Looking for an ‘IELTS clear girl’: Why Canada’s international student reforms may spoil these kinds of marriages in India

2024/02/08 Leave a comment

Interesting read and suspect more of these stories will come out as the new restrictions on international students come into effect:

At first glance, it looks just like any matrimonial profile, detailing the age, height and education background of the boy looking for a match. But then there’s a twist: Only an “IELTS clear girl” should bother responding.

In another ad, a young woman with a bachelor’s degree in science is looking for a groom interested in moving to Canada and willing to bear all expenses. And her biggest asset, as advertised: “IELTS 7 band.”

IELTS stands for the International English Language Testing System, one of the world’s most popular English proficiency tests for higher education and immigration — and an entry requirement to come to Canada. International students need a minimum overall score of 6 in writing, reading, listening and speaking English for admission to undergraduate and diploma programs in this country.

A perfect match would mean the bride could get the boy’s family to pay for her tuition and living costs of studying abroad. In exchange, the groom could come to Canada on an open work permit, accompanying the spouse. And they’d both hope to one day earn their permanent residence here.

“These are real marriages and there’s nothing illegal about it,” said Rajinder Taggar, an investigative reporter based in Chandigarh, India. “You can find these matrimonial ads very easily, in all the newspapers. People make no secret about it.”

But the practice of so-called “IELTS marriages” is coming to an end, quickly, after Canada’s announcement last week to tighten up the international student program. Among the many changes made by Ottawa is stop issuing work permits to the spouses of international students in undergraduate and diploma programs.

“The boy marries the girl and his family puts money in her studies, so the spouse can come,” Vinay Hari, a prominent education agent based in Jalandhar, told the Star.  “Now that will stop. The girl will not get the money for the education in Canada.

“They will file divorces and their relationships will be terminated. It’s already happening.”

Almost 40 per cent of Canada’s international students these days come from India, where prospective students are being hardest hit by Canada’s recent changes to the international student program.

Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced a plan to slash the number of new study permits issued across Canada this year by 35 per cent from last year’s level, to 364,000, while leaving the number of applicants accepted in master’s and doctoral programs, as well as those admitted to primary and secondary schools, uncapped.

Other new or recent measures include:

• Effective on Jan. 1, doubling the cost-of-living financial requirement for study permit applicants from $10,000 to $20,635 in addition to their first year of tuition and travel costs;

• Starting Sept. 1, stopping to issue post-graduation work permits to international students who complete programs provided under so-called Public College-Private Partnerships;

• In the weeks ahead, the spouses of most international students will no longer be granted work permits, with the exception of those studying in graduate schools or in a professional program such as medicine or law.

These three measures are intended to raise the bar and plug the incentives for people to take advantage of the international student program in what Miller has described as a “backdoor entry” into Canada.

According to Taggar, the Indian journalist, IELTS marriages have been happening for some time, but they became more common with Canada’s open policy to welcome international students and the marketing by unscrupulous agents to promote international studies as an immigration scheme.

“Girls work harder and are smarter. And they pass the IELTS exam,” said Taggar, who has published in the Tribune, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and Times of India. “Some of them come from poor families but they are good at studies. The boys’ families will pay for the education. They want to come to Canada and become permanent residents. That’s all.”

Removing the spousal work permit for students in undergraduate and college programs, which are normally cheaper and shorter than postgraduate studies, would deter that kind of exploitation of the international student program, he said.

Hari, the education agent, said he has received more than 100 inquiries in the past week from prospective students who asked to withdraw their applications for programs delivered under public-private college partnerships because they will no longer grant postgraduation work permits.

These partnerships are mostly between smaller public colleges in remote communities in the province and private colleges in Greater Toronto, where international students prefer to live — prompted by the public institutions’ need to stay afloat amid declining domestic enrolment and provincial funding cut.

The business model allows taxpayer-funded colleges to provide curriculum at a fee to private career college partners, who can hire their own non-unionized instructors to deliver the academic programs in the region.

Graduates from the private colleges then get a public college credential, which made them eligible for a postgraduate work permit as a pathway for permanent residence.

After the Jan. 22 changes, “they told us, ‘Sir, I don’t want to go to a (public-private partnership college). Transfer my application to the (public college) main campus,'” Hari said. “They don’t want to go to Hanson College in Toronto or Brampton. They want to go to Cambrian College in Sudbury.”

Over the last five years, said Hari, Canada has gained a bad reputation in India as a destination for immigration through education. As a result, many Indian students are enrolled in college diploma programs that give them quick access to work permits but won’t necessarily advance their employment and career prospects.

He said serious learners now tend to prefer the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, while those who want to immigrate come to study in Canada.

“Thousands of these students are coming for these general business programs,” said Hari, who has helped more than 11,000 students come to study in Canada in the last 14 years. “Did Canada produce that many businessmen and entrepreneurs?

“This immigration scam has given students the opportunity to work full time. So students are not coming but labourers are coming.“

Hari said many prospective students and their families in India are panicking in the wake of Miller’s announcement because the price tag has now gone even higher, with education agents quickly shifting to promote and market the master’s programs in Canada.

“Canada has to support the quality education. They have to fund public colleges and universities,” he said. “The PPPs have created a mess and I think Canada is now on track again.”

