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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Omidvar: Be wary of simple solutions on the foreign student issue

2024/01/31 Leave a comment

IMO, a reasonably targeted and focused set of measures:

Blunt instruments draw blood from all parts of the body, when a sharp scalpel is better suited to the surgery. Mr. Miller has chosen a blunt instrument. It will certainly draw blood. The underbelly of the industry, that he refers to as “puppy mills,” should and will close down. The limitation of postgraduation work permits to students from those institutions will limit the number who end up working behind the tills at big box stores and other low-paying outlets. Will these chains raise wages to get the staff they need? Will unemployed Canadians work in the retail, hospitality and tourism sectors over a sustained period of time? These are questions we don’t have the answers to.

We now face the serious risk that domestic students will face a drop in the quality of education they receive as universities and colleges lose fees from international students they have come to rely on. Provincial governments need to wake up. The “blue-ribbon” task force struck by Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made sensible proposals on stabilizing funding for universities and colleges, such as “a one-time significant adjustment in per-student funding for colleges and universities to recognize unusually high inflationary cost increases over the past several years,” and “a commitment to more modest annual adjustments over the next three to five years.” These types of recommendations need to be heeded and implemented promptly.

We have allowed ourselves to get tangled up in a sticky problem of our own making by all levels of government. But we can untangle ourselves from it if we go back to the basics of education. Providing high-quality education for Canadian students should not be reliant on external forces. Providing excellent education for foreign students must become an aspiration so we can educate young people from all over the world and they can take a bit of Canada back with them. Unfortunately, in higher education in Canada today, the tail is wagging the dog.

Ratna Omidvar is an independent senator from Ontario.

Source: Be wary of simple solutions on the foreign student issue

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B.C. seeks leniency as Ottawa reins in international student numbers

2024/01/31 Leave a comment

Apparent contradiction between the Premier’s call for leniency and the more “we’re getting on with it approach” of the Minister of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills:

B.C. Premier David Eby is pressing the federal government to bend on its new cap on international students, after learning of the significant reduction in the number of foreign postsecondary spaces that his province will be able to fill in the coming year.

He said the province wants some exemptions to allow more international students in some high-demand fields such as truck drivers, nurses and early childhood educators.

…Both B.C. and Ontario have responded by promising to impose stricter measures on the postsecondary sector. Selina Robinson, B.C.’s Minister of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills, announced changes on Monday that are meant to eliminate exploitive practices by “bad actors” in the system….

source: B.C. seeks leniency as Ottawa reins in international student numbers

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Regg Cohn: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Reminder of the Ontario government’s role in exacerbating the problems:

….

There’s plenty of blame to go around — federal and provincial, Liberal and Tory, public and private, educators and entrepreneurs.

What makes Poilievre’s public musings so amusing — or laughably unserious — is his political gamesmanship about all those gaming the system. The Conservative leader stressed that visa seekers “are not to blame for (Miller)’s incompetence.”

By posing so earnestly as a protector of foreigners, Poilievre is being too clever by half. While some innocent foreigners might be misled by middlemen, many other migrants know precisely what they’re up to by leveraging student visas to get a job, not an education.

Let’s not insult the intelligence of voters or visa holders about motives. Any approval process based on rules and regulations is open to manipulation — not least an immigration, accreditation and visa system anchored in an overcomplicated federal-provincial framework of overlapping jurisdictions where people fall through the cracks (and seek cover).

Post-pandemic, all that pent-up demand for catch-up visas led everyone to lower their guard, not least the previous immigration minister, Sean Fraser. As his successor, Miller repurposed the term “puppy mills” to describe the fly-by-night immigration and education workers that operate “on top of a massage parlour.”

Henceforth, each province will be assigned work permits in proportion to its population. Ontario will be especially hard hit, as it already fills 51 per cent of them with less than 39 per cent of the population.

The problem has been a long time in the making, but the Ford government had eyes only for traditional puppy mills — the ones that breed puppies — when it announced a crackdown last month: The Preventing Unethical Puppy Sales Act, or PUPS Act, will impose a minimum fine of $10,000 for breeders in the business of abusing animals when it is debated in the legislature next month.

But there’s been no similar alarm or alacrity so far from Ford’s Tories when it comes to outfits that exploit foreigners and dupe our own governments.

While Quebec and B.C. have gotten out ahead of the student visa issue, Ontario allowed problems to fester. On Ford’s watch, an entire industry has arisen — an education-immigration complex akin to the old military-industrial complex that raised alarm bells in America decades ago.

There was easy money — lots of it — to be made off of affluent foreign students, and Canadian universities or colleges understandably wanted a piece of the action. But you can have too much of a good thing when a surge of overseas students overwhelms classrooms, campuses, communities, housing and job markets.

