Data shows 35% drop in interest in studying in Canada

Canada’s reputation as an international student destination has suffered immense harm since last January when the government announced that it would be cutting the number of new international student visas, says Studyportals, an online education platform based in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

According to proprietary data Studyportals provided to University World News, the year-over-year decline in interest in studying in Canada by international students is 35.3%.

This figure is all but identical to the 35% cut in new international visas for 2024 announced by Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Marc Miller last January.

“As we predicted, the decline affects both bachelors (down 23.5% year-over-year) and masters (down 36.7% year-over-year),” wrote Cara Skikne, Studyportals’ head of communication and thought leadership in an email.

Studyportals data comes from pages viewed by prospective students on Studyportals, which, Skikne said, is a good predictor of enrolments 12-24 months in the future.

The data was released to University World News the same week that Miller announced an additional 10% cuts in international visas in each of the next two academic years. This will bring the total reduction in new visas in 2026 to 324,720 or almost 240,000 fewer international visas than in 2023.

The minister also announced that graduate students, who had been exempted from the Liberal government’s tightening of international visas, will be included under the cap going forward. The government is also limiting eligibility for the postgraduate work permit and tightening the rules around spousal work visas.

“The impact of Canada’s policy changes, processing delays, and overall narrative surrounding international students is unmistakable: students are voting with their feet – or, more accurately, their brains,” said Edwin van Rest, president and founder of Studyportals.

“The sector is going to feel a far greater hit than the student visa cap was intended to cause. Even segments of the market, such as masters and PhD students, which were beyond the scope of the policy’s original target, are facing consequences.

“With the rapid expansion of study options in Europe, Asia, and other regions, students are increasingly rethinking their plans and shifting towards destinations where they feel welcomed and secure in the government policies that affect them,” Van Rest noted.

Policy change

The Canadian government’s approach to international visas and immigration in general is a sharp turnaround from policies of just a few years ago. In 2023, Canada accepted 471,771 permanent residents (immigrants) and more than a million international students.

A September poll by Nanos Research found that 55% of Canadians wanted the federal government to accept fewer international students than the 900,000 slated to be accepted in 2024. (A similar percentage wanted the immigration target cut from 465,000; the previous March, about 33% of Canadians supported cut backs in immigration.)

Canada’s traditional support for high levels of immigration and large numbers of international students began to decline in 2023 when the country began to experience a housing affordability and supply crisis.

Especially in smaller cities, large numbers of international students, who are thrown into the local housing market because their college or university does not have on-campus housing, distorts those markets, said Professor Mike Moffatt, who teaches business, economics and public policy at the Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario) and who is also senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, an Ottawa, Ontario-based public policy think tank.

Houses that would otherwise be sold to families are being converted into student housing, for which a higher rent can be charged.

“We’re seeing a lot of single-family homes getting converted into student rentals. Previously, as in most communities with colleges and universities, there were kinds of informal boundaries between where the students live and the townies.

“But now, the student area has been expanding out from many colleges by a block or two every year. So, the catchment area where students live is growing, particularly along bus lines.

“The effect cascades through the entire housing system. What’s happening on the student side is causing shortages on family-sized homes because of those conversions into student rentals,” Moffat told University World News last September.

Economics not education

Canada’s colleges and universities did not increase their numbers of international students for either pedagogical reasons or for reasons of international comity.

Rather, as provincial governments began cutting back on grants to colleges and universities, they told these institutions to make up the difference by recruiting international students whom they could charge as much tuition as the market would bear.

Small, regional universities like Cape Breton University (CBU) in Sydney, Nova Scotia (a town with a population of 30,000), have become heavily reliant on international students, said David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Seven thousand of CBU’s 9,000 students are international students. Each one pays an international student differential fee of CA$10,330 (U$7,600) on top of their tuition of CA$9,225; accordingly, each international student pays more than twice as much to attend CBU as do Nova Scotia residents and other Canadians.

At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, international student tuition is CA$4,309 per semester, more than twice as much as the tuition paid by domestic students.

In 2019-2020, 91% of the tuition collected by Canadore College in North Bay (in north central Ontario) was paid by the 6,182 international students who travelled to the small city of North Bay, Ontario, where they were more than 10% of the city’s population of 52,000.

“We got the purpose of international education backwards. Institutions, and governments thought this was a great way to make money. So it was an economic incentive rather than an educational incentive,” said Robinson.

“We should be asking the question: how do international students help the educational mission of our institutions? Not, how do they help the bottom line?

“There certainly were a lot of voices who thought that way when Canada was developing its international student branding and recruitment strategy. Recruitment was placed in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. So, it was initially seen as a trade function,” he added.

“You remember back then [the 1990s, under Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien], it was part of the ‘Team Canada missions’. University presidents were going to China and India and then coming back saying, ‘We’ve got a deal to bring more students to Canada and so on’.

