New Brunswick post-secondary institutions are taking issue with new federal caps on international student numbers.
This comes despite the immigration department’s easing up of requirements for international students by increasing the number of attestation letters schools can send to them in support of their study permit applications.
St. Thomas University, for example, has access to 314 attestation letters now instead of the 199 it was originally assigned.
While associate vice-president of enrolment management, Ryan Sullivan, welcomes this change, he still believes that it falls short of the number of students the university would have liked to have accepted.
Last year, St. Thomas accepted 330 of the 550 international applications it received, and was looking to further expand that figure this year. However, IRCC’s new cap on the undergraduate study permits put a halt on that plan.
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In January, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced a on international students for 2024, as a means of stabilizing Canada’s growth and decreasing the number of new international students coming to the country. This, for Miller, has been a way to restore the eroding “integrity” of the international student system.
The cap of 236,000 study permits (42% lower than the number of approvals in 2023) is derived from the number of permits expiring this year (485,000), minus 20 per cent (which is the per cent of students applying for an extension each year and remaining in the country), minus the estimated volume of some international student groups (primary and secondary school students and master’s or doctoral degree students) from the 2024 target number of approved study permits.
This resulted in roughly 393,000 study permit applications to be allocated, of which 9,279 have been allocated to New Brunswick. The projected number of SP approvals is 5,567, which is a 10% reduction from 2023’s 6,186 approvals. However, it comes with a top-up of 5,372, with the revised allocations being 14,651 for the province.
Miller said that the number was topped up for any province whose approval rates are lower than 60 per cent.
New Brunswick is one of four provinces, the others being Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, that are going to experience a 10% fall in study permit approvals this year in comparison to the last.
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To reach the projected number of approvals for this year, a certain higher number of applications will be allowed, which need to be accompanied by an attestation letter. The number of attestation letters for each designated learning institution (DLI) in New Brunswick has been increased, with the new total being 14,651 instead of 9,300, as per the Department of Post-Secondary Education Training and Labour.
All designated learning institutions in the province are getting more attestation letters than they were originally supposed to get. The total number is increasing from 9,300 to 14,651, confirmed the Department of Post-Secondary Education Training and Labour.
New Brunswick post-secondary institutions and provincial and federal representatives, as per CBC, said that the increase was needed because a relatively low rate of applicants who want to go to New Brunswick programs are approved for study permits. This is why the province also received a generous top up from IRCC.
Administration from NB schools has also taken fault with the long and tedious process that underpins getting a provincial attestation letter, with some institutions speculating about whether they would even come in time for a fall approval.
“At this late stage we are not sure how many letters we can still use for fall 2024 given the time associated with the attestation letter process and the permit application process,” said Pierre Zundel, president and CEO at the Collège Communautaire de Nouveau-Brunswick.
“It’s quite frustrating,” trying to figure out how many students to expect.”
“We don’t want to have too many because then we’re going to have problems with housing, but we don’t want to have too few because the province has a labour shortage.”
Institutions based in competing destination countries, especially the UK, US, and Australia, have been quick to make use of Canada’s tightened grip on study permits by advertising themselves as a superior choice.
Greg Turner, minister of post-secondary education, training and labour, said that conversion rates are still low, for which Ottawa is working with Canadian post-secondary institutions.
One method of working on that is to require first semester fees to be paid before attestation letters are issued, with financial capability being an important predictor of a successful study permit application.
Sullivan said that “we continue to voice our concerns to the federal government as a group.”