Nitin Chawla, an education agent and immigration consultant based in Ludhiana in Punjab state, said he’s already seeing the impacts of Canada’s new rules as inquiries about Canada have slowed down and most people walking into his office are now exploring the opportunities to study in other countries, such as New Zealand.

While these changes might be good for Canada because they’ll raise the qualifying requirements and help weed out the “weaker” students, Chawla said they are going to have ripple effects on the consulting industry and employment in India, where tens of thousands of people make a living selling immigration to this country.

“Here in Punjab, the first word a baby learns is Canada,” he said. “People will not stop going to Canada, but the number will drop very badly. People have already started withdrawing (visa application) files.”

He predicted many people in India will lose their consulting and recruitment jobs, including some of his 40 staffers, and so will many employed in the postsecondary education sector in Canada.

In a recent entry on his blog, Alex Usher, an expert on higher education, said the federal crackdown on the public-private college partnerships — upwards of 125,000 international students in Greater Toronto — is going to take at least $1.5 billion in revenue out of the hands of Ontario colleges.

“Without the promise of a post-graduation work visa, it is hard to see how those spots are going to stay filled,” wrote Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates. “I’d wager a couple of the northern colleges, who used PPPs as a way to escape the brutal economics of teaching in the more sparsely populated north, will be in need of a bailout soon.”

Source: Looking for an ‘IELTS clear girl’: Why Canada’s international student reforms may spoil these kinds of marriages in India

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HESA: How bad is it going to get in Ontario? Really bad. 

2024/01/31 Leave a comment

Usual frank and insightful analysis:

This isn’t just cluelessness. The Ministry here isn’t even clueful with respect to understanding how to even get a clue in the first place. The cluetrain? It has left the shed but there’s nobody on board (ok I will stop now).

So, all of this is bad, certainly, but it’s arguably not as bad as Colleges Ontario’s 1326-word statement responding to the federal changes, which is a masterclass in failing to read the room. Go on, read it. Utterly self-centered, all about protecting their revenue schemes, no sense whatsoever that the whole reason this scenario is occurring is that they lost social license to keep bringing in more international students and that the public has serious (albeit not necessarily well-founded) views about the quality of PPPs and the quality assurance. Tone-deaf is putting it mildly.

(Of course, Colleges Ontario is a membership organization, and when it comes to membership organizations, they necessarily go with the lowest-common denominator. My guess is that there a few colleges that probably know this statement was a bad idea, but the ultras won out.)

(Also: I am taking bets on when the rest of the sector decides to throw Conestoga under the bus for ruining the international student thing for everyone else. Issuing acceptances for 34,000 study permit students in 2023 alone—in a city with under 400,000 students—was an absurd cash-grab with no thought as to impact on the local community. As soon as the distribution of spots starts, you know the other colleges are going to argue hard against Conestoga getting a share of 2024 visas based on its 2023 share. Should be amusing).

Meanwhile, Ontario universities had not issued a joint statement as of Sunday evening (when this blog was written) but as near as I can tell, the universities’ position is going to be “colleges created this problem, any balancing of student visa numbers should be done on their backs, not ours.” Which has a certain truth to it but is a long way from the full truth (within the university sector, you can expect Algoma will attract antagonists the way Conestoga does in the college sector, albeit on a more modest scale).

In other words, everything here in Ontario is a mess. It will be an interesting to compare Ontario’s…omnishambles…what British Columbia’s plan looks like. My understanding is that it will be published Monday (tomorrow for me, yesterday for you). I apologize in advance that due to extensive work commitments this week, I won’t be able to cover the BC announcement until next week. ‘til then: keep your eyes peeled. These files are moving fast.

Source: HESA: How bad is it going to get in Ontario? Really bad. 

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HESA: What Comes Next: Ontario (the hugely problematic provinces) [international student caps]

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

The insightful Alex Usher on the impact of provinces, with Ontario the focus:

Ontario is, not to put too fine a point on it, a shit show. My impression is that the Ford government, which has been throwing gasoline on the international student fire ever since it got into the office, mainly so it could avoid having to actually spend over its own money on post-secondary education, is in no way equipped policy-wise to deal with the mess it has just been handed.

The first policy question to be answered before getting to the issue of caps is: what the heck to do about the public-private partnership colleges currently strewn around the GTA? As it is, with the graduates denied access to the post-graduate work visa program, it will be difficult for any of them to stay in business, since satisfying this demand is largely their reason for being. That would be brutal on a couple of levels: first on the colleges themselves who would have to teach out their existing students with essentially no money coming in, and second on their parent public colleges who rely on the margin between per-student tuition and per-student payments to the PPPs in order to keep operating under a system in which per-student funding is just 44% of what it is in the other nine provinces.

At least conceptually, there’s another option: What if the public colleges bought out their private partners and operated these institutions directly? The province might well say no—college catchment areas in theory have meaning, and this kind of arrangement would undermine those catchment areas (which is precisely why they all went in the PPP direction in the first place). And net surpluses would be lower if all the staff at these colleges suddenly joined the college unions. It might not be a super-lucrative prospect, but it might be better than the alternative. I could see some institutions trying it.

But being able to make that decision requires you to know what provincial funding is going to look like. If the province comes in with a bailout package—particularly for northern colleges—then the need to keep pushing on those GTA campuses might be lessened. Alternatively, many of those PPP colleges may now move more quickly towards seeking their own degree-granting status through the Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) and start offering their own degree-level programs, escaping the problems created by Monday’s announcement.