“It was seen as strictly a commercial exchange, rather than, what I think it should be: ‘How does it meet the educational mission of our institutions?’” said Robinson, who went on to include among the educational mission the benefits of exposing Canadian students to international perspectives and views, as well as broader scientific collaborations.

A number of times since January, Miller has drawn attention to the fact that the provinces have been using international students, essentially as ATMs to fund their higher education systems. He did so again on 21 September on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news show, Power and Politics.

“The underfunding of post-secondary is one [issue] that has been consistent throughout Canada,” he said.

“Provinces, who have the responsibility to fund those institutions adequately, and it’s shameful that they haven’t throughout the years, really need to step up … The federal government has a role in this, but people’s balance sheets can’t be determined by whether they get international students or not,” he added.

Factors affecting enrolment

Although final enrolment figures for the fall 2024 semester are not yet in, at the end of June, by which time, traditionally, most of the visas have been issued, officials at IRCC were predicting that Canada would likely miss this year’s target of 291,914 new international visas.

“It is too early to fully assess the data,” Sofica Lukianenko, a spokesperson for the ministry, wrote in an email to University World News regarding the impact of the intake cap on study permit applications.

“However, early signs indicate that the cap announced in January is effectively reigning in international student volumes. From January to August 2024, we had more than 200,000 fewer international students coming to Canada – a 38% decrease compared to 2023.

“The full effects of implementing the cap will be more accurately represented in statistics on study permits when we tally the total number of study permits issued for the fall 2024 season, as well as considering those for the Winter 2024 season, and once students start to arrive,” she wrote.

There are several reasons that explain why the decline in the number of students coming exceeds the 35% cut to new international student visas.

The first is financial. In January, Miller announced that he was raising, from CA$10,000 to CA$20,650, the financial requirement to attain a student visa.

The second is the backlog in processing visas that resulted from a pause necessitated by the requirement, also announced in January, that applicants have provincial attestation letters (PALs).

With the exception of Quebec, which already had such a letter, Canada’s other nine provinces had to establish the machinery to produce and issue the PALs attesting to the fact that the institution each student applied to had space for them.

The backlog was so severe that in a report issued last June, ApplyBoard, a Canadian-based online platform that connects educational institutions and international students, recommended that colleges and universities make sure that applicants understood that “study permit processing times are longer than usual – and that delays don’t reflect on the application’s quality, or mean it’s lost in the process”.

The third reason for the decline is a drop in interest among students from India in coming to Canada because of political tensions between the two countries and the fact that the enrolment in programmes of most interest to Indian students, such as business, have been capped.

Further restrictions?

Although the minister did not announce any new restrictions on international students in an interview on Global Television on 22 September, his answer to a question about whether Muhammad Shahzeb, who was in Canada on an international student visa, had tried to claim asylum, suggested that further restrictions could be expected.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrested Kahn 18 days earlier before he could cross the border into the United States, allegedly with the intent of carrying out a “deadly attack targeting Jewish citizens in the United States”.

Later media reports alleged that Kahn’s targets were to be Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

“There’s a growing number [of such claims],” Miller told journalist Mercedes Stephensen. “And it’s frankly quite alarming given the volumes of people that come to this country, in theory, with the proper financial capacity to live and pay their tuition fees, which are four times what Canadians pay,” he said.

“But it’s an alarming trend … We see that it [an asylum claim] happens often within the first year that they’re here – often for less valid reasons than others … So there’s opportunism that’s being used and exploited there.

“It goes to the point I’ve been making to universities and colleges, to make sure that their recruiting practices are better, that they make sure that the type of people we are attracting under what should be a world-class student visa programme is one where people don’t turn around and after they’ve paid all sorts of money [then] claim asylum,” the minister said in the interview.

In its response to University World News, the IRCC said: “Canada values the significant social, cultural and economic benefits that international students bring to Canada.

“For those benefits to continue and to ensure international students who arrive in Canada are set up for success, we must tackle issues that have made some students vulnerable and have challenged the integrity of the international student programme.

“This includes making sure we can manage the number of international students coming to Canada in a sustainable manner, while deterring any bad actors who pose a threat to the system.”

A cautionary tale

For Van Rest, the roiled Canadian international higher education sector is something of a cautionary tale. “Governments should be very careful with unwelcoming policies. A destination’s reputation can fall rapidly and, as the saying goes, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’,” he said, quoting Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell.

“The sector needs to ensure that there is awareness among politicians and the public of the value that international students bring.

“This value is not just to the economy in the form of tuition fees and spending; international students have an important impact on talent gaps: they are a large source of entrepreneurs, tech CEOs, medical researchers, nurses and hospitality workers playing a pivotal role in our ageing societies,” he explained.

Van Rest turned then and, appropriately, since Robinson traced the government of Canada’s view of international students to Australia’s in the 1990s, pointed towards Australia’s new restrictive international student visa policy.

“There are important lessons [from Canada] for a country like Australia, where a cap system is about to get implemented, and where international students were responsible for half of their GDP growth last year, especially as the Australian economy is already at a record low point in terms of growth this year,” said Van Rest.