So, the feds finally moved on the whole student visa thing. And…it’s big.
What I’m writing about today comes from a combination of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Marc Miller’s announcement yesterday and information passed to me about the briefing IRCC gave to university and college association heads last Friday. It’s as up-to-date as I can make it, which is not easy because not everything I heard today was consistent with I heard over the weekend (which suggests to me that there may have been some late-night re-drafting).
Best as I can tell, IRCC had originally wanted to introduce a system of “visa caps lite” in which hard caps would not be introduced, but preference for visa processing would be based on some kind of system that would rank institutions in terms of their “trustworthiness.” This, as I wrote back here, was a deeply undertheorized (I’m being polite here) effort, with most indicators having an uncertain relationship with “trustworthiness,” or a susceptibility to being gamed or both. IRCC has not abandoned this idea but has now declared that it will not be able implement the idea until 2026. It is unclear whether this is because they concluded their approach to indicators was in fact doofusful, or if they just realized that the data to populate the indicators in many cases does not exist. In any event, moving the date meant they couldn’t propose these measures as a solution to the increasingly politically hot file of rising international student numbers (and the housing crisis they did not cause but are certainly exacerbating).
With that avenue ruled out, IRCC went with plan B: actual hard caps on visas. I wrote back here about the problems created by hard caps: mainly, that once you cap you have to decide how to ration the opportunities available for students. I suggested at the time that if the IRCC went down that route, the best way to do it was to allocate spaces by province and allow each province to figure out the rationing. I also suggested that an even better way to solve the problem was to avoid caps altogether and just take steps to reduce demand for Canadian higher education.
As it happens, the feds took both pieces of advice to heart.
In terms of caps, the proposed measures currently include:
- Starting in “fall 2024” (though, see below) the total number of student visas will be rolled back to roughly 2022 levels (there’s a more detailed formula that involves the number of expiring visas, but it’s complicated) and then keeping them capped for a minimum of two years. It is estimated that this will result in a drop of at least 200,000 spots. Important: according to press reports on the Monday announcements, graduate students are exempt from the cap.
- In terms of rationing, each province will be allocated a total number of visas proportionate to its share of population. That means the cut will be almost entirely concentrated in Ontario, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia. Many provinces will not see a cut at all.
- Each province will be responsible for allocating visas among its own institutions. All provinces will be required to provide students with a letter or certificate attached to their applications, indicating the institution that the student is to attend (this already happens in Quebec but it’s going to be a significant change elsewhere).
In other words, this is going to affect provinces in different ways. Quite clearly, the biggest hit will be to Ontario, and at this point literally nobody knows how it will react. We know the provincial government has an ideological predilection for the private sector over the public: this is in fact why it has been quite sanguine about throwing gasoline on the raging fire of the housing crisis in southern Ontario by greenlighting ever more students in private colleges under contract to public ones (see here for more on that).
But as I said, the government strategy isn’t just about caps. It’s also about making Canadian higher education less desirable. And it is doing this primarily by changing the rules on the Post-Graduate Work Program, a program over which it has sole legal authority.
The PGWP has been a key factor in the rise of international students in Canada. First implemented by the Harper government, the idea stemmed from the observation that many immigrants had a hard time getting a foot in the door with respect to the labour market because they lacked “Canadian experience.” It allowed graduates of Canadian programs to stay in the country and work after graduation. By doing so, they could get Canadian work experience and then apply through the “Canadian Experience Class” to get permanent residence. Thus, Canadian education became a recognized “front door” pathway to citizenship.
The numbers for this worked when the number of students coming into the country were in the low hundreds of thousands and most of them were university students. The math changed when numbers tripled or quadrupled and many of them went to college and found relatively menial jobs after graduation. Suddenly, the pipeline of students heading towards through the PGWP vastly outnumbered the number of spots available in the “Canadian Experience Class” (which I believe is capped in the mid tens of thousands). Agents—if not the universities and colleges themselves—have been promising a route to citizenship for years. For a while now, that proposal has not been a realistic future for many. PGWP reform was inevitable.
So here is what the feds are proposing:
- The length of a PGWP will now be directly tied to the length of program study. This is already mostly the case: the main change here is that graduates of two-year college programs will no longer be eligible for three-year work visas.
- The restriction on private non-degree granting institutions access to the PGWP will be extended to programs at Public-Private Partnership (PPPs) institutions in Ontario which will no longer be eligible for the PGWP.