(You see how many moving pieces there are here? It’s going to be wild to watch this all work out.).

Only once you work out the PPP piece can you sensibly make decisions about the rest of the system. If the baseline numbers include the PPPs, then everyone is going to take a big hit on their numbers. If the baseline excludes the PPPs, then the hit to the rest of the system will be greatly alleviated. How that gets distributed across the system is still the big unknown. Will it be done equally across all institutions? Will there be a steer to the colleges rather than universities, or vice-versa? How will stand-alone private institutions be treated (Northeastern is the big one to think about in this category). We have no idea. It’s all an enormous mystery. And with a moratorium on visa processing until the provinces figure all this stuff out, there are a lot of very anxious international student divisions out there.

Source: What Comes Next

Reading this article in the Globe, appears British Columbia more advanced in its thinking and planing.

British Columbia and Ontario are planning to crack down on “bad actor” private colleges that they say take advantage of international students, after Ottawa announced a plan to cap foreign study visas for two years.

Source: B.C., Ontario planning crackdown on ‘bad actor’ colleges preying on international students

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HESA: Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

2023/11/01 Leave a comment

Usual insightful analysis by Alex Usher on the planned changes to study permits announced by Minister Miller, particularly the risks associated with rating education institutions and “calibrating” the PGWP in line with labour market needs, given lack of IRCC expertise in these areas, not to mention the operational challenges:

Last Friday’s, Marc Miller, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship (IRCC), announced three changes to the International Student Visa program (link here).  You may have seen a small news alert about it (see here or here).  But it seems that almost nobody caught the full import of the announcement. 

The announcement started out ok, with Miller again swatting down rumours of a cap on international student visas and comparing the idea to “performing surgery with a hammer”.  Miller then announced – or re-announced, or semi-announced, depending on your point of view – three things.

First, starting December 1, 2023, every designated learning institution (DLI) will be required to confirm every applicant’s letter of acceptance directly with IRCC.  This is good.  It’s what pretty much every other country in the international student business has been doing for a couple of decades, and the only reason we haven’t done it before is Ottawa’s catastrophic inability to undertake IT projects (plus, you know, sheer bureaucratic inertia).  Assuming they can launch on time – and I wouldn’t bet the farm on it – top marks, 10/10

Second, the Government re-iterated its desire to launch its deeply under-theorized plan to rank and rate institutions, whose utter incoherence I outlined back here.  The difference is that they’ve changed the language from “trusted institutions” to “recognized institutions” and the implementation date has been moved back to next fall, which gives us all a few extra months to convince the feds that this idea remains infeasible.

So far, so boring.  But pay attention: the third element is a big one.  I’ll quote it verbatim, while adding emphasis where appropriate:

In the coming months, IRCC will complete an assessment of Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) Program criteria and begin introducing reforms to better calibrate it to meet the needs of the Canadian labour market, as well as regional and Francophone immigration goals.

Well, now.  Let’s think about how this might work. 

“Calibrating” the PGWP program with the labour market would require two things.  First, it requires IRCC to decide what skills the labour market “needs” (or, more formally, which occupations will be “in demand” over the coming years.  The feds sort of have this through ESDC’s Canadian Occupational Projection System (COPS), although its worth remembering that this system has its limitations (remember when the system claimed that “university professors” was an occupation facing imminent shortages?  Good times.)  And of course, COPS was just one way of determining future skills shortages: other methodologies, like the one developed by the former Brookfield Institute (now TMU/Dais) can provide quite different answers. 

But that’s not really the hard part here.  We have a lot of different projection systems, but the government of Canada has never used any for the purpose of policy implementation.  In this case, the government would basically have to have enough faith in whatever methodology they pick to say “yes” or “no” to individuals or institutions over something as important as who gets into the country and who does not.  It can model itself on some other countries – Australia’s National Skills Commission maintains a list of in-demand skills for immigration and education purposes,– but it’s a fundamentally new role for this ministry – or indeed anyone in the federal government.  I have my doubts it will go smoothly.  No, the hard part is working out how exactly to link labour market information to the PGWP program.  And I am pretty sure it is going to be something along the lines of “occupation X, meet program Y”: that is, PGWP will only be available for specific programs of study.

This ought to be…interesting.

I mean, the feds’ logic is clear.  What they really want to do is strike hard at rural/small-town Ontario colleges offering loads of “Global Business” diplomas through PPP arrangements with private colleges in the GTA.  since the areas near these schools are the epicentre of the housing shortage that’s currently affecting southern Ontario and tanking Liberal re-election projects.  Nobody thinks the diplomas actually have much educational or social value – and the public perception of them is that they are a backdoor route to immigration (personally, I disagree, I think they are a front-door to immigration, but a back-door to a Temporary Foreign Worker Program, but that’s as may be).  So why not use federal immigration rules to wipe them out?

Well, for one, it’s not 100% clear how the Government intends to link data on occupations to data on programs in a way which is defensible.  At the more technical end of the spectrum, occupations and programs line-up reasonably well, but in humanities, social sciences, business and indeed a lot of the biological sciences, the line from program to employment is a lot looser, and it’s not clear how a crosswalk can be driven.  So, while it should be easy enough to “prove” that Global Business doesn’t have many direct routes to the labour market, it’s not obvious (to me at least) how you can do that in a way that doesn’t sideswipe every faculty of arts and business in the country.

