Quebec says private colleges are selling citizenship. The data tells another story

MONTREAL — Quebec wants to cut its share of international students to ease housing pressure and protect the French language, but a recent uptick in study permits has mostly gone to people from francophone countries where the province has explicitly sought to attract more students.

Many of those permits have gone to people attending schools outside Montreal, in regions where the government has promised not to target programs that largely depend on foreign students.

Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge tabled a bill earlier this month that would give the government broad discretion to cap the number of international students based on region, institution and program of study. The government could also take language into account.

Roberge said the number of foreign students in Quebec has increased by 140 per cent, from 50,000 in 2014 to 120,000 last year, a number he said is “too many.” He suggested some private colleges are using education as “a business model to sell Quebec and Canadian citizenship” and pointed to two — without naming them — that have seen a manifold increase in international student enrolment in the last two years.

But federal and provincial numbers paint a different picture. They show a sharp increase in international students at public and government-subsidized private colleges and francophone universities that aligns with government policy. Enrolment at unsubsidized private colleges, meanwhile, has cratered.

“If we try to understand why there has been an increase in our network, it’s because our colleges responded to the government’s call to recruit more in French-speaking countries, and in particular (for) Quebec’s regions,” said Patrick Bérubé, CEO of the Quebec association of private subsidized colleges. “We are currently trying to understand exactly what problem the government is trying to solve with this bill.”

The federal government issued about 61,000 study permits to foreign students at post-secondary institutions in Quebec in 2023, up from 51,000 the year before. The increase in permits went almost entirely to students from French-speaking countries, mostly in North and West Africa.

A 2023 strategic plan from Quebec’s higher education department says that attracting international students to francophone colleges and universities is “a government priority” as part of a “global race for talent.”

Starting September 2023, the government began exempting some foreign students attending francophone colleges and universities outside Montreal from international student fees, allowing them to pay the same tuition as Quebecers. The measure was an attempt to draw newcomers to different regions of the province, and to fill Quebec’s labour shortage.

More than half of the increase in study permits between 2022 and 2023 went to students planning to attend universities and colleges eligible for that exemption. At the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, the number of study permits in 2023 more than tripled from the year before. The Trois-Rivières campus of Collège Ellis, a private subsidized college, saw a nine-fold increase.

Many regional schools say they depend on international students to keep their programs afloat. Sylvain Gaudreault, president of a group representing regional public colleges, known as CÉGEPs, said many colleges need foreign students to keep the numbers up in regions with declining populations.

“There are certain CÉGEPs where (international students) correspond to 30 per cent of their clientele,” he said.

Some regional universities also rely heavily on students from abroad. Last year, foreign students made up more than one-third of those enrolled at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, in the Saguenay region.

Roberge has said his government won’t target regional programs. “The objective of the bill is to provide Quebec with new legal levers to better regulate the number of foreign students,” his office said in a statement. “We want to preserve and ensure the sustainability of regional programs and take into account our workforce needs.”

When Roberge announced the new legislation, he suggested schools in Montreal are the problem because almost 60 per cent of foreign students are in the Montreal area. Though he said the bill is “not about attacking the English-speaking network,” he went on to say that “obviously the numbers will be reduced in the Montreal region, and we know that the major English-speaking institutions are in the Montreal region.”

Since 2014, the number of international students at universities and colleges in Quebec has risen across the board. McGill and Concordia, the two English-language universities in Montreal, have the highest individual numbers in the province. But foreign student numbers at anglophone universities have stayed static since 2018, while the numbers at francophone universities have continued to rise.

Public colleges have also seen a steady upward trend, as have private subsidized colleges, with notable increases in students from Cameroon, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire and other African countries where French is widely spoken.

Meanwhile, the province’s network of private unsubsidized colleges has seen international student enrolment plummet by more than 90 per cent since 2020, after the government cracked down on what it deemed to be abusive practices.

After a 2020 Radio-Canada investigation documented a dramatic rise in Indian students enrolled at certain private colleges, the province launched an investigation and ultimately decided that students at unsubsidized colleges would no longer be eligible for post-graduation work permits, starting in September 2023.

Ginette Gervais, president of the Quebec association of private unsubsidized colleges, said the new legislation could cripple private colleges already hit hard by the loss of work permits. “If our network is targeted, it could threaten the viability of several establishments,” she said in a statement.

But Bérubé, who represents private subsidized colleges that were unaffected by the decision, claimed the change to work permits effectively solved the problem of Quebec diploma mills. He said the new bill “is tackling a problem that has already been resolved.”

Though Roberge singled out private colleges when he announced the new legislation, those schools accounted for fewer than 6,000 foreign students in 2023, compared to more than 56,000 in Quebec universities.

The new bill is part of a larger attempt by Quebec to reduce the number of non-permanent residents in the province, which currently sits around 600,000. The government has been especially vocal about wanting to halve the number of asylum seekers in Quebec.

Post-secondary institutions across Canada have seen a rise in the number of asylum claims by foreign students in recent years, and Quebec schools have some of the highest numbers. Roberge mentioned the trend when he announced the bill, saying he doesn’t want people to “use student visas to make asylum claims.”

As of Aug. 31, Quebec was home to nine of the top 20 institutions in Canada for asylum claims this year. Many are the same regional schools that have seen big spikes in foreign students, including the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, which has counted 300 asylum claims so far this year.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 29, 2024.

Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press