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Mark Miller, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, stands up during questioning in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on October 9. Spencer Colby/Canadian Press
Mark Miller has been immigration minister for nearly 15 months, and after a year of slow progress in reversing the government’s previous policies, he has finally achieved something to be trumpeted.
In August, the number of new and renewal visas issued to international students decreased by 45% compared to August 2023. Two months ago, 97,610 study permits were issued, compared to 178,000 a year ago.
This is important. Miller has long acknowledged that an out-of-control student visa system has led to immigration fraud and the devaluation of education. But month after month, the numbers didn’t show he was making progress – until now.
Data provided by Miller’s department is not yet available online, but it shows a continued positive trend in September. good.
Mr. Miller also said to inform foreign students that paying tuition to any educational institution is no longer an easy path to permanent residency, but to inform those institutions that paying tuition is an unlimited cash grab. Therefore, many changes have been made to the system. These last few years are over.
The most significant changes include Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP). As of next month, students on university visas will still be able to obtain up to three years of PGWP, but most university programs will no longer be eligible. Only college graduates in five broad fields: agriculture and agri-food. Health Care; Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. Trade and Transportation – You can stay and work in Canada.
I’ve written column after column about the many ways the Trudeau government has destroyed our immigration system. To Mr. Miller’s credit, Canada is well on its way to repairing what was broken with its student visa program.
But there is still much work to be done. We need to start by understanding the benefits of international students and thinking about how to make the most of them.
We must become like the protagonist in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, who stopped managing by intuition and started following the data closely. We need to Moneyball the student visa program.
Let’s start with a question. Why does Canada want foreign students? There are two answers. Money and immigration.
It makes sense for Canada to draw the bulk of its immigration from former international students. They study here, get work experience and are already here.
But in recent years, Canada has increasingly attracted immigrants from foreign graduates of low-quality Canadian education programs, whose jobs are in low-productivity, low-wage fields.
Canada reverse Moneyballed the student-to-immigration pathway. We took advantage of that. Ottawa did the same for temporary foreign worker flows and overall economic immigration flows.
I wasn’t thinking about the long term or the big picture.
As a result, the University of Waterloo received fewer than 1,900 foreign student permits in 2023, while Conestoga College, on the other side of town, saw its number of visas more than quadruple from 2019, increasing by 3. The number was nearly 2,000.
A recent study of decades of labor market outcomes among thousands of Waterloo graduates, conducted by three Waterloo economists led by Professor Michal Skuterud, found that foreign graduates from the “Massachusetts Institute of the North” were found to earn higher salaries and outperform their Canadian alumni. , including a Canadian-born Waterloo graduate.
This indicates that data exists to predict which visa students in which programs are most likely to get good jobs and therefore most likely to contribute to increases in Canada’s per capita gross domestic product. I am. That’s who should get the limited number of student visas, PGWPs and economic immigration slots.
So while Miller’s new rules are an advance, they still don’t quite hit the mark. With the federal government still focused on the myth of a “workforce shortage,” some university programs that offer a path to low-skill jobs, from medical assistant to bus driver, still require student visas and PGWPs. Targeted.
We need to be smarter about this. MIT further north. Puppy mills are rare in southwestern Ontario.
Besides potential immigration, the second reason Canada seeks international students is money, primarily in the form of tuition fees. Education is an export industry, but instead of sending products overseas, we bring students (and their money) to Canada.
Considering that the number of student visas is not infinite, you should prioritize programs with the highest tuition fees. By a happy coincidence, many of the most valuable programs that produce graduates who are likely to become high-wage immigrants are also the programs with the highest tuition costs.
For example, annual tuition for international students at the University of Waterloo ranges from $50,000 to $73,000. This is roughly four times Conestoga’s international tuition fees.
This means that each international student at Waterloo pays the tuition of four Crosstown University students. While the Ontario government has long prioritized university visas as an easy cash grab, some basic math needs to be done. You need to earn cash more efficiently.
Moneyballing the system means fewer student visas, but going to programs that educate the most economically productive future immigrants and those that charge the highest tuition fees. . Although the two are not exactly the same, there is significant overlap.
The path forward is clear.