In brief, I foresee both a titanic amount of lobbying around what kinds of methodology will be used to determine “in-demand” skills and a titanic amount of chicanery as institutions re-classify their programming to meet whatever rules and standards the government eventually chooses to set for the PGWP program.   In fact, I think you can guarantee that as of Friday, these two items right now are at the top of the to-do list of every non-GTA college in Ontario, because these new rules have the potential to disrupt their largest income source and drive them to the wall, financially.

And remember, all of this potential change and financial consequences is being driven by the feds, not the provinces.  Specifically, it’s being driven by the freaking Ministry of Immigration, whose understanding of the higher education system might charitably be described as “diddly-squat”.  And yet, despite this lack of institutional expertise, right now Marc Miller is the closest thing Canada has ever had to a National Minister of Higher Education.  Through his unworkable ranking system, he’s claiming the right to distinguish “good” from “bad” institutions, and through the PGWP revisions he’s claiming the power of life and death over hundreds – maybe thousands – of university and college programs across the country.  It’s both unprecedented and absurd.

Provinces only have themselves to blame for this: whatever power over higher education the feds now have exists because of the provincial cheeseparing that drove institutions to seek international students in the first place.  No international student boom, no terrifying leverage placed in IRCC’s hands.

What a country.

Source: Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

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HESA: Canada’s Internationalization Strategy [spoiler, not a strategy]

2023/10/12 Leave a comment

Another insightful analysis by HESA that applies to other areas of government than Global Affairs:

A couple of months ago, I was invited to participate in a Global Affairs Canada (GAC) stakeholder roundtable on its Strategic Plan for the next five years.  It was very kind of them to invite me and a few others to be part of the consultation.  It was an interesting window into how the federal government thinks about policy and – especially – strategy.

It seems to me that GAC is in the education business for three reasons.

  1. It has a commercial function in that it exists to make things easier within the limits of existing provincial and federal legislation to assist in increasing educational imports. 
  2. It has a diplomatic/soft power function in that it is, in conjunction with institutions, meant to generate ongoing goodwill towards Canada with current and future world leaders through programs of educational and cultural exchange. 
  3. It has an immigration function is there to promote immigration via education.  That’s been the policy of the Government of Canada for a decade and a half now. 

But instead of talking about goals and the role of GAC in these three areas, the department chose to jump straight into talking about four “pillars”: digital marketing, diversification (in the sense of widening the international student base beyond India and China), scholarships and education agents. The background papers for those four pillars are available here (there are also another 9 or so background papers here, and kudos to the folks at GAC for making all of this public…it would be normal in other countries, but in Canada, this counts as a major act of transparency).

I don’t want to dismiss these pillars – they are all important – but they don’t really amount to a strategy.  They are more like issue management.  And as a result, what pervaded the discussion was a mixture of presentism and mission confusion.  By presentism, I mean that the conversation tended to focus on “how do we make minor changes to things we do now” rather than “what should we be trying to achieve in this area”?  This was most evident in the discussion about the small suite of scholarships that that GAC runs such as the Canada-ASEAN Scholarships, the Canadian International Development Scholarships Program, and the CARICOM Faculty Leadership Program.  All the questions were about “how can we make these work better?”, where “better” means “in line with educational objectives with respect to student recruitment diversification.  This was disappointing.   The possibility of aligning these with actual foreign policy objectives, like, say, our vaunted turn to the Indo-Pacific?  Not on the table.

Similarly on the question of digital marketing – the Government of Canada spends $5 million year, spread across 25 countries (not India and China), on “promoting the benefits of studying in Canada as they relate to the primary drivers influencing international students’ choice of study destination” (which,  apparently do notinclude immigration – more on that below).  What was at issue was not “is spending this money a good idea?” either in the sense of “is there any evidence that this advertising is working” or “is there any evidence that there is a market failure here given how much institutions themselves spend on marketing?”.  Just, again, “how could we do it better” in the sense of more “efficiency”, not “should we be doing this at all”?

The issue of agents was a bit more intriguing.  As a host of recent news stories have suggested, there are some serious cases of study permit fraud in Canada and we could certainly stand to gain from being more pro-active and adopting stricter controls on agents as other countries have done through the London Statement (which is a good policy in theory, though I suspect over-rigorous enforcement of such policies are a potential nightmare).  But tucked into the paper is a sentence which suggest that from GAC’s perspective the problem is not fraud per se, but “the wrong kind” of students, to wit:

This advising fee model [among student agents] has led to a lack of quality control with respect to study permit applications, resulting in a huge increase in applications from students who have no chance of being approved for a Study Permit, increasing IRCC workloads and contributing to the backlogs in the system, negatively impacting genuine, high-quality prospective students. [emphasis added]

The sharp-eyed will see links here back to the whole “trusted provider” approach that IRCC is taking, only for some reason it’s taking aim at agents rather than institutions.  In any event, we see here that a group of Ottawa officials have a very clear idea in their heads with respect to “genuine” students vs. fake ones, “high-quality” students vs low-quality ones, etc.   And I’m guessing once again it has something to do with the use of the immigration tack.

