You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have.

Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been wrecked by the September announcement that most of the programs (and specifically business programs) that their international students take are now excluded from the Post-Graduate Work Permit system. If you’re in Southern Ontario, you may think that all international students are in “global business” programs, and that the only way colleges knew how to attract these students was to pack them into these programs, sometimes turning them over to PPP colleges for instruction, and then using the tuition fees either to build new buildings, hoard annual surpluses and cross-subsidize money-losing programs (which tends to include trades).

But that’s not actually the case. If you look across the country, particularly in small-town colleges, you’ll find lots of colleges across the country that have done a pretty good job bringing students into those high-labour-market demand programs, particularly in health and trades, whose graduates are still eligible for PGWP. So: the first thing that’s going to happen is that all those urban institutions, particularly in southern Ontario, are going to be learning from their further-afield cousins and start recruiting directly into PGWP-eligible programs.

(There is also going to be a whole heck of a lot of lobbying about which programs are allowed into the PGWP. The actual list, available here, is remarkably idiosyncratic, a reflection of the fact that IRCC doesn’t have a strong grasp of either i) which occupations are actually in demand in various parts of the country, ii) the NOC codes which describe the eligible occupations or iii) how to do a cross-walk between NOC codes and CIP codes which describe actual educational programs. So you have weird situations where two almost identical programs are being treated differently, one inside the program, one outside, or occupations like Early Childhood Care is not on the list of “in-demand occupations” when many parts of the country are dying for them, or tourist regions with needs for a strong supply of culinary and hospitality students are being told to go pound sand…I could go on but trust me, the details of this policy are an absolute mess.)

Now, while colleges are certainly going to change the focus of their international marketing and admissions, this alone is not going to prevent a massive drop in international student numbers. Adopting these kinds of tactics might reduce colleges’ losses of international students from 80% to a mere 50 or 60% or so—better than nothing, but not exactly salvation. But there’s a corollary here. Recall that under the new recruitment system imposed by the feds last January, each province got a quota allocation of visa spaces, and each province then allocated a quota to each institution (more details about this in blogs on student visa systems, provincial predictions, and developments made later in February after the announcement). If the colleges are about to lose half their spots, it stands to reason that provinces are likely to re-allocate their quotas in universities’ favour. Take Ontario, where 80% of provincial allocation letters were given to colleges. If the province takes half of those away and gives them to universities, that would triple the potential allocation to universities. Given a continued provincial tuition freeze and a provincial government that would prefer all universities take a long walk off a short pier, you had better believe universities are seeing dollar signs here.

This re-allocation of spaces towards universities will occur in every province other than Quebec, where international enrolment in colleges is close-to zero (Quebec institutions have to worry about a whole bunch of other nonsense with respect to international student allocation because the CAQ has now decided that it will introduce its own limits to international student numbers “in order to curb abuses at some institutions,” which depending on who you ask might mean Université du Québec à Trois Rivières due to its extraordinarily high percentage of international students filing asylum claims or possibly McGill, Concordia, and Bishops due to their practice of teaching while being anglophone…we’ll soon find out, I guess). Apart from BC, the shift towards universities won’t be as dramatic because in most provinces universities already own a larger share of the quotas. But the direction of change will be consistent.

The real question is “will universities be able to make use of these spots?” And the answer is short term no, long term ka-CHING!.

The short-term looks bad. Marc Miller’s constant belittling of the sector undermines Canada’s image as a destination and the constant chopping and changing of rules makes agents in other countries view us as not worth the bother. Policy stability matters, and Miller knows this, but driving down demand is a feature of his policy, not a bug. Miller does not care in the slightest because the louder institutions scream, the more he looks like a tough, decisive guy. Expect more chopping and changing right through to the election.

The short-term is also bad because of what’s going on in Canada-India relations. There has been a pretty steady drumbeat from the Government (echoed in the increasingly subservient Indian media) that Canada is a dangerous place for Indians (as long as you understand the subtext that, for the purpose of discussions about Canada, Punjabis aren’t really Indians). That was never a huge problem in the college sector, because Punjabis just ignored the media on this issue. But in the university sector, where Indian students are more likely to come from places like Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, this has caused a real fall in applications. That’s unlikely to change in the near term, though a change of government in Ottawa might cause a re-set.

But over the longer term? Canda is still a great destination for education, particularly if there is a path to permanent residency at the end. Universities can sell a good product. The India thing will pass. Canadian universities will eventually diversify their recruitment pool, get their pricing right (institutions tend to overprice in Ontario and underprice elsewhere). And eventually, this is going to help drive a turnaround in their fortunes.

International student recruitment isn’t dead. It’s not even resting. It is going to morph a bit, and then come back as important, albeit probably not quite as lucrative, as ever.