A few universities and most colleges got greedy — counting on high-fee foreign students for one-third or even one-half of their tuition revenues. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government got stingy.

Five years ago, Ford’s Tories announced a 10 per cent cut in tuition for domestic students, and have kept them in the deep freeze ever since, while keeping overall subsidies unchanged even as more local students showed up in class. No wonder so many public colleges responded to those foregone revenues by counting on foreign students to make up the difference — leaving them vulnerable to precisely the kind of crackdown coming from Ottawa.

…We set targets, see trends, change course and plug the gaps. This is a country that will always need immigrants, always look after refugees, always benefit from foreign students, always need to learn from its mistakes — federal but also provincial and, yes, institutional — without pressing buttons or yanking chains.

Source: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

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Ottawa to ensure international student cap doesn’t target francophones

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

On the one hand, the feds have correctly made the provinces responsible for study permit allocations by institution, but on the other….

Immigration Minister Marc Miller is preparing measures to ensure that the federal government’s new cap on international student visas does not lead to a sharp drop in the number of francophones studying in Canada.

…Mr. Miller announced the cap earlier this week, saying there would be “no further growth” in the number of international students in the country for the next two years. This would mean cutting the number of new permits issued this year by about 35 per cent, compared to 2023.

…

But the minister’s office said Thursday that he is concerned the cap could lead English-speaking provinces to target francophone institutions, resulting in a disproportionate reduction in the number of French-speaking students in Canada, including those from African countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire.

One option the government is considering is the creation of a separate visa stream for francophone students….

Source: Ottawa to ensure international student cap doesn’t target francophones

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Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Nails it:

The federal government’s decision this week to substantially reduce the number of foreign student visas is the right thing to do, but it undermines the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities and will hamper their ability to serve the province’s students.

Making Ontario’s post-secondary sector significantly reliant on foreign student tuition was an unsustainable, unwise decision that was sure to end badly. Now it has, and Premier Doug Ford’s government seems unready to respond.

It’s not like federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s move to cut the country’s foreign student visas from 600,000 to 360,000 came out of the blue. The government has been telegraphing it for months.

That wasn’t the first warning the Ford government had. Ontario’s auditor general criticized overreliance on international tuition in both 2021 and 2022. Late last year, an expert panel appointed by the Ford government warned that “Many colleges and universities have passed the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students.”

So far, all the Ford government has done is repeat a second-rate federal Liberal talking point about cracking down on “bad actors,” those being strip mall campuses that licence the curriculum of public community colleges. All with the full knowledge of the provincial government, of course.

There are three bad actors in this story, but none of them operate out of a strip mall.

First, the federal government. It turned foreign student training into a back door immigration system with no limits. Students could work for three years while they studied, then for two or three additional years after that. In all, there are about one million students here on visas now. Only belatedly has the federal government come to admit that flooding the country with unofficial immigrants might contribute to Canada’s housing shortage.

The surge of foreign students worked remarkably well for the Ontario government. Foreign students pay absurd tuitions, as much as $14,300 a year for a college student and $46,443 a year for a university student. According to the Ontario AG, foreign students accounted for 45 per cent of university tuition revenue and 68 per cent of college tuition fees.

The influx of foreign student money papered over the government’s own neglect of the post-secondary sector. In 2019, Ford cut tuition, then froze it. The government’s direct support for the sector has been meagre. The province’s funding per university student is only 57 per cent of what the rest of the country spends, and it’s even worse for college students at 44 per cent.

Finally, there are the universities and colleges themselves. They have overcome inadequate tuition and government funding by milking foreign students for all they are worth, becoming dependent on their tuition fees in the process.

The absurdity of the situation was illustrated earlier this month when international students at Algoma University’s Brampton campus conducted protests after receiving failing marks. One student got right to the heart of the transaction with a sign saying “CAD 26000 are not enough?” One of his compatriots missed the point altogether with his sign, which read “Education is not for sale.” Of course it is, and these students have the receipts to prove it. The university, an obscure Sudbury institution that has set up shop in Brampton to grab some cash, fixed the issue by putting the students’ marks on a bell curve. Smart move. In 2021-22, the Brampton campus generated 65 per cent of the university’s revenue. You have to keep the customers happy.

Unfortunately for the Ford government, the years of pretending none of this was happening are coming to an end. The federal government hasn’t shut off the student tap entirely, but it’s time for Ontario to figure out how to pay for universities and colleges without an ever-increasing flow of foreign student tuition.

The first challenge will be distributing visa quotas, something the province has not done previously. The new visas are based on population, implying that Ontario might get about 130,000 study visas compared to 300,000 in 2023.

Private colleges that were given a veneer of credibility by licensing curriculum from real community colleges should be cut off. Colleges overall will require a significant trim and a return to their mandate of job training for people in their own communities. They can afford it, for now. Foreign student training has been lucrative. In 2022, all but one Ontario college posted a surplus, with the average being $27 million across the system.

