How policies based on long-term economic needs are being enacted by institutions focused on short-term survival
Laura Morales (she/her) // Co-Editor-In-Chief
Lily Jones (she/her) // Illustrator
The 2024 federal cap on study permits became a turning point for post-secondary institutions (PSIs), ending a period of peak international recruitment and triggering a steep enrolment drop from this demographic. Even though the cap was the immediate cause for this drop, Dr. Dale McCartney, whose research examines international student policy over the past 75 years, argues that the crisis the post-secondary sector is dealing with today has much deeper roots. Moreover, Tim Acton, former president of the Capilano Faculty Association with 32 years of experience teaching at Capilano University, argues that PSIs are also responsible for their lack of strategic planning.
In the 1980s, according to McCartney’s dissertation, there was no difference between international and domestic tuition in B.C. Moreover, the administrations of PSIs were against having what was called ‘differential fees.’ Evidence of this position can be found in an article from the Courier from October, 1980, titled ‘Davis attacks foreign students.’ North Vancouver MLA Jack Davis had distributed a report to local university administrations calling for differential tuition fees for “foreign” students, out of concern for accessibility for “our own people.” Davis stated, “Universities are the last places to consult about whether differential fees are a good idea,” as it was assumed that increasing international tuition would decrease international enrolment, and he considered universities to be biased towards having more students. So, how did colleges and universities in B.C. go from defending that international and domestic students pay the same to having an average of 5.6 times higher international tuition fees?
According to McCartney’s research, “At first universities opposed these fees, which were widely seen as unjust. But, the economic pressures of the 1970s and 1980s forced institutions to rely on international student tuition.” The professor’s dissertation lays out how this prompted PSIs to reshape themselves—and the federal government to change immigration laws—in order to “increase the number of international students they could attract.” Consequently, as McCartney explained in a recent CBC interview, the federal government introduced the Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) in 2005 and the Canadian Experience Class in 2008, a combination that granted an official immigration pathway that PSIs could market to international students.
Put differently, new pressures were placed on PSIs to select students that fit with the country’s larger immigration plans, on top of trying to operate with insufficient government funding. McCartney recognized how difficult it is to place responsibility among PSIs and the different levels of government for the consequences of unsustainable recruitment practices; however, he believes that this difficulty is not accidental, but rather an example of policy heterarchy. In a hierarchy, for example, the government instructs institutions on how to recruit students; in a heterarchy, such decisions are left to the institutions themselves, but with a limited range of choices since the government still defines the expected outcomes. “What we discover is that Canada is not a country that accidentally allowed too many international students,” concluded McCartney, “It’s a country that was always interested in exploiting and using international students to advance its national goals, understood very narrowly by a very pro-business government that wants to have a particular kind of tax regime.”
The rationale for higher international tuition is that these students must pay the full, unsubsidized cost of their education. However, evidence now shows their fees exceed this cost, making the original rationale—that they pay the ‘real’ cost—ineffective when it is no longer convenient. If domestic tuition plus government funding was equal to international tuition, it would not be more lucrative to attract international students and the incentive for exploitative recruitment practices would not exist.
Even though the economic rationale behind these policies has been normalized and accepted, McCartney’s research shows how the arguments that initiated them were rooted in racist and xenophobic beliefs. International students that come to Canada with refugee status pay domestic fees because they are considered potential future Canadians, and therefore it makes sense for them to receive subsidized tuition as they will eventually become tax payers. In contrast, even though post-secondary education has been heavily marketed as a pathway to permanent residency—leading to many international students viewing their high tuition fees as an investment for that purpose—the ‘economic’ rationale prevails, as well as the higher tuition fees.
Now, what happens when policies based on long-term economic and labour needs are enacted by underfunded institutions with short-term goals? “I think the government should have known that the institutions weren’t thinking long-term,” stated professor Acton, for whom it seemed that enrolment and revenue were the only two metrics being considered by the administration, instead of questioning, “Is this sustainable? What kind of educational experience are these students having? It was just, how much money can we get and how quickly can we get it?” In an email sent to the Courier on September 10, 2025, the administration explained, “Provincial funding now makes up only 35–37% of our operating budget, down from higher levels in past years. With a 2% annual cap on domestic tuition increases, the university has limited revenue options. The current funding model makes it increasingly difficult to sustain high-quality programs and operations.”
The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) of BC also addressed this issue in a press release sent to the Courier on September 2, 2025, stating that the provincial government had been encouraging and enabling international student recruitment “as a way of backfilling a lack of public funding.” FPSE President Brent Calvert added, “Now that our members are in crisis, the government has amnesia about setting up this risky, unreliable model of funding.” Moreover, in a press release received on the same day, Debi Herrera Lira, chairperson of the British Columbia Federation of Students (BCFS), announced that “the BCFS is calling on the provincial government to restore public funding of the post-secondary system to at least 75% of operating budgets, returning to the level it was before 2000.” According to the recommendations published by the BCFS in March of this year, “In 2000, provincial funding made up 68% of operational revenue; today, that figure is just 40%.”
