Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful.
But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students.
It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students.
It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up.
The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour."
Not only do post-secondaries bring in far more money from foreign students than domestic students, the high cost of living in Canada ensures that those students will have to look for work while studying here. That's great news for employers looking to fill low-end jobs.And while the provincial and federal governments seem to want to point the finger for exploitive tuition fees at "the diploma equivalent of puppy mills," they'd be wise to take a look at what the higher-status universities are up to as well.
Let's start with the University of BC, where the cost of completing an undergraduate program is typically more than eight times higher for an international student than a domestic one. The Medical Laboratory Science program, for instance, costs $7,500 for a Canadian student, while a foreign student will shell out $61,000.
Need an applied science degree in engineering? That'll be $15,000 if you're Canadian, and $60,000 if you're not. Same with a commerce degree.
Not surprisingly, the number of international students at UBC climbed from 8,685 in the 2012-13 fiscal year to 17,040 in 2021-22. If one international student pays as much tuition as eight Canadians, who can say no?
At the University of Victoria, the per-credit cost is five times higher for international students than for domestic students - $1,981 compared to $411. At any point where there's an additional fee, international students pay much more for that as well: $990 to challenge a course as compared to $205; $1,500 to challenge a co-op work term versus $776.
Even the mandatory acceptance fee that has to be paid just to get started at UVic is three times higher for foreign students, coming in at $750.
Clearly, the primary responsibility for figuring out whether you can afford to study in Canada has to reside with the foreign student. It's up to them to do their research and make sure they're not signing up with Bob's Shady Career College. It's up to them to bring a healthy level of distrust for any recruiter who makes it sound like studying in Canada is a ticket to permanent residency. (In BC, less than a third of foreign undergraduates land permanent residency within five years of graduating.)
But if foreign students feel like they're doing their best on all of that yet still feeling like there's some plot afoot to take advantage of them, they're right.
Canada planned things to go exactly the way they're going. The use of foreign students as cash cows and cheap labour was all carefully laid out in the 2013 federal report, "International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity."
"We must recognize the immediate benefits of international education for Canada, which span economic growth, job creation, and increased exports and investment," noted the report. "These benefits are distributed across all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast."
And wow, did post-secondaries embrace the challenge. There were 239,000 international students in Canada at the time of that report, with a goal to double that by 2023. Instead, the number of students had quadrupled to a million by last year.
The Tyee notes a 2019 report to the BC government that highlighted the $3.5 billion in tuition fees that international students were bringing in that year. If they were an export commodity, said the report, they would be the third most valuable in the province, after fuel and timber.
Apparently a number of educators interviewed for the Tyee's story felt uncomfortable with that comparison. But that was exactly what our governments set out to do with the massive expansion in international students: Create cash cows and a new pool of cheap labour.
I haven't seen anyone try to put an international-development-and-global-goodwill spin on any of this, and at least that's a relief. The only foreign students who could possibly afford these tuition fees come from wealthy families. Nobody's even pretending this is about supporting citizens from challenged countries toward a better future for themselves and their homeland.
But trying to present this issue as being about "a few bad apples" is just plain wrong. We've been taking advantage of foreign students for at least a decade, and now we're a little embarrassed that we let it go this far. Just say it.
1 comment:
Hello Jody
When Canadian universities see international students as the cash cow they have become, it's small wonder they will cling solidly to the status quo they and the government have created. You're so right in pointing out however that the responsibility for the decision to come to Canada for an expensive education is entirely the student's (and probably more correctly, the student's family).
Another group is also affected, yet rarely mentioned: the other people in the classrooms alongside the international students. I attended night school at UVic's School of Business and Management for nine years, and in some of my classes, over half of the students did not speak English. I don't mean that their English was poor. I mean that they were non-functional in the English language. While the profs were up at the front lecturing, these students were head down, typing frantically on their Toshiba translator devices trying to keep up. Doing midterm group projects (worth 50% of our final marks) was the worst. In my last class, for example, I and one other student in our assigned group spoke English - the other four students sat smiling and nodding as we basically did the work for them. They walked up to the front of the room with us for our group presentation, but could not speak. Those students were awarded the same mark as the two of us who actually did all the work, the research, the slides, the presentation. I empathized with how frustrating this must have been for them, but it was maddening for us. We spoke to our prof about the inherent unfairness (e.g. we do the work, they get our marks). She suggested we speak to the Dean, who told us that we were "lucky" to have these international students because we could have the experience of being mentors to them. MENTORS? They were unable to understand a word we said. UVic claimed that all international students must pass an English proficiency test before being accepted for admission - but based on the results we witnessed for nine years, this was clearly untrue.
It's a cash grab for universities, plain and simple.
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