Why do I think this?  Well, one very intriguing moment in the consultation happened when a fairly senior GAC employee recounted an event he had recently witnessed in Dubai.  At this event, an unnamed university President said something to the effect “come study at my university and you’ll be on a path to Canadian citizenship”.  This was deeply distressing to the GAC employee.  “That’s not what this program is for”, he huffed (he presumably meant both the PGWP program and pathway to Permanent Residency that follows). 

It was on Zoom and most everyone was muted, but I could still hear a lot of jaws dropping at this.  This is of course exactly what IRCC policy is meant to be for.  GAC might not like the policy that IRCC developed, but since it is responsible for selling the policy overseas, you’d think GAC would understand it.  The fact that not everyone there does, combined with the fact that – as noted above – GAC seems determined to ignore the evidence that immigration is a major factor in student choice, suggests some major communications gaps between Ottawa departments.  Maybe not the most auspicious conditions under which to launch a new strategy.

In short, I found this whole exercise to be well-meaning but not particularly strategic.  The strategy focuses on scholarships for students from other countries but refuse to link these scholarships to broader diplomatic or soft power goals.  The strategy wants to attract students from other countries using digital marketing and so forth but refuses to look at the link to immigration, because GAC and IRCC appear to be at cross-purposes on the subject.  It’s the kind of process that might lead to some tiny little improvements but never seems to have even considered the possibility of a strategy that was genuinely transformative.  I don’t feel that’s GAC’s fault, particularly: rather, boldness and ambition just aren’t in a lot of governments’ DNA these days.  Too bad.

Source: Canada’s Internationalization Strategy

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Ottawa forecasts 1.4 million international student applications a year by 2027, document shows

2023/09/22 1 Comment

Hard to deny the impact such numbers would have on housing, healthcare and infrastructure pressures and the increased numbers of disillusioned students given worse economic outcomes and likely frustration for the majority who will not transition to permanent residency.

But unlikely to convince the denialisms among the various interest groups that favour higher numbers.

Good that IRCC officials are carrying out this analysis:

The number of foreign students applying to come to Canada each year is forecast by the federal immigration department to rise to 1.4 million by 2027, an internal policy document says, which also raises concerns that such growth is “unsustainable.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada forecast the rapid rise in the number of foreign students in a paper last month about establishing a class of “trusted” universities and colleges, which would qualify for faster processing of international student study permits.

The document, obtained by The Globe and Mail, says that from 2019 to 2022 study permit applications for overseas students have increased by nearly 300,000 a year.

“By 2027, volumes are forecasted to nearly double to 1.4 million applications per year,” it says.

The federal document was sent to a select group of universities and colleges taking part in a pilot to establish the proposed trusted-institutions framework.

The IRCC paper forecasts that applications from foreign students will reach 949,000 this year, and just over one million next year. The number is projected to rise to 1.1 million in 2025, 1.28 million in 2026 and 1.4 million in 2027.

It says a recent strategic immigration review – and a continuing review of the international students program – has raised a number of concerns including “unsustainable growth in application volumes, impacting education quality, community infrastructure, and IRCC processing capacity.”

The paper says that the rapid growth in the intake of foreign students “has disrupted processing times” for study permits to enter the country. Meanwhile universities and colleges have become “increasingly dependent” on international students for revenue, in some cases not providing international students with “a positive education experience in Canada.”

It is currently piloting metrics to determine which universities and colleges are eligible to be counted as trusted institutions. To qualify they would have to share data annually with the immigration department, including the number and percentage of international students living in university housing.

Alex Usher, founder of Higher Education Strategy Associates, said on-campus housing is often not the cheapest option and this measure could reward universities attracting the wealthiest international students

Housing Minister Sean Fraser – the former immigration minister – floated the prospect of a cap on international student numbers at the cabinet retreat in Charlottetown last month, saying the number of foreign students is putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs. Immigration Minister Marc Miller said at the retreat that around 900,000 students are expected to enter Canada this year.

A Senate report on Canada’s international student program, published Wednesday, said that many international students are forced to live in crowded, sub-standard housing, with universities failing to provide them with accommodation, even though they pay far higher tuition fees than Canadian students and inject around $22-billion into the economy each year.

One of the report’s authors, Senator Hassan Yussuff, questioned assertions that international students are to blame for the shortage of affordable housing, saying that many are living in cramped and overpriced accommodation with little protection from avaricious landlords.

The Senate report quoted findings by Statistics Canada that 40 per cent of study permit holders live in unsuitable accommodation compared with 9 per cent of the rest of Canada’s population.

“Housing supply and affordability are a decades-old problem that cannot be solved by putting the burden principally on international students,” the report said.

It said that reducing international student numbers will reduce housing demand although the benefits would vary in different parts of the country and depend on the “tenancy preferences of Canadians.”

The Senate report said 51 per cent of international students settle in Ontario, with 20 per cent in B.C., and 12 per cent in Quebec.

The report added that the number of foreign students coming to Canada could be affected by diplomatic disputes with India and China, the “top international source countries.”

The IRCC, in assessing whether universities and colleges qualify as trusted, will gather information from government of Canada databases, such as on the “rate of adverse outcomes for study permit holders” –including convictions of international students for crimes in Canada. Ottawa will also check the approval rate of study permits to attend an institution.

