Just as I finish writing about the huge boom in STEM enrolments, along comes the Financial Post’s Diane Francis with a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers op-ed effectively arguing that international students are stealing all the spots in Science and Engineering. She contends that Canadian university STEM programs should only be for Canadian students because foreign students all return home and this leaves us defenceless in a world of massive technological change.  This article is such a grab-bag of bad arguments I decided to answer it immediately; the promised follow-up piece on faculty hires in STEM and Arts will come tomorrow.

First, this notion that the future is going to demand lots of STEM jobs is…shaky.  You’d think that if Science skills were hugely in demand that there would be an increase in science graduate salaries, right?  Scarcity causes prices to rise, right?  Well, here’s graduate salaries in four scientific fields, plus social science for comparison:

Figure 1: Graduate Salaries 2 Years After Graduation, by Graduating Class, Select Fields of Study

Yes, Engineering and Mathematics degrees seem to be more or less holding their own, but the path for biological and physical sciences grads is pretty sharply negative – basically no different than grads in the social sciences.  If the labour market is screaming for more science graduates, it seems to be doing so awfully quietly.

Second, this notion that international students don’t stay?  Nonsense.  Roughly a quarter do.  Here’s the Statscan paper on the subject. I found it with less than a minute’s googling.

Third, this idea Francis has that international students are squeezing out domestic ones comes from this paper by Peter Wylie from UBC-Okanagan.  Having looked at it, I can’t actually see what he’s on about.  He is only using about three years worth of data and none of it shows declines in domestic student enrolments (or even much in the way of increases in international student enrolments).  What seems to have his underwear in a knot is the fact that UBC changed the wording of its entry criteria from “International Student GPAs must meet or exceed those of domestic students” to “international students should be admitted [if they are] comparable to domestic students”.  Wylie seems to think this represents UBC letting in the riff-raff in the pursuit of filthy lucre; I am not privy to the details but I suspect that the wording change has more to do with a growing awareness of the infernal difficulty of trying to equivalize GPAs across international systems than anything else.

It just so happens that a number of the institutions I looked at yesterday re: big STEM enrolment increases break down their undergraduate enrolments both by faculty and visa status.  So, I went back to the data to look at how much of the growth was due to international student.  As it turns out, there was not a single institution where international students accounted for even half of the growth in STEM enrolment over the past seven years.

Figure 2: Increase in STEM Enrolment 2009-2016, by Visa Status, 6 Ontario Universities

Now, I can’t vouch that this is the case in every single STEM program in every single university.  In fact, one exception I did find was U of T Engineering, which has gone from having 254 international students out of 1115 in 2008 to having 382 international students out of 1,084 in 2016.  That’s a pretty clear example of an institution choosing to enrol more international students at the expense of domestic ones (though, to be fair, there’s no evidence that this is because of the lowering of standards of which Wylie accuses UBC; U of T might well simply say the standard of competition is rising).  But it is the only example I have been able to find at the undergraduate level.

(Of course, all of the foregoing is just about undergraduate students. When it comes to graduate studies, every STEM lab on the continent would shut down without foreign graduate students.  The idea of a Canadian-only rule is not even worth contemplating.)

So, in short: it’s not clear the labour market requires way more STEM grads.  Even if that weren’t true, quite a few international students stay and hence contribute to the Canadian STEM labour market.  And even if that weren’t true there is very little evidence that international students are crowding out domestic students.

All things Diane Francis would know with only a bit of research.  But I guess visions of educational autarky make better copy.

Tomorrow: that promised piece on faculty complements.