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Many of you have asked me over the past couple of days regarding the potential impact of Monday’s announcement on study permits and post-graduate work visas. Nationally, I can only give you one certainty: because Master’s programs—all Master’s programs—lie outside the cap, everyone and their dog is going to try to load up on students taking expensive 8 month Master’s programs. Including private institutions—the model here will be Northeastern university, with its campuses in Vancouver and Toronto (quite near HESA Towers as it goes). Provincial degree approval boards should brace themselves.

As for the rest: a lot of it is going to depend on where you are in the country. It’s best to break up the analysis by province, grouping them by how close their current international student numbers are to the new federal caps.

The Easy Provinces (Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Alberta)

These are the provinces where the expected cap exceeds current visa uptake by a significant margin. The imposition of the new caps/distribution will mean almost nothing in these provinces as the number of available spots remains high. In Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, I would anticipate continued increases in international numbers; in Quebec, I have my doubts, given the proportion of international students who prefer their education in English. In Alberta, though, I think it’s likely that a number of new private institutions from other provinces will try to move into the market to take advantage of space under the cap.

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The Borderline Provinces (New Brunswick, Manitoba)

These are two provinces where the number of current spots more or less equals the new cap. I suspect what both will do is simply freeze permits at something very close to current numbers and distributions. Easiest decision imaginable.

The Problematic Provinces (British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island)

Now it starts to get complicated, because we’re into the provinces where some institutions will inevitably lose spots. Governments might simply drop everyone’s existing numbers proportionately, but they may also be tempted to try to achieve other goals with their rationing strategy.

In British Columbia, I think there are two issues the government will have to deal with. The first is whether the government chooses to prioritize the public sector over the private. My impression is that the phenomenon of private vocational colleges educating international students directly (rather than through a PPP arrangement as in Ontario) is more pronounced here than elsewhere in the country. An NDP government might well choose to privilege publics over privates in which case public institutions might not in fact experience all that big of a hit. The second set of decisions has to do with geographic concentration: the influx of international students has certainly caused a lot more disruption in the housing market in the lower mainland than elsewhere. It is possible that we will see allocations tighten more around Vancouver than in, say, Victoria, Prince George, Terrace, etc.

In Nova Scotia, some will undoubtedly suggest that if there is to be a reduction in spaces, those spaces should fall disproportionately on the two institutions that account for x% of the international students: Dalhousie and (especially) Cape Breton. Personally, I would not want to be the person who starts a fight with Cape Breton president David Dingwall.  But a conservative government? You never know. The politics here are pretty interesting.

PEI only has two institutions, and they have pretty similar levels of international student enrolment. Those are going to have to be pulled back a bit, and the likeliest scenario is that they get pulled back relatively evenly.

Ontario (the hugely problematic province)

Ontario is, not to put too fine a point on it, a shit show. My impression is that the Ford government, which has been throwing gasoline on the international student fire ever since it got into the office, mainly so it could avoid having to actually spend over its own money on post-secondary education, is in no way equipped policy-wise to deal with the mess it has just been handed.

The first policy question to be answered before getting to the issue of caps is: what the heck to do about the public-private partnership colleges currently strewn around the GTA? As it is, with the graduates denied access to the post-graduate work visa program, it will be difficult for any of them to stay in business, since satisfying this demand is largely their reason for being. That would be brutal on a couple of levels: first on the colleges themselves who would have to teach out their existing students with essentially no money coming in, and second on their parent public colleges who rely on the margin between per-student tuition and per-student payments to the PPPs in order to keep operating under a system in which per-student funding is just 44% of what it is in the other nine provinces.

At least conceptually, there’s another option: What if the public colleges bought out their private partners and operated these institutions directly? The province might well say no—college catchment areas in theory have meaning, and this kind of arrangement would undermine those catchment areas (which is precisely why they all went in the PPP direction in the first place). And net surpluses would be lower if all the staff at these colleges suddenly joined the college unions. It might not be a super-lucrative prospect, but it might be better than the alternative. I could see some institutions trying it.

But being able to make that decision requires you to know what provincial funding is going to look like. If the province comes in with a bailout package—particularly for northern colleges—then the need to keep pushing on those GTA campuses might be lessened. Alternatively, many of those PPP colleges may now move more quickly towards seeking their own degree-granting status through the Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) and start offering their own degree-level programs, escaping the problems created by Monday’s announcement.

(You see how many moving pieces there are here? It’s going to be wild to watch this all work out.).

Only once you work out the PPP piece can you sensibly make decisions about the rest of the system. If the baseline numbers include the PPPs, then everyone is going to take a big hit on their numbers. If the baseline excludes the PPPs, then the hit to the rest of the system will be greatly alleviated. How that gets distributed across the system is still the big unknown. Will it be done equally across all institutions?  Will there be a steer to the colleges rather than universities, or vice-versa? How will stand-alone private institutions be treated (Northeastern is the big one to think about in this category). We have no idea. It’s all an enormous mystery. And with a moratrium on visa processing until the provinces figure all this stuff out, there are a lot of very anxious international student divisions out there.

At the national level, one other point of note is with respect to French-language institutions outside Quebec. Until about 2021 or 2022 they were falling behind English counterparts because they could not attract international students. But things have really changed in the last couple of years: they upped their recruitment game quite a bit, particularly CCNB in New Brunswick. You can be very sure that they will be pleading for special consideration to be exempted from caps because of the role they play in continuing francophone migration to regions where francophone populations would otherwise be falling. I am not sure how big a deal this will be, but it’s something to watch.

In any event, the key takeaway here is that things are going to be messy. But the size and nature of the mess will vary significantly across the country, and depends not just on how provincial governments (Ontario in particular) choose to react to the new policy environment, but also how institutions choose to maneuver to take advantage of whatever room is left to them.

May you live in interesting times, as they say.