It will also assess the “average teacher-student ratio” for the most popular courses taken by international students, retention and completion rates, foreign students’ ability to speak English or French, and the proportion of students who transition to permanent residency in Canada.

It says following the pilot, universities and colleges would be able to apply and the trusted institutions system could be up and running by spring next year. Foreign students applying to attend colleges and universities on the approved list could “receive expedited processing for the 2024 academic session.”

Source: Ottawa forecasts 1.4 million international student applications a year by 2027, document shows

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HESA: A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges

2023/09/12 Leave a comment

Useful explainer and a large part of the reason why numbers have increased more for immigration reasons than for education. Another dubious legacy of the Ford government given their policy changes in 2018. Not illegal, but bad public policy. And shameful shifting of blame to the private colleges by public colleges who are equally complicit:

Back around 2012, Ontario colleges were coming around to the idea that there might be a lot of money in recruiting international students. The Harper government had come up with the idea that we could attach a permanent residency/citizenship pathway to any credential of two years length or more. And why not? There was a lot of evidence at the time that the return to foreign credentials among immigrants was low: why not pair Canadian credentials to Canadian degrees and diplomas?

The problem was that it was widely believed that international students would only gravitate towards the big cities (Cape Breton University’s contrary experience was still in the future). So, from the perspective of colleges outside the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), this was a bonanza in which they could not participate. Until they hit on the idea of public-private partnerships.

Here’s the way these Ontario PPPs work. A public college from outside the GTA contracts with a private institution located in the GTA. Under this contract, the public institution admits students (thus making it possible for them to get a visa) and takes their tuition money. It then turns around and sends these students to the GTA-located private college. The private college is contracted to teach these students according to the public college’s curriculum and receives a fee-per-student. Because this fee is less that what colleges charge in tuition, what is effectively happening is that colleges are receiving a couple of thousand dollars per student simply for admitting the student: the bulk of the money is used by the private college to do the actual teaching.

(To be clear: if you feel like attacking PPP colleges for their “poor teaching standards” – a common line of attack – keep in mind that they are teaching a public-college curriculum, and that their instruction is vouched for by a public college. See what I mean by blurring lines?)

Back in 2017 or so, the provincial government started getting worried about these arrangements. It asked David Trick, a former ADM at the (then) Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities, to write a report on these colleges. His recommendation was unequivocal: existing quality assurance structures had no way of checking up on the quality of the education being delivered in these institutions (they still don’t). The reputational risk stemming from potential failure was too high, Trick said. Shut ‘em down.

To be clear: Trick was not making any claims about the quality of instruction in these institutions. Presumably, some of them are good, some are so-so and some are not so good. What he was saying was that we have no way to identify and remediate the not-so-good ones, and that was going to cause a problem.

The Wynne government acted on Trick’s suggestion: in 2017, they gave the four colleges which at the time operated such PPP arrangements two years to shut them down. But then an election happened, and Doug Ford replaced Kathleen Wynne. The Ford government reversed course, hard: more PPPs for everyone! Whether this was due more to an ideological preference for private education over public, or because enriching college coffers without touching the public purse appealed to them is unclear but ultimately immaterial. They did it. And then it was open season: by 2022 nearly all the non-GTA colleges had one.

It’s not that the Ford government refused to regulate the sector so much as they were determined to make regulations so lax that anyone could pass them. Here is there 2019 Binding Ministerial Policy on Public-Private Partnerships (removed from the Ministry website, but still available on the Wayback machine). In theory, this limited international enrolment at a PPP to twice what it is at the “home campus”; however, there was a grandfather clause where northern institutions with 4,000 students at its PPP in Toronto but only a couple of dozen international students in Sudbury or Timmins or North Bay (for example) just had to make vague suggestions about “coming into compliance over the long term” in order to avoid problems with the government.

In 2022, as housing pressures in the 905 became more palpable, the Ford Government intervened to mess things up still further. It repealed its 2019 Ministerial Policy with a new one, which put a hard cap on each institution’s PPP enrolment…at 7,500. Doesn’t matter how big the home campus is. Call it the David Bowie/Cat People approach to public policy management (i.e. Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline).  And since virtually all the anglophone non-GTA schools have schools, we’re talking about max enrolment in these PPPs of something on the order of 120,000 next year, or about twice what it was in 2021-22.

None of this is illegal. There is no “scam” here, unless you disagree with the consensus POV of both the Harper and Trudeau governments that Canadian postsecondary education is a legitimate pathway to permanent residency. Institutions are acting to monetize this route to citizenship, surely, but aren’t governments always asking them to behave more entrepreneurially? And while there is almost certainly some agent mis-selling going on, to which institutions both public and private have taken a see-no-evil/hear-no-evil approach, institutions have been actively abetted in this by a provincial government which has refused to take regulation seriously time and time again. 

Oh, and of course, the Ontario government funds FTE college students at just 44% of the rate that the other nine provinces do. Never forget that bit.