Universities are in a different situation. The Council of Ontario Universities says at least 10 Ontario universities are forecasting deficits this year, amounting to $175 million. Next year, the total is expected to be $273 million. A reduction in foreign student tuition will exacerbate that.

This is all a worrisome situation for Ontario students and their parents. The Ford government needs to put a credible fix in place, quickly.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

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Prousky: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Yet another crack in international and domestic students:

…It’s not that hard for Canadian high-school students to buy their seats in the country’s most coveted university programs. For a few thousand dollars, students can enroll at private credit-granting “schools” – usually in strip malls – where they’re almost guaranteed top marks. What these students pay in fees, they can often recoup in scholarship money.

…

The whole thing bears a striking resemblance to the issue of pay-for-citizenship private colleges. At some of these institutions, as many as 90 per cent of students are “no shows,” and in all likelihood are just paying the college for the visa and work permit it affords them. Morally, it’s no different than a domestic student who buys a grade they don’t deserve.

Clearly something beyond a cap on student visas needs to be done to restore the country’s meritocratic values. Shoddy private schools need to be held accountable, regardless of whether they target international or domestic, or high-school or college students.

The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be much data on these private schools, and any available data is wanting. At a minimum, provinces would need to know the acceptance, enrolment, graduation and employment rates at each of these schools. Ontario purports to make this data available, but it’s chock full of missing fields.

There are thousands of these private secondary schools across the country, but do the provinces know how many students attend them and on average how inflated their grades are? If they do, they aren’t sharing this information with universities, and despite auditing these private schools, rarely if ever shut them down.

Some universities have taken matters into their own hands. The University of Waterloo in Southwestern Ontario made headlines in 2018 for its “secret list” of high schools for which they adjust applicants’ grades. But if this effort is going to bring about meaningful change, it requires provincewide co-operation.

Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer who focuses on business, technology and society.

Source: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

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‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Willful blindness? Should have seen this coming:

Calling the federal government’s new restrictions on international students “a moratorium by stealth,” Ontario public colleges are warning that many thousands of students will soon be left in limbo, their hopes on hold.

The public statement released Thursday by Colleges Ontario, which represents the province’s 24 taxpayer-funded colleges, is the most critical response yet from the post-secondary education sector to changes announced this week by Immigration Minister Marc Miller to rein in a system that he’s previously said had “lost its integrity.”

“The decision has been rushed, resulting in a confusing and damaging early rollout. We urge the federal government to immediately engage with us and our provincial government in a meaningful conversation about the material impacts on students and Canada’s reputation,” said the four-page statement.

“Ontario’s public colleges are very concerned about the attacks on a high-performing, efficient public college system — impacting our reputation with potentially long-lasting negative repercussions.”

Public colleges in Ontario, which have seen an exponential growth of international enrolments over the past few years, had kept silent since October, when Miller started rolling out a series of changes to the international student program in response to public pushback about high levels of immigration and criticisms of its impact on affordable housing.

In December, a new system was put in place to authenticate schools’ letters of admission, followed by a doubling the cost-of-living financial requirement for study permit applicants on Jan. 1 to $20,635, in addition to their first year of tuition and travel costs.

Miller’s reforms

On Monday, after weeks of floating the idea of capping the number of international students in Canada, Miller imposed a two-year cap on new study permits issued in 2024, with an aim of reducing the number issued by 35 per cent from 2023’s level, to 364,000. The cap, however, won’t apply to students for master’s and doctoral programs or in elementary and secondary schools; the intake level will be reassessed in 2025.

Source: ‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

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Star editorial: Necessary reforms on international students and CILA statement

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

Even the Star supports these restrictions:

After weeks of foreshadowing, the federal government moved this week to cap the number of international student visas over the next two years. File this policy change in the “better late than never” category.

The number of international students flowing to this country has grown by such epic proportions it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than the federal Liberals were simply sleeping on this file. There have been no shortage of red flags, from Statistics Canada reports warning of the strain on affordable housingand access to social services to provincial auditors warning of an unhealthy dependence on international student fees by post-secondary institutions which are being underfunded.

Over the past two years, the number of international students in this country jumped from 617,000 to more than a million. About a third are in public universities but the overwhelming majority are in public colleges or private schools, often offering substandard education and a backdoor route to permanent status in this country. Immigration Minister Marc Miller, in announcing he is cutting the number of study permits by 35 per cent to 364,000 this year, is right to target the shady operators who are preying on international students and not doctoral and postgraduate international students at public universities. Miller says hundreds of the private schools should be shut down.

“It is not the intention of this program to have sham commerce degrees and business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour,” Miller said in making his announcement.

