Student visa cuts: Ontario’s colleges come out swinging

The 35% cut in international student visas announced by Marc Miller, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, has set off a ruckus – especially in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.

Starting this year, Ontario, which presently has 51% of the 1,028,850 international students, will see its share drop to 39%, a figure commensurate with the province’s population percentage: 15.4 million of 40 million. The cut is part of Canada’s efforts to deal with an acute housing affordability crisis.

Both Career Colleges Ontario (CCO), the lobbying group for private for-profit colleges (a number of which Miller pointedly called the “diploma equivalent of puppy mills”), and Colleges Ontario (CO), which represents the province’s 24 public community colleges (many of which offer four-year BAs in such fields as interior design and nursing), have come out swinging against the minister.

On the other side are the provincial government of Ontario, which just days after Miller’s announcement unveiled a number of initiatives designed to address the problems he identified, as well as Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist of CIBC Capital Markets Inc, a division of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada.

“Minister Miller’s announcement came as a surprise,” said Jacques Frémont, president of the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). “We knew that they had the view of taking better control of the immigration policies with regard to foreign students, but never to that extent. This is a major piece of policy and it will affect Canadian universities substantially.

“Part of the issue for us is that we are under provincial jurisdiction [as are all universities in Canada]. And this time they [Miller and the ministry] took the file and sent it bluntly to the provinces. So the provinces are stuck with having to make decisions about student visas without having the bureaucracy or the policies behind it,” said Frémont.

He also pointed out that nothing is known about how the province will parcel out its portion of international visas – an issue of prime importance for the president of the world’s largest bilingual (English-French) university in which the 11,000 French-speaking international students are necessary to the maintenance of uOttawa’s French programmes.

Housing crisis

International students are not the only cause of Canada’s housing affordability crisis that has seen prices for new homes rise by 40% since 2018 and 6.3% between 2022 and 2023.

Nationwide, rents for two-bedroom apartments have risen by an average of 8.6% in 2023.

Canada’s immigration policy, under which one million immigrants settled in the country in 2023, is also a key driver of the affordability crisis.

Another is years during which the construction of new housing units was far below the rate of population growth; over the last decade Ontario’s population grew by almost two million, yet only 700,000 homes were built.

Call for evidence-based approach

In its response to Miller’s announcement, the CCO let pass the federal minister’s characterisation of some career colleges as “sitting on top of a massage parlour” and his statement that many career colleges hand out “sham commerce degrees or business degrees” to people who, despite having a student visa, “come into the province and drive an Uber [taxi]”.

Instead, the CCO accused the minister of focusing on the wrong end of the higher education spectrum. These colleges are not, the statement issued on 25 January said, “the primary conduits of international students”. Citing figures from the minister’s department, the CCO emphasised that “less than 10% of study permit applications are regulated career colleges”.

The CCO’s call “to see more data to show exactly where the problems lie in an evidence-based approach” is more than an echo of the National Association of Career Colleges, as the statement asserts.

The words ‘evidence-based approach’ have special political resonance: during the COVID crisis, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used it or similar expressions numerous times to define the actions of the Canadian government (in contradistinction to those of American states and the government of the United States under former president Donald J Trump). Accordingly, the CCO was essentially accusing Miller of making policy out of thin air.

The CCO also took umbrage at the fact that “the policy fails to differentiate between responsible institutions and bad actors”.

Miller had made it clear in his announcement that he wants Ontario to shut down “bad actors”.

“These colleges have been an integral part of Ontario’s post-secondary education and workforce development, providing timely, affordable education that equips learners with practical, job ready skills,” said the CCO’s statement.

A ‘blunt approach’

If anything, the CO responded to the minister in even more combative language, calling the cap on study permits “a moratorium by stealth” and characterising Miller’s policy as “rushed”.

The minister said: “We believe that this blunt approach does not adequately consider the talent needs of the province of Ontario – and does not consider the many thousands of students who will now be left in limbo with their hopes on hold.”

Already, the statement said, students who had been accepted into programmes and paid their fees are “having their application for study permits returned to them … often without any explanation or way forward.”

Nor, said the CO in its own statement also issued on 25 January, does the minister understand the calendar of the public colleges; many of their colleges’ programmes are not on the traditional semester system and intake occurs year-round. “Students are already into the application process, ready to start in May in programmes for key sectors of Ontario’s economy,” the statement said.

As did the CCO, the CO decried the new requirement for visa applicants to provide an attestation paper, proving that their institution is legitimate, and called on the minister to suspend the requirement until the provinces are able to provide them.

