – who pay much higher fees than domestic students – as their solution.
But these abusers are not being reined in as the number of international-student permits declines.
Tying the number of new permits to previous enrolment is a failed policy that needs to be overturned.
In 2023 alone, Conestoga College in Kitchener (this professor’s former employer) received more than 30,000 international-student permits, the highest number in Canada by far, the CBC reports, based on data on study permits from Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada obtained via the Access to Information Act.
These study permits are the most important step for a prospective international student looking to come to Canada.
That’s akin to bringing a city almost the size of Stratford into Kitchener on an annual basis. It’s unsustainable for the local housing market, let alone individual students, who often borrow vast sums of money in their home countries to finance their studies and can’t find a job in Canada to defray expenses.
The second highest? University Canada West, a private institution in Vancouver that doesn’t even rank on global academic-quality surveys. Roughly 95 per cent of its students – more than 13,900 out of a total of 14,400 – are international, begging the question: if it offers a good education, why don’t local students attend?
In January, the federal government announced a two-year cap on international student numbers. This meant a 35-per-cent overall reduction in new study permits nationally, including a 50-per-cent cut in Ontario. In September, Ottawa launched an additional 10-per-cent reduction.
Dangerously, graduate students – crucial for conducting cutting-edge research – will be included under the new cap.
Ontario has largely allotted its quotas to two-year colleges based on their previous international enrolment. In 2024, Ontario issued more than 19,800 provincial attestation letters to Conestoga, according to data released under access-to-information laws in June. The letters are the first step to securing a permit.
Other two-year colleges, including Seneca, Fanshawe and Centennial, had similar numbers.
By contrast, the University of Toronto – the Ontario university with the highest number of international students – received about 6,200 letters. Western University was granted fewer than 1,100, while Queen’s got 749.
In other words, Conestoga College was granted three times as many spaces for international students as the University of Toronto, Canada’s top-ranked university. This was also roughly 20 times as many as leading research institutions, such as Western and Queen’s.
This is terrible policy: It rewards the schools that caused the problem of unsustainable international admissions in the first place.
By linking new permits with previous international enrolment rather than with research capacity or education quality, the Ontario government is continuing a failed approach.
Today, Conestoga remains the highest source by far for new international permits. It received more than 4,000 new international-student permits in 2024.
The college’s president, John Tibbits, made headlines when he called the boss of a rival college a “whore” during a public forum. He apologized and still faces a libel suit, but the embarrassment didn’t cost him anything.
In fact, his salary increased more than 20 per cent last year to $494,716. By comparison, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earns $406,200.
The negative tone in conversations about international students and their impact on housing has turned many prospective students away. Interest in studying in Canada fell more than 35 per cent in the past year, according to Studyportals, a Netherlands-based education firm. That’s a shame.
Countries and universities around the world are trying to recruit the best and brightest graduate students – AI creators, biotechnologists, astrophysicists and medical researchers, among others.
Limiting university permits for graduate researchers while giving hundreds of thousands to two-year college students continues a failed approach.
Fortunately, this isn’t a hard problem to fix.
For the worst actors, including Conestoga and other colleges in Ontario, University Canada West and Cape Breton University (where roughly 7,000 out of 9,000 students are international), it’s time to de-couple new permits from past enrolment.
Private career colleges and two-year public-college business programs should receive no new permits, period. They have attracted the most international applicants yet offer no measurable skills training.
This move is needed now more than ever given the federal government’s decision on Oct. 24 to drastically cut the number of new permanent residents from 485,000 in 2024 to 365,000 in 2027.
Students who take these business programs are unlikely to get permanent residency under the new rules. Worse, they’re being hosed financially and set up for failure.
Conestoga alone is sitting on a budget surplus of more than $250 million, financed quite literally off the backs of farming families in India’s Punjab state, home to the majority of international students.
New rules on post-graduation work permits announced earlier this month might fix some problems related to degree-mill business programs. But the core mistake continues: allotting international study permits based on prior international enrolment rather than teaching and research quality.
At the very least, Canada’s top research universities must be able to keep their 2023 allotments for international admissions. University graduate students – a tiny minority of international student arrivals – shouldn’t face caps at all.
By allotting the highest numbers of permits to the institutions most responsible for causing international student numbers to balloon beyond sustainable levels, federal and provincial officials have achieved the worst of all outcomes, hurting graduate research capacity and rewarding colleges granting useless degrees.
Note: The author taught at Conestoga College from 2019-June 2024. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect those of his current employer, Western University.
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