That second one? It’s huge. Ontario colleges outside the GTA have upwards of 125,000 international students in GTA-area PPPs. Without the promise of a post-graduation work visa, it is hard to see how those spots are going to stay filled. My very rough guess is that this is going to take at least $1.5 billion in revenue out of Ontario colleges’ hands. They’ll have fewer students to teach so their costs will drop too, but still, this is going to hurt. A lot. I’d wager a couple of the northern colleges, who used PPPs as a way to escape the brutal economic of teaching in the more sparsely populated north, will be in need of a bailout soon.
IRCC is also touting one other measure to tamp down demand: denying open work permits to spouses of international students. My impression is that this only applies to students under the cap, meaning that it does not apply to graduate students, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.
Overall, this package is pretty well-balanced. It avoids constitutional issues by handing rationing over to the provinces, and politically speaking, puts pressure on the provincial governments who have been most eager to offload the funding of their institutions to international students. It reduces demand for only a very specific type of post-secondary education: that is, the desperately under-regulated PPP market in the GTA (which also happens to be the site of some of the worst housing pressures).
There are two wildcards here, of course, is what the provinces end up doing with respect to rationing. That will be very, very interesting to watch (and of course, provincial governments, if you’re in need of ideas or counsel, you know where to find us). And the second is how and how quickly the feds will move to implement this project. They are using language about “fall 2024,” but there are already students applying for visas for fall 2024. For any of these initiatives to mean anything in fall 2024, they would have to be implemented almost immediately—and that would mean suspending visa processing almost immediately until provinces got their act together with respect to allocating visa spots and issuing certificates. This could create a lot of uncertainty in the short term.
Stay tuned. This story has a ways to go.
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Thanx for this most informative analysis.
I am repeatedly very annoyed that Canadian governments develop policy in semi secret, consulting only a favoured few, and half release information to secret squirrel meetings.
In contrast, the Australian Government also changed its immigration policy substantially recently. This followed 2 reviews, whose reports were published with the Government’s responses. One of the reviews was a full review with a discussion paper, and public submissions and consultations.
The new policy was published as a full plan, an action plan, and a description at a glance. This greatly facilitates understanding, acceptance and implementation by the public, prospective students, and institutions.
Australian Government Department of Home Affairs. (2023). Migration strategy, https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/migration-strategy
Regarding this, “All provinces will be required to provide students with a letter or certificate attached to their applications, indicating the institution that the student is to attend (this already happens in Quebec but it’s going to be a significant change elsewhere).”
Doesn’t the study permit issued by CIC/IRCC not already include the name of the institution that the student is allowed to attend? What does this kind of certificate look like in Quebec right now?
Quebec has the CAQ (certificat acceptation du quebec) — once you get acceptance from a university, you have to get the CAQ to be able to get a Canadian study permit. Canadian study permit also indicates the institution name… and in the past when international students were not allowed to work off campus at all, the study permit specifically indicated that the student was only allowed to work on the campus of said institution.
Hi Alex,
Really appreciate your posts. However, can you please clarify where you got this information?
“The length of a PGWP will now be directly tied to the length of program study. This is already mostly the case: the main change here is that graduates of two-year college programs will no longer be eligible for three-year work visas.”
This is not my understanding, and it’s not listed anywhere here: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-number-of-new-international-student-permits-issued-to-approximately-360000-for-2024.html
What I do see is: “Graduates of master’s and other short graduate-level programs will soon be eligible to apply for a 3-year work permit.” – meaning, graduates of master’s/grad-level programs with a duration of less than 2 years will be eligible for a full 3-year PGWP (longer than they currently are).
I think this is a key point missed in your analysis above – I have to expect this will likely result in a ballooning of international student enrollments in short-term master’s/graduate-level programs in the near future. In other words – professional master’s degrees will become the new college degree! Institutions able to offer/expand such programs will significantly benefit, as many charge high tuition fees for professional-oriented master’s programs, and graduate students are not included in the overall cap.
And yes, as per https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-number-of-new-international-student-permits-issued-to-approximately-360000-for-2024.html, “open work permits will only be available to spouses of international students in master’s and doctoral programs. The spouses of international students in other levels of study, including undergraduate and college programs, will no longer be eligible.”
Again, a big selling point for those professional master’s programs.
Thank you, indeed. There is a lot of food for thought here for everybody involved with running, funding, or regulating higher education institutions. I can sense that federal bureaucrats and politicians have been sticking their heads together and done some serious brainstorming on how to come up with some sort of fix within a short time frame. Of course, there are only finitely many knobs and buttons and wheels on the panel, and dialing that particular knob in that particular direction will almost inevitably create that particular follow-up problem. Be that as it may, it’s a genuine effort for correction while trying to minimize collateral damage, and that in and by itself is encouraging.