One thing I will say about that is that Ontario colleges have been wicked-smart about their comms game for the last couple of years. An unfortunate Canadian trait is that a lot of people simply lose their minds when they hear the words “private” and “education” in the same sentence. There’s simply no nuance here, no possibility that anything they do is good – or conversely public institutions cannot do anything bad. And so, when they hear about “bad” privates in PPP arrangements, the baseline assumption is to assume that whatever bad stuff is going on is the fault of the private partner. So, not only have colleges managed to find a set of partners who can bring them large sums of money, these partners also act as handy scapegoats that shield the public sector from too much scrutiny about their role in this whole thing. Win-win!

Source: A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges

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Usher: Backlash on international students to fund our system

2022/12/09 Leave a comment

Nugget in Usher’s year-end summary:

The second take-away from this year is the backlash against using international students to fund our system.  This is mainly because the higher rents in communities bordering the institutions most active in this scene are (correctly, I think) seen as a tax on non-home-owners being imposed for the dubious privilege of having a college or university in the neighborhood.  I’ve heard via the grapevine (because of course no official data will be available for another 18 months) that international students now make up 45% of the student body in Ontario colleges. Everyone (and I mean everyone) knows the current path is madness, but no one wants to be the first to leave the race for all those easy, easy dollars. Saner minds will eventually prevail on international students – ones that will try to focus on improving the quality of international education rather than the MOAR MOAR MOAR of the last few years – and when that happens, everyone will wonder how we allowed things to get out control in the first place.

Source: https://higheredstrategy.com/sayonara-2022/

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Usher: A First Look At 2021 Education Census Data

2022/12/06 Leave a comment

Good analysis of census data by HESA:

Figure 1 shows the attainment rates of the population aged 25-64, by visible minority status and Indigenous identity.    What it shows is that there are some quite fascinating differences in attainment rates across different segments of the population.   Individuals who self-declare as visible minorities are somewhat less likely than other Canadian to have a PSE credential below the bachelor’s level but substantially more likely to have a degree at the bachelor’s level or above.  Those reporting Indigenous identity, meanwhile, have college credentials at higher levels similar to those of non-visible minority/non-Indigenous Canadians, but university attainment rates substantially  lower than those of other Canadians.  White Canadians have higher college attainment rates than visible minorities, but substantially lower university attainment rates. 

Figure 1: Post-Secondary Education Attainment by Level, Visible Minority Status and Indigenous Identity, Canadians Aged 25-64, Census 2021

Stacked bars showing that visible minorities have the highest rate of bachelor degree or above attainment.

This is, by the way, quite different from the situation in basically any other developed country except perhaps Australia and New Zealand; in most other countries with large scale immigration, visible minority populations tend to have much lower levels of education that the mainstream population.

One of the interesting things about this census is that it permits analysis not just by level of education but also by field of study.  Figure 2 runs the same analysis as figure 1, only examining the distribution of undergraduate degrees.  Again, we see some interesting distributions by visible minority/Indigenous identity.  The proportions of Canadians of various backgrounds who are in the fields of health and business are relatively consistent, but there are huge differences in the areas of education, social sciences/humanities and STEM.  For those with Indigenous identities, 45% of all degrees are in education, humanities and social sciences, while only 14% of all degrees are in STEM; among visible minorities (who, recall, are more than 3 times as likely to have a degree as those with Indigenous identity), it is 25% in education, humanities and social sciences and 35% in STEM.

Figure 2: Distribution of Degrees by Broad Field, Visible Minority Status and Indigenous Identity, Canadians Aged 25-64, Census 2021

Stacked bar charts showing percentage of people with education, humanities, SETM, management, health, or Other degrees

We can run the same kind of analyses by immigration status.  In figures 3 and 4, we repeat the analysis in figures 1 and 2, only by immigration status.  Statistics Canada divides Canadians into “first generation” (basically, individuals born outside Canada), “second generation” (at least one parent born outside Canada) and “third generation or more” (both parents born in Canada).  That second category is – if you ask me – a heck of a hodge-podge, so focus on the difference between first and third generations. 

Figure 3: Post-Secondary Education Attainment by Level and Immigration Generation, Canadians Aged 25-64, Census 2021

Stacked bars showing that "Third generation" people have the lowest percentage of bachelor attainments.

Figure 4: Distribution of Degrees by Broad Field and by Immigration Generation, Canadians Aged 25-64 Census 2021

Stacked bars showing that "Third generation" people have more humanities and social science degrees and "first generation" people have more STEM degrees.

There’s an old (American) cliche about how the first generation of immigrant families works hard in menial jobs to make sure their kids get ahead, the second generation works hard to get into professional schools and attract great wealth while the third generation goes to art school.  By the looks of it, Canada’s points-based immigration system allows us to skip that first generation thus bringing immigrants into humanities and arts programs that much faster.

Source: A First Look At 2021 Education Census Data

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HESA: That Fifth Estate Episode [international students]

2022/10/27 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the abuse of international students by private vocational colleges in the GTA that are in public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements with non-GTA public colleges and the need for greater regulation:

Many of you will have seen the Fifth Estate episode that aired two weeks ago, about international students in Canadian institutions and how many of them think – sometimes not without reason – they have been sold a bill of goods with respect to the quality of the education they receive.  If you haven’t already watched it, it’s here and you may want to give it a gander before continuing with this blog.

Finished?  Good.  Then I’ll begin.