CO also objected to the fact that masters and PhD students are exempted from the cap while “high-quality global graduates with an undergraduate degree” who seek to receive “hands-on training and Ontario-based experiential learning that allow them to quickly enter the job market” are under the cap.

In what some would perceive as putting the cart before the horse, the CO called on the federal government “to treat the post-graduate credentials at public colleges the same way it treats the post-graduate credentials at universities”.

CO has also called on the province to allow tuition, which has been frozen for the past five years, to rise by CA$135 (US$100) per year. Following the recommendation of the blue-ribbon report, Ensuring Financial Sustainability for Ontario’s Post-Secondary Sector, which the government received last November, CO is also calling for an increase of 10% in government grants to post-secondary institutions; the grants have been frozen for the past several years.

Growth in international students

While the increases CO are calling for may help some public post-secondary institutions “stabilise” as they work through the disruption caused by the drastic reduction in student visas, there are several institutions that are seriously exposed because a large percentage of the tuition comes from international students.

Spurred on by the province’s then Liberal government, starting in the 2010s, Ontario colleges and universities turned to international students to buoy their bottom lines. At the end of 2023, there were more than a million international students in Canada, almost 200% more than in 2015. In Ontario alone, there were just under 412,000.

Colleges and universities are free to set their own tuition and fees for international students. According to Value-for-Money Audit: Public colleges oversight, a 2021 report by Ontario’s then auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, international students’ tuition at Ontario’s colleges averaged CA$11,000 more than did the tuition paid by Ontario residents.

International students’ tuition fees accounted for 70% of the tuition revenue at 11 of Ontario’s colleges. At Canadore College in North Bay (in north central Ontario) which has a population of 52,000, the number of international students has risen from 336 in 2014-2015 to 6,182 in 2021-2022 (or an increase of 1,740%); in 2019-2020 international students paid 91% of the tuition payments collected by the college.

Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, a city 500,000 (west of Toronto), has 42,000 full-time students. Cambridge Today cites the area’s member of parliament Bryan May as having been told that the college’s enrolment of international students was close to 30,000 or 71% of the student body.

Fifteen of Ontario’s public colleges have an additional revenue stream provided by partnerships with private colleges, under which private colleges deliver public curriculum at smaller campuses. The province’s regulations stipulate that no college is to have more than 7,500 students enrolled in private partnerships, a figure that has been exceeded by many of the colleges because of lax enforcement by the province.

According to the Toronto Star, one-third of Sault College’s tuition revenue of CA$40 million comes from students who take its courses via a partnership with triOS in Toronto and Brampton, hundreds of miles from the college’s campus in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario in North Western Ontario.

This revenue stream will be cut off starting in September when Canada will stop issuing visas for students attending public-private partnerships like the one Sault College has with triOS. On 26 January, the Toronto Star reported that students at triOS campuses in both Toronto and its suburb of Brampton, provide one-third of the colleges’ budget of CA$40 million.

“Those partnerships are driving revenue to support our operations,” the Toronto Star quoted David Orazietti, Sault College president, saying. “I don’t believe that Minister Miller was intending to undermine the financial stability of half of the public colleges in Ontario, but nevertheless, that’s what he’s managed to do.”

The province’s universities are also exposed as can be seen from the brutal honesty of the 2022-23 McMaster University financial report. The university’s tuition revenue was CA$445.8 million, 1.9% or CA$8.4 million higher than 2021-22. This increase was “solely due to increased international enrolment and international tuition rate increases”.

Martin Regg Cohn, a Toronto Star columnist, summed up the situation on 26 January: “While Quebec and British Columbia have gotten out ahead of the student visa issue, Ontario has allowed problems to fester. On [Premier] Ford’s watch, an entire industry has arisen – an educationimmigration [sic] complex … There was easy money – lots of it – to be made off of affluent foreign students.”

Nor is the Universities Canada (UC) sanguine about the Minister’s actions. Their greatest concern, which echoes one of CO's, is the impact of the delay that international applicants will experience waiting for the provinces to establish the bureaucracy needed to issue attestation letters.

“This sudden halt” – which UC also calls a “moratorium” – “is already impacting enrollments.” Students who are uncertain about whether the paperwork will be completed in time for them to start their studies “are likely” says the letter CO sent to the minister on 30 July, “to choose alternative destinations.” The drop in enrolment caused by such decisions, “pos[es] a significant risk to Canada’s post-secondary sector” and will hinder Canadian universities to “attract global talent for years to come”.

UC also says that the cap on international students will disrupt Canadian communities that have come to rely on the money these students spend in those communities. In total, international students, UC says, contribute $22 billion to the Canadian economy and are vital to “increasing diversity and meeting the demands of high-growth sectors”.

