Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in 2025 came another set of changes including a 10% cut in the national limit. And then, on top of that, a set of new conditions on post-graduate work visas were imposed which were specifically designed to depress demand for certain types of education.
To the extent that the world outside post-secondary education absorbed this news and didn’t dismiss it outright because Ontario colleges in particular “deserved it” for pouring gasoline onto a housing shortage bonfire, the reaction to all this was: “boy, losing nearly half your international students is really going to lead to a financial pinch”. But this reaction was wrong in two ways. First, that 50-percent was an average – in most cases, institutions either saw drops that were either significantly higher or significantly lower than that. Partly, this was because the federal government designed the cap drop to hit provinces unequally (Ontario to the max and Quebec not at all, for instance) and part of it had to do with the fact that some provinces distributed the cap hit in some peculiar ways (see back here for an earlier blog on this).
But second, and most importantly, not many institutions actually even met these significantly-lowered quotas. Talk to folks in institutions these days and they will tell you that it’s not that the caps are too low, but that demand for Canadian post-secondary has simply dried up: no one wants to come to Canada anymore. I believe this. Former Immigration Minister Marc Miller did a serious number on the reputation of Canada’s post-secondary. If you go around accusing institutions of fraud and deceit and imposing clampdowns on student visas (it wasn’t just the caps – visa processing times are up and visa refusal rates are rising too), foreign students might get the idea that the country doesn’t want them, and so they never apply in the first place. I am sure Marc Miller would deny ever wanting to dry up demand, but it is exactly what his ham-fisted, Attila-the-Hun in a China shop approach to student visas managed to achieve.
(And still, so many bien-pensant people think Liberals are the good guys on higher education. Or think more federal involvement in the higher education file would be a good thing. God Save Us All.)
Anyways, as a result of this, universities and colleges are in a funk and wondering if and when international students will come back and (partially) save their bacon, financially speaking. But what is shocking, to me at least, is how unbelievably passive the sector is. They are waiting for students to come. Just waiting. ‘Why don’t they come?’ people ask. ‘It’s that darn Marc Miller! Nothing we can do about it’.
You see the problem with the international student industry in Canada is that institutions themselves never grew an overseas recruitment game the way UK and Australian institutions did. By the time Canadian institutions started thinking about the whole international-students-as-revenue thing, the feds had already created the student-to-permanent immigration pathway via our post-graduate work visas and the like. And then, when things got hotter, aggregators like ApplyBoard came along and made it so easy to attract students that a lot of Canadian institutions just never upped their ground game on student recruitment.
You see, despite Canadian institutions’ tendency to congratulate themselves on their “international outlook” and their ability to attract international students, very few of them ever bothered to go deep either on recruitment tactics (spending time abroad, juicing the recruitment pipeline) or on paying attention to the international student experience on campus. Some did, of course, but I can count the number who would be considered on par with the top institutions in the anglosphere on one hand.
When it comes to internationalization, Canada is the kid who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple. So many unearned advantages. And so, when Attila-the-Minister came along and took away most of those unearned advantages, people did not know what to do. The simple answer – UP YOUR GROUND GAME IN A FEW KEY TARGET MARKETS FOR GOD’S SAKE – seems not to have been considered very widely.
I suspect one of the reasons for this is a deeply unsexy one: internal funding formulas for non-academic units. You see, under the enshittification model that is widely prevalent in Canadian institutions (more so in universities than colleges, but the latter aren’t immune from it), when a budget crunch happens, everyone needs to cut back. And so, international units, far from being given more money to go fight for students in overseas markets, sometimes have to scale back their activities (or at least not increase them as they should). The idea that it takes money to make money does not fit easily with a budget model that bases this year’s budget on what you got last year plus or minus a percentage point or two.
This is bananas, of course. Self-destructive, even. But even if you gave international offices more money, they wouldn’t necessarily know how to spend it. The born-on-third-base thing meant we never needed to fight that hard for international students – they just kind of showed up. The situation Canadian institutions are in right now requires a lot more bodies on the ground overseas, understanding individual city markets, developing relationships with schools and agents, and attending more fairs, in more cities and more countries. This is how Australia and the UK developed their international markets. We managed to skip a lot of that in the ‘10s. We are going to have to learn it now.
The shock, pain and impact of both the visa caps and Marc Miller setting fire to the country’s reputation are all real. Never forgive, never forget (but also: never again wish for the federal government to be more active in post-secondary education). But institutions are not without agency here. My feeling is that in too many cases they are just throwing up their hands, either because they prefer not to spend on recruitment or are insufficiently skilled at doing so in the absence of a cuddly national image or an absurdly favorable visa system.
You want markets? Invest in them. Fight for them. If Canadian post-secondary education is as good as everyone claims it is, students will come. Passiveness helps no one.