Canada urged to drop English language tests for Nigerian students

Canada is getting determined pushback over English-language test requirements for students from Nigeria, inflaming a racially fraught relationship with one of its more promising sources of overseas tuition revenue.

The tests have been required by the federal government as a condition for student visas and also by a few universities as a condition for acceptance, despite English being the main language of instruction in Nigeria.

Protests over such requirements are being led by African students in Canada, who condemn both the negative message the requirements convey and the prohibitively high cost of taking the tests.

For many such students, said Olumuyiwa Igbalajobi, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, the testing rules create “an artificial barrier before they can even apply to the university”.

One of the most prominent Canadian institutions to impose such a requirement on Nigerians as a condition of admission, the University of Alberta, rescinded it recently after Dr Igbalajobi and other Nigerian-born students in the country drew attention to it.

Such advocates also helped to produce a recommendation from the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in Canada’s House of Commons that called on the federal government to end the English-language testing requirement for students from Nigeria seeking education visas.

The situation is not unique to Canada. The UK government has faced protests over its own requirements for English-language tests for students from Nigeria and numerous other African countries where English is a primary or official language, despite allowing exemptions for those coming from other parts of the world.

The tests are priced at nearly C$300 (£190), or about three times the minimum monthly wage in Nigeria, said Dr Igbalajobi. The result, he claimed, has been a dramatic decline in recent months in the numbers of Nigerian students coming to Canada.

Data were less clear, however, about the ultimate risks to Canada of alienating Nigeria, the world’s seventh-biggest nation by population. Canada’s higher education system does rank as one of the world’s most highly dependent on international students, with more than a fifth of its enrolment coming from abroad. And Nigerians rank in the top 10 among those high fee-paying visitors to Canada, at a time when the country seeks to lessen its reliance on those from China and India. Yet Canada also persists in global surveys as the most popular destination for studying abroad, and last year it reported a record 450,000 new student permits – with those from Nigeria jumping 30 per cent – as it reopened from Covid with new rules that let online courses count towards eligibility for post-graduation work visas.

The Citizenship and Immigration Committee in the Canadian parliament listed the English-language testing requirement among a series of hurdles that uniquely confront students from Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. Others, it said in an investigative report earlier this year, include far tougher requirements for demonstrating sufficient financial resources, far longer delays in visa processing, and far lower rates of university admission in Canada. The legislative review repeatedly suggested human biases as chief among underlying causes for such policies.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com