Much of the current discourse about international students sounds something like this:

“We love international students, it’s just that we want them to get a more Canadian-oriented education. They shouldn’t be in global business programs, they should be in trades programs, they should be in health programs. You know, things that contribute to Canadian society. If only we enrolled international students in these programs, we could let in more and more of them”.

This is, simply, a combination of wishful thinking and outright crap.

First of all, anyone who talks this way seems to be unaware that international education is a MARKET. Students are buying education that makes sense for them. They want what they want. The idea that they are suddenly going to take a program because it happens to be convenient for the Canadian state or the Canadian economy is kind of hilarious. I mean, I suppose if you want to make our immigration system even more transactional than it currently is require international students to do a kind of indentured apprenticeship in a specific field of study, then fill your boots.

Second of all, what is it that people think is preventing colleges (and to a lesser extent universities) from offering programs in the areas like Health and Trades? Let me explain this in the shortest words possible:

There are no spaces. There is no capacity. Labour regulations get in the way.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

The fastest route into the trades in Canada is through apprenticeships. But to be an apprentice, you need to be hired full-time by a firm conducting work in a given trade. Students on visas can’t be hired on such a basis even if employers had a mind to offer them jobs. For more international students to come into trades, we need to have some bespoke paths for them to do so. I have yet to see a provincial government make a serious move in this direction. I will go out on a limb here and say that perhaps this is in part because there are some folks in the trades who are quite comfortable with the notion of a restricted supply of tradespeople and are not eager to open up such alternate routes. But I’ll leave that topic for another day.

In health, one of the biggest barriers to increased supply is the fact that it’s really hard to manage and expand clinical placements in a health care system that is stretched to the limit and in some cases falling apart. You need nurses to supervise clinical placements. If you don’t have nurses (or, I suspect, if you are mostly just using agency nurses), it’s hard to train new ones. Post-secondary institutions can’t fix this one on their own. It requires governments to get involved and spend some actual money first. So, sure, we could try to get more international students to take nursing….but could we actually provide enough spaces to train them? Not clear.

To be fair, we might have enough. From everything I am hearing this year, we are going into an almighty slump in Nursing enrolments: seemingly, the profession is a lot less attractive than it used to be and institutions are having trouble filling their spots. Maybe this is a short-term thing, but if not then presumably there is more room for international students here.

And finally, there is the whole idea of getting more students into areas that are already pretty massively oversubscribed. Like STEM subjects. On the whole, Canadian universities have been able to accommodate both new international students and new domestic students in STEM and health over the past few decades (see Figure 1, below). But remember that almost none of the billions of dollars that has gone to fund this enrolment transition (and it’s expensive, with STEM/Health costs per student being anything between 50% and 100% more expensive than purely lecture-based programs) over the past fifteen years has come from government. Instead, with the exception of some government panic spending on nursing spots, institutions have largely self-funded this shift.

Figure 1: University enrolments, STEM/Health vs. Everything Else, 1992-93 to 2020-21

And that’s fine—in fact, that’s been a pretty productive use of international student dollars over the years. But at a certain point, expanding capacity wears out the infrastructure. And with only three semi-exceptions (Quebec, Alberta, and BC), governments aren’t spending money to renew infrastructure. So this particular “path” to bringing in international students, if it is to actually work, also requires government investment—this time in scientific and lab infrastructure—so as to actually increase capacity.

Technically speaking, these lines of wishful thinking aren’t entirely baseless, exactly. If you could change the rules around apprenticeships (which the government has chosen not to do), you might get a lot more international students through this pathway. If the government could sort out the mess in hospital-based nursing, and it invested a lot of money in scientific infrastructure then yes, we might get more international students in these kinds of pathways. But, for God’s sake, people, it was precisely governments’ collective failure to do this properly that led institutions to enroll students in other, cheaper programs?

It would be great if the policy discussion around international students could, just for once, be less aggravatingly clueless. I’m not holding my breath. But it would be great.