Broadly speaking, the story is one of supply meeting demand.  In Punjab (this story is all about Punjabi students, there might as well not be any other types in Canada so far as this story is concerned), there are a lot of poor families who want their sons and daughters to go abroad to make a new life.  In Canada, there are several post-secondary institutions who a) can provide a pathway to permanent residency if a student graduates from a 2-year program and b) are willing to expand spots almost to infinity to accommodate students wanting to take advantage of this path.   The usual televisual suspects give some facetime to presenter Mark Kelly are students, often despondent from parental pressure and homesickness, immigration consultants eager to play whistleblower, and teachers recounting students falling asleep in class, exhausted from trying to combine work and study.  But there’s also some not-so -usual suspects: where this piece breaks some new ground is showing how the whole recruitment operation works in Punjab. Specifically, the report uses through some hidden camera work finding agents giving out flagrantly incorrect and, in some cases, illegal advice.  (It’s not entirely clear whether these agents are contracted to specific Canadian institutions or not).

So, there is some important reporting in this show.  But there’s also some weird stuff, too.  For instance, near the beginning of the show, a health counsellor in Brampton claims that there are 50-60 suicides a year among Pubjabi students in Brampton alone.  You’d think this would be the actual center of the story, right?  Mass death in a Toronto suburb?  But no, the statement just hangs there, unverified, un-followed up (presumably the local coroner would be able to verify).  Bizarre.

What I found most baffling about the show was the producer’sdecision to insinuate that this was a true depiction of the international student market across Canada, when pretty clearly it is just a depiction of what is happening in Ontario colleges, and more specifically, in the private vocational colleges in the GTA that are in public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements with non-GTA public colleges.  That’s not to say this stuff is absent elsewhere (it’s not), but if you’re a follower of this blog, you’ll be aware of what an outlier Ontario colleges are.  But for some reason The Fifth Estate chose to just glide over this distinction.

In fact, even though the report focused on a handful of egregious cases in the GTA, it seemed incapable of consistent reporting on the details: yes, Alpha and Hanson Colleges are private career colleges, but the programs the international students are attending belong nominally to a pair of public colleges (St. Lawrence and Cambrian Colleges, respectively).  The show seems to be under the impression that it was the private institutions which made the deals to sign up 10x the number of students that the institution could physically hold.  But that’s not true: it is the public colleges that are responsible for this.  And by missing that distinction, it completely let the leadership of these public institutions off the hook. 

Another thing the show misses completely: all these schools are acting in defiance of Ministry Policy with respect to these PPP campuses.  Read the policy and you’ll quickly realize that the number of specific protocols being breached are more numerous than the ones being observed.  But the most egregious violation is that international enrolment at partnership colleges is not supposed to amount to more than twice the number of international students on the “home” campus.  Yet not even one of these public colleges with PPPs in the GTA are obeying this limit.  All of them are massively overenrolled in relation to the policy.  And yet consecutive Minister of Colleges and Universities have simply failed to enforce the policy.  Why?  Your guess is as good as mine, but with hundreds of millions of dollars involved, you’d think it’s something that both opposition parties and media would take more seriously.  Or rather, I understand why Ontario opposition parties are not taking it seriously because they’re currently in shambles, but how could The Fifth Estate miss it?  Indeed, why choose to make the federal immigration minister the focus of its winding-up hard-question interview when it is clear, and I mean CRYSTAL FREAKING PEPSI CLEAR, that the key failure is one of provincial policy?

The answer, I suspect, is that The Fifth Estate is one of those CBC shows with a “national mandate”.  And so, while this story was fundamentally about certain PPP arrangements in Greater Toronto which are not especially representative of the rest of the country, they had to make out like it was a national story. And heck, it isn’t even representative of actual Toronto colleges.  If I were Humber College, I’d be  furious about Mark Kelly using the Lakeshore campus as a backdrop for the intro to a show talking about a set of atrocious events, PRECISELY NONE OF WHICH were associated with Humber.  I mean, really.

(Also, for some reason, the show does a drive-by smearing of Waterloo-based recruitment aggregator ApplyBoard, mainly because it does not differentiate between dodgy agents using ApplyBoard as a platform to submit their students’ documents and agents actually working for ApplyBoard.  But – full disclosure – HESA is working with ApplyBoard on a project at the moment, so take that observation with whatever-sized grain of salt you wish).

To be clear: whatever its failings, the show gets two big things right.  First, there are some really nasty things happening in the PPP colleges around Toronto.  Some of us have been warning about the reputational danger these institutions pose for quite awhile, and it’s long past time both the federal and provincial governments got their act together and regulated international education and international recruitment as if quality mattered (that they do not do so already is a complete disgrace).  Second, there is an ethical element to recruitment that a lot of institutions have missed: what might be acceptable in terms of recruitment tactics when dealing with rich international students whose family wealth makes high international fees easily affordable (as is the case with a lot of East Asian students who have come to Canada) and who are likely to return to their home countries later, are much less acceptable when applied with poor international students (mainly from Punjab) whose families are mortgaging everything in order for a shot at getting their kids Canadian citizenship.  These are important points that need to be front and center in the policy debate, and good on them for doing so.

But at the same time: boy howdy, the show missed a lot and unjustly left the impression that the bad apples were representative of the whole.  Maybe that’s just how media works: but if so, that’s all the more reason the federal and provincial governments should take regulation of the international student sector more seriously than they currently do.

Source: That Fifth Estate Episode

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