Vancouver’s Langara College among those bracing for drastic plunge in foreign students

The impacts of the international student cap being felt:

…At Langara College, president Burns said in her message to faculty that while foreign student applications are down 79 per cent for the January term, they are also down nine per cent for the fall term, which begins in just six weeks.

Burns attributed the declines to several factors.

They include Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s promise in January to decrease the number of study visas it hands out by 35 per cent this year compared to last.

The B.C. government has also been making reforms — including instituting a new requirement that no more than 30 per cent of students at public post-secondary schools can be foreign students. There are 217,000 foreign students in the province’s post-secondary institutions.

This year both the federal and B.C. governments are expressing the need to temper the record volume of foreign students because of the impact on runaway housing costs, particularly rents, as well as on infrastructure and social services, such as health care.

On a national level, there are mixed signals about the pace at which foreign students are entering Canada.

Last year the country had about 1.1 million foreign students, a jump of three times from when Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015.

Despite Miller pledging to cap study visa approvals at 360,000 for this year, immigration department data shows it issued more study visas in the first five months of this year than it did in the first five months of last year, which broke records.

According to numbers from the immigration department, Canada has handed out 217,000 international study permits in the first five months of 2024. In the same period in 2023, 200,000 were handed out.

In B.C., however, study visa numbers are slightly reduced. In the first five months of 2024 the immigration department has issued 40,000 visas to those who say they will study in B.C. That’s down from about 45,000 in the same period last year.

In response to Postmedia’s questions, the immigration department said via email: “It is premature to claim the cap isn’t working.”

The ministry noted the cap doesn’t apply to students who apply to extend their studies from within the country, nor to those attending kindergarten-to-Grade 12 programs. It also said it expected visa approvals will go down in the months of August and September.

Andrew Griffith, a former immigration department director who now writes independently about migration, says he believes overall foreign student numbers will begin broadly declining soon.

A crucial government data table, he says, reveals that the volume of people around the world inquiring on the immigration department’s website about getting a Canadian study visa is down 26 per cent this year compared to last.

For instance, there were far fewer inquiries about obtaining a Canadian study visa in June of this year: 68,000  compared to 110,000 in June of 2023….

Source: Vancouver’s Langara College among those bracing for drastic plunge in foreign students