Canada ‘may fall short of caps’ as overseas interest nosedives

Canada appears to be losing the attention of international students so quickly that its institutions might not recruit enough students this year to hit the sharply lower visa caps imposed recently by the Trudeau administration.

After watching overseas student enrolments surge to more than 400,000, the federal government this year announced the imposition of study visa caps aimed at ratcheting down the number by about a third to around 290,000. But at current application rates, Canada’s colleges and universities might get only some 230,000 students from abroad for the coming academic year, the online services company ApplyBoard has estimated.

Universities Canada said its members were “seeing application numbers down by an average of 40 per cent”.

“Canada’s attractiveness has fallen significantly,” Meti Basiri, ApplyBoard’s chief executive and co-founder, told Times Higher Education. “There is far less demand than supply.”

The reason, Mr Basiri said, was that the Trudeau administration had taken several other steps in recent months beyond the visa caps, and had threatened more, which together are discouraging many international students from considering Canada.

Those additional steps by the federal government included a doubling of the wealth requirement for incoming international students, new limits on their working hours and new visa limits on their spouses.

Canada is a prime global study destination that had grown increasingly attractive before Covid, then became extremely popular after the pandemic. But that explosion of interest, while heavily subsidising higher education for Canada’s own domestic students, was coming at an accelerating cost, especially in the form of housing shortages around many campuses.

While the full enrolment picture for the coming academic year is not yet known, the apparent speed of the turnaround looms as shocking. In recent months, Canada’s higher education leaders had been loudly warning of dire consequences from the visa caps, apparently unaware that those caps might prove moot because of other factors.

“We did what the UK did,” Mr Basiri said of the limits on visa rights for spouses and dependants of students, “and five other things on top.”

A decline to 230,000 international students, if it materialises, would bring Canada back to the pre-Covid level of 2019. ApplyBoard’s analysis suggests that, as universities and students adjust to the new process, visa approval rates might improve, bringing final enrolment figures closer to the cap of 292,000.

A Universities Canada spokeswoman said that any further immigration policy changes should be paused while ministers and universities “adapt to recent changes, review policy effects and analyse the outcomes of future changes”.

“Canada’s recent decisions have conveyed globally that borders are closed to international students, which has had ramifications for institutions beyond the bad actors targeted by these policies,” the spokeswoman said.

“We are very concerned about the damage being done to Canada’s international reputation as a desirable destination for high-quality education.”

The Trudeau administration, however, is unlikely to retreat quickly from its policy shift, Mr Basiri said, as Canada needs to take a hard look at its goals for such students – answering whether the nation merely wants to educate students and send them home or to make them residents, use them to fill labour shortages, or any particular combination.

Since the pandemic, he said, “things grew too fast, without too much of a strategy behind it”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com