As the federal government prepares to implement a two-year cap on international student permits, it remains unclear what this means for universities and how it might affect existing students, who face a variety of increasing pressures.
“Some institutions have significantly increased their intakes to drive revenues, and more students have been arriving in Canada without the proper supports they need to succeed,” said a statement issued by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Jan. 22.
The cap is primarily directed at private institutions, so-called “diploma mills,” within a system that has become so lucrative it has “opened a path for its abuse,” according to the statement.
On Tuesday, Universities Canada and Colleges and Institutes Canada said the announcement caused “significant concern” as international students bolster the Canadian economy to the tune of $22 billion a year.
As an international student at Vancouver Island University (VIU), I wanted to understand more about the challenges we face and how they might be affected by this new legislation.
When I came to Canada in December 2019, I was hoping to get a list of the information necessary for an international student to get by in a completely new country. However, a different experience was awaiting me. Due to the exchange rate changing in the four days that it took to process my tuition fees from India because of technical difficulties, I owed VIU $22.
Because of that, I didn’t exist in the system, which made it impossible for me even to get my student ID. While trying to deal with the issue, my academic advisor responded with an offhand remark that perhaps I was at the wrong university.
International students face many barriers when they arrive to study, whether it’s overcoming administrative challenges like mine, financing tuition fees as they increase each year or being forced into a precarious labour market to make ends meet.
I feel privileged to have parents who offered to fund my education if I covered my living expenses in Canada.
But that’s not the case for many students, including Anita, an undergraduate student of business who came to Nanaimo from India in 2021.
“Being a full-time student and a part-time [employee]… I had to work in illegal ways, like working extra hours because a job I was doing didn’t pay me overtime,” she says. (The Discourse has agreed to withhold her full name to protect her employment).
“We were working 80 to 100 hours every week — every single week — just to put our fees together to send money back home, because we took out loans for the studies we’re doing,” she says. “It’s hard for a student who comes here.”
For many international students, working a job while going to school is essential to cover the cost of tuition fees: An average international student at VIU will pay more than $10,000 per semester.
“A four-year graduate degree in Canada, that’s like $80,000. And yes, that’s way out of budget for a middle-class family back in India,” Anita explains.
This figure does not include living expenses. The average market rent for a one-bedroom in Nanaimo is $1,695 per month, plus food and transportation. For a four-year degree, living expenses could easily add another $80,000 to the overall cost of studying at VIU.
“In Nanaimo, you can’t even find a house right now,” Anita says. Even a room in a shared house or apartment is difficult to find. “We feel privileged that we are living in a good area now, living near the university near our jobs.”
“A student who works like 20 hours a week… with all these expenses together, how would you be able to [cover] the tuition fees?”
International students are working more than ever, leading some researchers to describe them as the “new temporary foreign worker,” The Tyee reports.
Across Canada, the share of international students at the college level who were also working went from seven per cent in 2000 to 57 per cent in 2018, according to Statistics Canada.
“I work four jobs,” says Sarah Mei Lyana, a VIU student who is from Singapore. “I’m exhausted all the time.”
Lyana is the university’s Women Students’ Representative and is in her third year of a political studies undergrad.
With so many international students needing jobs to cover costs, they are put in a precarious position, Anita says.
“Employers know that the students [need to] work… so they exploit us,” Anita says. “The employers have a lot of options. They pay minimum wages.”
For Nittu Prasai, an international student from Nepal, she relied on her parents initially to support her.
“I had to ask my parents back home, and they had to send me money for the year. And when you think about conversion rate, it’s so high — if they send me CAD $11,000, they can probably survive with that money for the whole year in Nepal,” she said.
Prasai’s husband has now arrived, and his financial support has been essential to cover the cost of being a student at VIU.
“As a student, I cannot work more than 20 hours. But my husband, he used to do two jobs at a time, morning till 11 at night, and until now he’s been paying for my tuition fee. He definitely worked so hard,” she said.
International student fees drive growing disparity
As an international student, I was aware that my education would be costlier than domestic students, but the disparity is growing larger — a trend seen all over the country.
In the last 10 years, tuition fees have increased by 23 percent for Canadian undergraduates. For international undergraduates, it rose by nearly 97 per cent.
For Canadian graduate students, tuition rose by 25 percent, and for international students, it rose by 90 percent, according to Statistics Canada.
B.C.’s tuition limit policy is restricted to two per cent per year, the rate of inflation — but international student fees are not held to these limits.
At VIU, the international tuition increase for 2023 was set at two per cent and international ancillary fees increased by one per cent on April 1, 2023.
However, international student tuition was raised by five percent in 2023.
As of 2023, international students at VIU pay nearly five times more than domestic students. So, for a five-course semester, international students pay $11,647 compared to the $2,447 paid by a domestic student.
As a student I was — and still am — completely unaware of the hike my fees would take at any given time, making it impossible to budget year over year. And as a student, being able to calculate the cost of living and studies makes it easier for anyone to plan their future. It is a right everyone should have, regardless of their nationality.
The proportion of international students is also on the rise, pointing to an increasing reliance on international student fees to support overall revenues.