With the same interest in getting the percentage of government funding for PSIs back up, McCartney explained where the funding has gone in the last four decades. He stated that, “Since the 1980s, Canada has massively reorganized its tax regime to benefit the wealthy and corporations.” According to a study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which analyzed tax changes between 2004 and 2022, “Canada’s tax system is flat for most Canadians and regressive for the top 20 per cent of households”; moreover, in a 2008 report from the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Finance, “The federal general corporate income tax rate reached a high of 47% in the 1950s before beginning to decline, reaching 36% in 1980, 28% in 1990 and 21% in 2007; according to legislated reductions, the rate will be 15% in 2012.”
Considering that corporate taxes are less than half what they were in 1980 as a percentage, and the percentage of government funding dropped from 80 per cent in 1997 to to 44.5 per cent in 2017—according to a 2018 submission from the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC—McCartney affirms that the math is not hard, as he states, “I’m not trying to oversimplify this because I do understand that tax rates are quite complex, but I think the numbers are really clear.” However, on top of the neoliberal goals reflected on the current tax regime, McCartney also pointed out that there is no political will to increase funding for post-secondary education; “There’s nobody on the street who’s saying, ‘Let’s save higher ed. These professors look like they’re really starving,’” he acknowledged.
On the other hand, from Acton’s perspective, the fact that colleges and universities were caught so off guard by the federal cap had a lot to do with poor strategic planning on their part. According to the professor, the symptoms of over recruitment and unsustainable growth were impossible to miss, such as international students having to take online courses at Thompson Rivers University and transfer the credits afterwards, as there was no space in CapU courses for the minimum of nine credits needed to maintain PGWP eligibility. With regard to whether the administration considers their growth rate before the government cap to be sustainable, the response sent to the Courier on September 10 reads, “CapU’s Internationalization Plan sets a goal of 30–40% international students. Growth peaked above that, but our Strategic Enrolment Plan has already been curving it down since 2024–25. This fall, our student body is 66% domestic and 34% international.”
In Acton’s experience, CapU has experienced shrinking in the past but the way things are trimmed has changed significantly. Before CapU was a university, “when there were budget cuts, they would do what they called horizontal rather than vertical,” explained the former president. Each department received their “share of the deficit” and decided which section would go and in what order. Then came the years with vertical cuts, which led to the Capilano Faculty Association taking CapU to court during the fall of 2013 for discontinuing courses and programs without consulting with the senate. Now, according to the minutes of the February 4 senate meeting, the board approved a $6.4 million deficit budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which includes the additional operating cost from the Squamish campus, the new Centre for Childcare Studies and the two new student housing residences. Considering the precedent with cutting programs and the cap on domestic fees, the higher operating cost will be compensated with a 5% increase on international tuition. Moreover, the minutes of the June 3 meeting reads, “It is now anticipated that the 2025/2026 deficit budget will be approximately $11 million, with further shortfalls projected for 2026/2027.” For international students who are already experiencing financial uncertainty, this forecast is very concerning.
According to McCartney, the federal cap was so problematic for most PSIs because it was an exception to how immigration policies were usually implemented; “Policy was crafted informally at the institutional level, or by non-governmental actors, and then formalized by institutions or governments when convenient.” For example, PSIs early stages of international recruitment between the 1980s and early 2000s demonstrated how differential fees could “partially offset cuts to institutional budgets” and—to the eyes of the federal government—became an efficient filter to bring immigrants with a certain language proficiency level, area of study and economic status. Then, in 2012, the government released a report which envisioned doubling the number of students Canada had at the time; in other words, formalizing what PSIs had already been doing.
However, this was not the case for the federal cap on study permits which, according to McCartney, explains why PSIs were caught so off guard; “they didn’t have the pre-existing ad hoc, informal policy system to formalize. There wasn’t anybody trying to lower the [international enrolment] numbers or take any control over it.” Still, McCartney considers the timing for this policy to seem convenient to the federal government at the time, not in terms of what’s best to advance its national goals, but in the context of the election. “I think the Liberal government looked at the backlash they were facing around housing. They couldn’t fix that,” he says, “But because they didn’t want to blame immigration as a whole, they chose to blame international students.”
To understand the way Canada grapples with immigration, McCartney refers to Robert Harney’s political science article from 1988, titled ‘So Great a Heritage as Ours,’ which addresses how the views on immigration as both a necessity and a threat have been a difficult needle to thread for the federal government. Moreover, it stresses how the importance of immigrants for Canada’s survival goes beyond bringing in large numbers of people, but rather, as McCartney understands it, “the country can only exist as long as it can successfully integrate immigrants.”
The federal government’s study permit cap has been the policy equivalent of doing “surgery with a hammer,” as former Immigration Minister Marc Miller predicted. However, blaming the federal cap and subsequent policy changes for the current crisis on the post-secondary sector fails to recognize the role that the provincial government and PSIs themselves played in shaping the exploitative system that is driving international students away; a system fueled by an artificial demand for international students amassed through unethical recruitment practices—enabled by Canadian policies—that allow institutions to exploit how much students are willing to pay for a chance at permanent residency. After the painful period of shrinking comes to an end, PSIs have an opportunity to grow in a more sustainable way, but as noted in McCartney’s introduction to the latest issue of the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada, “to do so requires an honest conversation about our entanglements with both the neoliberal era of internationalization and the neocolonial era that preceded it.”
