International student graduates earn much less than Canadian peers, study shows

2025/02/07 1 Comment

Of concern, particularly at masters and PhD levels:

International students earn substantially less than their Canadian counterparts upon graduation, and a larger proportion of them end up in sales and service jobs, new research from Statistics Canada shows.

The data – part of a report by the agency examining the labour-market outcomes of university and college graduates in Canada – capture the inequity in wages and types of jobs that international students eventually obtain compared with Canadian graduates.

Over all, international student graduates earned 19.6 per cent less than Canadian graduates three years after graduating, the report found. Moreover, their annual incomes were lower than Canadian graduates at all levels of study, regardless of if they earned a diploma or a doctorate degree.

The report used data from a 2023 national survey of graduates conducted by Statscan, and focused on the graduating class of 2020.

Foreign students with a bachelor’s degree, for example, earned a median annual income of $52,000, compared with Canadian graduates at $65,200. At the master’s level, international students earned 16.6 per cent less than Canadians – $70,000 compared with $83,900, annually.

A critical difference in the employment outcomes for foreign students compared to Canadian graduates can be seen in the proportion of international students who work in sales and service occupations. Across all education levels, approximately 28 per cent of international student graduates worked in sales and service jobs, compared with roughly 12 per cent of Canadian graduates.

Some examples of sales and service occupations, according to the National Occupation Classification system, include retail and restaurant workers, door-to-door salespeople and call-centre operators. These jobs tend to pay lower wages than, for example, management occupations or jobs in business and finance.

Brittany Etmanski, the report’s author, suggested that one reason for the significant earnings differential between foreign graduates and Canadian graduates was because more of the former group tended to be college and bachelor’s degree holders employed in the low-wage sales and service sectors.

“However, this does not explain the difference in income at the masters and doctoral levels,” she wrote….

Source: International student graduates earn much less than Canadian peers, study shows

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StatsCan: Official language proficiency and immigrant labour market outcomes: Evidence from test-based multidimensional measures of language skills 

2023/01/28 Leave a comment

Of interest. Significant difference:

Numerous studies have demonstrated that higher proficiency in the language spoken in the destination country improves immigrant labour market outcomes. However, because of a lack of objective measures of language skills, previous studies have mainly drawn on subjective measures of language proficiency and were confined to the effect of only one dimension or general language skills. This study examines the effects of test-based measures of official language proficiency in four dimensions—listening, speaking, reading and writing—on immigrant employment and earnings. The analysis focuses on economic principal applicants admitted through the Express Entry (EE) system who immigrated to Canada from 2015 to 2018. A self-reported language measure based on self-reported knowledge of official languages at immigration and mother tongue is also examined for comparison. 

The analysis of employment outcomes shows that in the initial years after immigration, test-based language measures in all four dimensions, as well as the self-reported language measure, had little effect on the incidence of employment. The analysis of earnings, however, shows that the predictive power and the marginal effect of each of the four dimensions of test-based language measures were much stronger than those of the self-reported measure, indicating that using the latter can considerably underestimate the effect of language skills on earnings. The four test-based measures of official language skills all had independent positive effects on earnings. Reading tended to have a stronger predictive power and a larger marginal effect than the other three dimensions, but the differences across the four dimensions were generally small. The tested official language skills were as important as pre-immigration Canadian work experience and more important than the educational level and age at immigration in predicting initial earnings of principal applicants admitted under the EE system.

Source: Official language proficiency and immigrant labour market outcomes: Evidence from test-based multidimensional measures of language skills

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Are the gaps in labour market outcomes between immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts starting to close?

2021/05/10 Leave a comment

Another important and good analysis from Statistics Canada, highlighting some improvement in economic outcomes from “two step” immigrations (temporary residents transitioning to permanent residency):

Earlier studies have well documented the expanding earnings gap between new immigrant workers and their Canadian-born counterparts during the 1980s and 1990s. However, significant policy changes in immigration selection and settlement have been introduced since the early 2000s, and the employment rate and entry earnings among new immigrants have been improving in recent years.

Little research has been undertaken to examine whether the earnings gap between new immigrant and Canadian-born workers has recently started to close. This paper compares the employment rate and the weekly earnings of immigrant and Canadian-born workers throughout the 2000s and 2010s. It is based on information from the censuses from 2001 to 2016 and information from the Labour Force Survey from 2015 to 2019. Analyses are conducted for new immigrants (in Canada for 1 to 5 years), recent immigrants (in Canada for 6 to 10 years) and long-term immigrants (in Canada for over 10 years).

Over the 2000-to-2019 period, the employment rate for new and recent immigrant men grew faster than for Canadian-born men, and the relative employment position of new immigrant women also improved slightly. The earnings gap between immigrant workers and Canadian-born workers with similar sociodemographic characteristics widened between 2000 and 2015, with both years posting similar national unemployment rates.

In the late 2010s, there was some improvement in the earnings gaps for immigrant men and women relative to their Canadian-born counterparts. This improvement may be related to the rising demand for labour during these years, since relative labour market outcomes for immigrants tend to improve during expansions and to deteriorate during contractions. It may also be related, in part, to the increased tendency to select economic immigrants from the pool of temporary foreign workers. This has been shown to improve both entry earnings and longer-term earnings.

Source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2021004/article/00004-eng.htm

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