A muted response from provincial government

The Ontario government’s reaction to Miller’s surprise announcement was surprisingly muted given the usual rancour between the federal government and the provinces.

On 26 January, while announcing a suite of measures, Jill Dunlop, the province’s minister of colleges and universities, said: “Challenges stemming from the recent spike in students coming to Canada, including predatory practices by bad-actor recruiters, misinformation regarding citizenship and permanent residence, false promises of guaranteed employment and inadequate housing for students, require immediate attention and collaborative action.”

To protect the integrity of the province’s post-secondary system, she announced a moratorium on new public college-private partnerships and that the province will work to improve oversight mechanisms to ensure quality.

Responding to the federal government’s criticism of the province allowing colleges and universities to accept too many international students, Dunlop announced “a review of the programs offered by postsecondary institutions that have a sizable amount [sic] of international students to ensure that programme quality protects Ontario’s reputation in education and needs Ontario’s labour market demands”.

To address the distortion that large numbers of international students cause in rental markets, the minister said that colleges and universities will have to provide housing options for these students.

Dunlop also pledged to better integrate enforcement efforts across ministries to strengthen oversight of career colleges and to work with “sector partners and the federal government to explore ways to further crack down on bad-actor recruiters who take advantage of international students and make dubious claims of employment and citizenship”.

Reduced pressure on rental markets

Both Macklem and Tal told the press that Miller’s actions will take pressure off the rental markets which should lead to a lowering of rents and housing prices (because fewer houses will be turned into student rentals).

“Until now, we have been talking about supply, supply, supply. And that’s the right direction because we have to increase supply. But it takes forever,” Tal told Bloomberg on 23 January. It takes five, six years to get that extra supply and at the same time, demand is rising and rising. So you have to do something about demand.

“If we didn’t do anything, within a year or two, the number of international students would have gone up to 1.4 million, another 400,000.

“This is a very significant move and that move is in the right direction; [it’s] probably the most significant move in recent history,” said Tal.

For his part, Macklem told Canadian Press: “You saw this week the government capping student visas. That, I think, will take a bit of pressure off rents going forward.”

Implications for French-language sector

When I interviewed Frémont on 26 January, he said the international students at uOttawa were not adding to Ottawa’s housing shortage because, “as we speak, I have a 3% vacancy rate in my residences”.

The interview had been scheduled before Miller’s announcement and was supposed to discuss the CA$50 million deficit uOttawa’s French programmes have. There are two main causes for this deficit. The first is the tuition freeze, which, Frémont explained, was worse for uOttawa because it had much lower tuition than did other universities when the freeze was put in place.

The second reason for the deficit is that uOttawa’s grant per French student is significantly less than its numbers warrant. The university has 85% of all French university students in the province, yet it receives only 42% of the grant funds allocated to French university students.

When French students in the province’s colleges are factored in, uOttawa still has 63% of the French post-secondary students but receives only 29% of the provincial grants for French language education. According to the province’s blue-ribbon report, this is “roughly half the share it [uOttawa] would receive if the allocation were based on student numbers”.

“The exact numbers are in our brief,” Frémont told University World News, “but per Francophone student we get something like CA$2,500, Glendon College [of University of Toronto] gets CA$5,000 and Laurentian University [in Sudbury, Ontario] gets over CA$6,000, almost triple the money per head.”

uOttawa’s 11,000 French international students, the majority of whom are from French Africa, are needed to bolster the numbers of French students at uOttawa and, thus, maintain its French-language sector.

French African students are charged the same tuition as Ontarians, so they do not, as is the case with McMaster’s and other universities and colleges in Ontario, produce a windfall for uOttawa. Were the numbers to be significantly reduced, however, the viability of uOttawa’s French sector would be put in doubt.

The day after Frémont was interviewed, it appeared that his representations to the federal government had borne fruit.

According to The Globe and Mail, Miller was “concerned the cap could lead English-speaking provinces [such as Ontario] to target Francophone institutions, resulting in a disproportionate reduction in the number of French-speaking students in Canada, including those from African countries”.

The Globe and Mail quotes Miller’s director of communications, Aïssa Diop, as saying, “We are looking for mechanisms to minimise the impact on Francophone institutions outside Québec and on Francophones in countries where we already have a low acceptance rate.”

Miller’s office is mulling the idea of creating a separate visa stream for Francophone students, according to The Globe and Mail.

Given the perennial complaint in English Canada that the government favours Francophones, a separate stream for international Francophone students will likely be a hard sell.