Though it’s unclear if this is the case with VIU, a recent study stated that there is evidence international students subsidize higher education for domestic students in schools where their higher tuition fees represent a major funding source for operational activities and instructional programs.
As international students report challenges in finding places to live and work equitably, it seems universities and cities are not able to handle the massive flow of international students as the promotional materials suggest.
According to a report released in 2023, the majority of international students are motivated to gain Canadian permanent residence after their studies. The research also found that 73 per cent of respondents planned to apply for work permits post-graduation, which means that consultants, such as the one above, are ready to capitalize on those aspirations.
However, experts caution the promise of permanent residency could be misleading, as the process is competive and success is not guaranteed.
In a recent study reported by New Canadian Media, researchers found that in some cases, a larger share of revenue is being spent recruiting and marketing to international students with agents in other countries than on education.
For example, Kwantlen Polytechnic University saw a 174 per cent increase in international student enrollment in 2017, which increased their revenue by approximately 70 per cent, while the commission fees they paid agents increased by 220 per cent.
Calculating international student tuition costs
Tuition is higher for international students because public universities do not receive any funding from the province for them, a spokesperson from VIU told The Discourse, via email.
“We are required to recover costs of educational delivery,” they said. “The world has been in a period of rapid inflation in previous years and with declining enrolment, we have been in the position of a rapid increase in costs per student with inflation increasing costs and delivering services to fewer students at the same time.”
Lyana said this reasoning doesn’t make sense.
“Cost recovery for what costs? For whose costs? Not my costs, for sure,” she said. “What costs are they bearing for me? How can I be at five times the cost of a domestic student?”
The international student cap aims to crack down on exploitation by Canadian colleges and universities that accept large amounts of students and charge “exorbitant” fees while operating campuses that have limited resources, according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller.
International students and alumni in my circle agreed it is a step in the right direction. The problem lies in transparency. The changes come without much notice and time to prepare, and even people with master’s and PhDs are also starting to grow concerned about their status in Canada.
In response to questions from The Discourse, a representative from VIU said they have a “robust, day-long new student orientation specifically for international students” in addition to a “range of pre-arrival webinars” and 55 staff members working for international students.
The university has also created a cost calculator to estimate expenses, the spokesperson added.
In 2023, VIU surveyed international students to “determine what services they value to ensure we are meeting needs.”
The roughly 100 respondents said the most important services they accessed related to immigration, academic advising and finance.
When asked what services they would appreciate that don’t currently exist, respondents said “transparency in tuition increase expectations over the course of a program” as well as work opportunities and an affordable variety of food.
When rating the university’s services, the response was split, with about 50 per cent saying it was average to poor and 47 per cent saying it was good to excellent. Forty-seven per cent said they receive “very little value” from the tuition and fees they pay.
“We are taking all recommendations from the survey into consideration and using them to inform our student services planning and priorities going forward,” VIU told The Discourse.
International student groups continue to push for change
The provincial Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills has been reviewing international education standards and announced on Jan. 29 it would pause approvals for new post-secondary schools seeking to enrol international students for two years as they work to strengthen requirements.
At the same time, Premier David Eby said he would push for exemptions on the federal cap in some high-demand professional programs like nursing and childcare.
The province also stated it will increase tuition transparency rules to combat “exploitative practices” and unexpected tuition hikes.
To fight inequities like these, the VIU’s student union (VIUSU) held a protest at a VIU Board of Governors meeting in February 2020 and are participating in Fairness for International Students, a province-wide campaign that advocates for a two per cent international tuition fee cap.
This campaign is run through the B.C. Federation of Students, which also advocates for more equity and transparency about international student fees. Student unions in different universities and colleges like Camosun College and the University of Victoria, are trying to make a change.
For international students, finding help remains a challenge
Beyond a tuition cap and more transparency and equity concerning fees, international students say additional resources could help ease the pressure and isolation they face.
Prasai says that being an international student is particularly challenging without friends or family to lean on.
“I feel like international students should research before coming in, what to expect and what not to, just to be aware of what [they are] coming into, what they have to face, or what would be their struggle,” Prasai says.
The isolation of an international student is also a concern for Bárbara Burgardt, an international student from Brazil in the creative writing and journalism program.
“Most of the people who you see going to school, they talk to their parents every day,” she explains. “And if they have a problem, they can go up here and up and be like, ‘Mom, please help me.”
“What happens with us when we get sick? …We can’t get sick.”
She recalls an incident where she had an allergic reaction and had to wait in the emergency room for eight hours. “I was just thinking like… I could have died. What do I do now? My mom isn’t here. My Dad isn’t here. Who do I call for help?”
Burgardt says she felt similarly isolated trying to navigate the tax system.
“How many international students do you think learn how to do taxes… reading in a completely different language?”
She is grateful for the support from her father, even though he’s ten thousand kilometres away. “He was like, I don’t know how to do taxes in Canada, but I’ll walk you through it.”
Every student has a different situation, but the students I spoke with agreed that more support from post-secondary institutions in navigating access to housing, health care and taxes could make the move to study here more bearable.
“[People] don’t know how hard it is as an [international] student, to get housing, or maybe also to get emotional, mental support,” says Prasai. “It’s hard, I think. More advising and… also the awareness, I would say, that would be helpful.”
