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Over the past two decades, Canadian universities have relied increasingly on international students to fund their operations.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Catherine Dauvergne is a law professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
The announcement that visas for international students in Canada will be halved in the coming year hardly comes as a surprise.
After all, international students have been vilified as part of the moral panic about housing and temporary foreign workers. If universities push back, it can easily be portrayed as simple greed.
But the reality is that cutting international study permits is complicated and will have consequences for Canadian students – and there were other solutions available to the federal government.
If the problem is housing, one option would be to require universities to house the international students they admit. A logical outcome of a shift like this is that large research universities would be able to meet the requirement, and fly-by-night colleges would not.
If the problem is too many temporary foreign workers, it would be possible to curtail the current right to work in Canada that most students have access to following their studies.
It is even possible, though less logical, to restrict international students’ right to work while they’re at school.
Any of these options would more directly target the alleged problems.
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So then what goals are met by the simple cut method? An obvious one is that the government is able to continue treating international students as trial migrants: that is, charging people very high tuition fees and then encouraging them to stay and fill Canada’s continuing need for permanent migrants with made-in-Canada credentials. A classic double dip.
Or perhaps the government was thinking that the harm to universities had already been done, given the reputational harm from significant cuts to international study permits last year.
But it may simply be that a dramatic cut makes a good headline.
Over the past two decades, Canadian universities have relied increasingly on international students to fund their operations. At the University of British Columbia, where I work, the budget includes a whopping $606-million in international student tuition fees this year. That’s more than 22 per cent of the total operating budget.
But international students bring much more than their parents’ money to Canadian universities. They contribute enormously to the intellectual diversity of our campuses, build global networks for our students and our researchers, challenge professors to think globally in the classroom and improve our international rankings.
At the Harvards and Oxfords of the world, 20 to 30 per cent of students come from elsewhere, and many are on full-ride scholarships.
Making it all about the money is a blinkered approach that plays to the moral panic.
The Canadian government has curbed universities’ willingness to complain about cuts to international-student permits by providing $1.7-billion to attract top-flight researchers. While universities will certainly put all those dollars to good use and profess gratitude, those dollars will not go toward day-to-day operations. The continuing support of top-flight scholars will also require operating dollars as new labs get built, new research is launched, new collective agreements get negotiated and so on. Federal special talent programs don’t anticipate these costs, which will challenge university budget-makers years in the future.
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Additional elite researchers will not in any way address the hole blown in university budgets by cutting international students.
So, what tools do universities have to make up these shortfalls? Very broadly, there are three: increase tuition fees, get more money from provincial governments and cut services.
Philanthropy rarely addresses shortages in operating funding, and we cannot expect it to be the answer over the next two decades. More funding from provincial governments seems unlikely in our current economic circumstances. Furthermore, provincial governments generally sharply limit the scope for tuition increases.
This leaves two likely outcomes. First, significant cuts in services for students – meaning larger class sizes, fewer class choices, less time in laboratories, fewer mental-health supports and the like. Faculty salaries will not be cut because almost all faculty are unionized. Most students are Canadian, not international, but both local and foreign students will be affected immediately.
Second, I suspect that the intense budgetary pressure will mean that provincial governments – which have almost no capacity in current circumstances to add to university budgets – will begin lifting limits on tuition-fee increases. This will make postsecondary studies more expensive for Canadian students.
I find it hard to believe that a worse student experience that costs more was what the federal government was hoping for, but it is an inevitable result of this policy choice.
Allowing this to happen just because international students are so easy to vilify is a policy error that ought to be undone.