There are a number of threads to unravel from this announcement. First and foremost, as the minister stressed, this is not an indictment of foreign students. They are hardly responsible for a housing crunch or fears over access to stretched social services. International students were more likely the victims, living in crowded, substandard housing, dealing with a much more expensive country that they had anticipated and receiving diplomas which Miller says were being churned out like “puppy mills.” It was creating reputational damage to this country.

But these students would not be in this country without federal approval, so Miller is correcting a problem that his government largely created. According to a memo obtained by The Canadian Press, the Trudeau government was warned in 2022 that there was a widening gap between immigration and housing supply, largely driven by the increasing number of international students and temporary foreign workers admitted to this country.

This cap will be most acutely felt in Ontario, home to 51 per cent of international students. The Doug Ford government has twice been warned about a reliance on international student tuition fees, once in November by his own panel on colleges and universities, and in 2021 by the auditor-general who warned him not to increase a dependency on foreign student fees without a post-secondary education plan in place. The panel reported in November that the Progressive Conservatives had the lowest per student post-secondary funding in the country following a tuition cut and freeze that meant colleges and universities had reached the point at which revenue from international student tuition fees was “fundamental to the sector’s financial sustainability.” Now Ford is forced into some tough decisions. He will have to decide what schools can bring in international students and what schools should be eliminated, while protecting universities in financial trouble.

Finally, the Liberals – and all governments at all levels – must handle matters of immigration, including temporary foreign workers and international students, with utmost delicacy. To their credit, Canadians have held together on a consensus on the accommodation of immigrants. And to their credit, Canadian politicians have largely resisted any base urge to exploit frustration and anxiety in this country by playing the immigration card.

But the numbers are increasing. Some 500,000 immigrants will arrive next year and this country is going through a population boom during challenging economic times. Immigration will dominate much of the upcoming U.S. presidential election and delicacy is not a feature of debate to the south, particularly from Republicans.

It would not take much to bust that Canadian consensus. We trust our politicians to be vigilant on that score.

Source: Necessary reforms on international students

Sensible recommendations in CILA’s statement on Canada’s international student caps

CILA wishes to use this opportunity to highlight other means to better protect international students and promote the integrity of our higher education and immigration systems:

  • Federal and provincial governments must work together to identify how to fund our higher education system in a more sustainable fashion so that colleges and universities are not so reliant on international students to fund their operations.
  • The federal government needs to set more realistic expectations to international students about the feasibility of obtaining permanent residence following graduation. The federal government, in concert with colleges, universities, and immigration consultants continue to tout Canada’s TR to PR pathways, when the reality is attaining PR is a very competitive process that is far from a foregone conclusion.
  • IRCC may wish to consider increasing the English- and French-language proficiency requirements so that approved international students are better equipped to succeed in Canadian classrooms, the economy, and society.
  • Re-introduce the Post-Graduation Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to international graduates so that employers with genuine labour shortages can obtain work permits for international graduates with in-demand skills. This can also help such international graduates improve their odds of transitioning to PR.
  • Better regulate the conduct of immigration consultants in Canada and overseas to deter them from engaging in unethical behavior or with unauthorized agents that exploit international students.

CILA acknowledges the significant growth in Canada’s international student population has created significant integrity challenges and believes it is incumbent on governments across Canada to do more to provide both Canadian and international students with a better experience. CILA hopes such efforts will lead to a more sustainable path forward for Canada’s international student program. International students enrich Canada in many ways and are key to our global competitiveness. As such, it is imperative Canada get its international student program back on track so we can sustain the economic and social benefits that international students bring for many decades to come.

Source: Source: CILA’s statement on Canada’s international student caps

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Keller: Thanks to Marc Miller, the immigration system is (slightly) less broken, Clark: Ottawa finally acts on international student visas, setting a challenge for Doug Ford

2024/01/24 Leave a comment

Two of the better assessments:

Every journey begins with a first step. The Trudeau government has finally taken a step toward fixing what it broke in Canada’s immigration system. This is not the end of the trip, not even close. But it’s a start.

Ottawa didn’t do the breaking on its own. The provinces helped. So did business.

…Mr. Miller has finally taken a first step to repairing the immigration system. All he has to do now is keep walking.

Source: Thanks to Marc Miller, the immigration system is (slightly) less broken

Still, Mr. Ford faces a challenge now. The days of unlimited student visas are numbered, so his government has to decide which schools will get them. Will they prioritize top-notch talent, or keep business going for a low-standard industry?

Of course, Ontario’s failing shouldn’t let the federal Liberals off the hook. They were asleep while the number of temporary residents ballooned. It took ages for the Liberals to even see that massive policy failure while the damaging consequences were piling up on so many ordinary folks.

Finally, albeit belatedly, Mr. Miller has acted. Over to you, Mr. Ford.

Source: Ottawa finally acts on international student visas, setting a challenge for Doug Ford

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