An interesting side effect of this whole conundrum is that nobody can game this to their political advantage without hurting themselves more than anybody else. So now provincial bureaucrats and politicians have to stick their heads together and come up with plans to make this work in collaboration with the feds. And while you’re on it: Please think of the fact that international tuition won’t be sufficient anymore to balance the books. You’ll have to make a conscious choice about the future of your higher education institutions. A choice that you will be remembered for, one way or another.
Any possibility that a province with international enrolment numbers below its cap could figure out how to sell its excess capacity to the provinces that will be constrained? Or would that require a degree of cooperation (among provincial governments and also institutions, I suppose) that is too complicated to implement?
Seems to me then the obvious work around for universities at least, to offset the inevitable decrease in undergraduate international tuition, would be to increase international enrolment in 1-2 year course based Master’s programs. These types of programs charge considerable fees, typically do not provide students with funding (unlike thesis-based research STEM Master’s), and are relatively low cost to run. The UK is famous for low quality 1 year master’s degrees that aren’t that difficult to get admitted to so long as you can pay that attract a substantial number of international students hoping to use them as immigration pathways. The US also sees thousands of students from India and China every year applying to expensive course-based STEM Master’s, mostly in the fields of CS, Data Science, and Engineering, for the 3 year work visa it grants them.
“The length of a PGWP will now be directly tied to the length of program study”. Didn’t see any announcement regard this- is it something for the future?
It was in the briefing given to associations last Friday afternoon. It is possible they changed their minds over the weekend; it;s also possible that not everything being implemented is actually in the announcement. Hard to tell.
With respect to the PGWP being tied to length of study – this would be a BIG change for 2-year college diploma programs. I don’t see reference to this in the IRCC announcement. Is there another announcement pending?
Which either tells you that a) they were giving people false information on Friday, when the associations were given briefing, or b) the announcement doesn’t actually contain all the actual details, c) they made a lot of changes between Friday and Monday or d) all of the above.
My money is on d. Which is to say, you might be right, but I wouldn;t count on the announcement being the definitive version.
Students are not to blame for the housing shortage. The housing shortage has been a long time in making. A cap on international students will only offer minimal relief. I sense some are operating in blame game mode. No names is there an election any time soon. Are there bad actors yes o f course but there everywhere, in post secondary, the government, business and the media and so on. What should have been the solution was to have a dialogue in public and in open. After all that is what ought to happen in a democracy. Gavin made me laugh with the secret squirrel meetings which is a very accurate description of this very unfortunate set of events. Stop blaming the students and do a deep dive into this mess and get on with focusing on innovation, leadership, and good policy. Oh Canada we need someone to stand on guard for thee. From coast to coast to coast.
The UK is much farther down this road than Canada is, and the government was smart enough to realize that this means there’s still something in the tank for Canada: poach the would-be masters students who’ve had the door closed on the UK. It’s a quite nimble move, with the only downside being the creation of tons of extremely low quality MSc programs that border on being scams.
The real story is what the UK does now, because Canada is going be in that position within a few years.
Great analysis.
The term “doofusful,” inspired.
The average Punjabi family works 74 years to afford one year of education here. Canada brings in 21 billion from international students. Call it PPP, call it an alternative revenue stream… doofusification. Such a massive transfer of wealth form the Global South is colonialism, and administrators and politicians bemoaning the cap and lost fleecing are like plantation owners wondering whatever shall happen now that slavery is abolished.
21 Billion from international students. These must be very well off international students whose families are more than capable of paying high tuition in the first place. The displacement of home grown students by international students with access to money to pay for high tuition has become a concern to the tax paying population of Canada. Why? Because the federal government is pandering to international students in front of its own home grown students under the guise of (DEI) Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
International students choose to attend classes in an establishment built by colonialism but in the same breath berate colonialism and everything they cherry pick it to stand for. You are speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If you are that anti-colonialism you would not want to attend a Canadian University. Or would you?
Our sun got a formal acceptance letter to Selkirk (SROAM program in Hospitality school) the Thursday night before this announcement. Now we’re biting our nails to see the process and hope he can get a Visa before Sept. We’re American and have a French exchange student. We were joking the other night that Canada ‘just goes for it’. France announces they are thinking about ‘it’ and everyone protests. In America, we announce ‘it’, delay ‘it’, and then adopt half of ‘it’.