THUNDER BAY — Confederation College has already been greatly affected by changes announced by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) earlier this year.
IRCC’s new rules mean the college will get 10 per cent fewer international student study permits for 2025 and the school has already seen a big drop in international enrolment.
“As we look at the fall of 2024, we've seen a 39 per cent decline in the international students who are new and studying semester one of a program here as compared to fall of 2023, a year ago," said Aaron Skillen, vice-president academic with Confederation College.
New, more restrictive criteria for the Post-Graduate Work Permit system will also affect the college said Skillen.
“We believe the impact could be even greater going forward because of these announcements at the IRCC level. The most recent announcements are actually which programs are going to align with the postgraduate work permit at the federal level," he said.
"Just to quantify the type of impact that we see on the horizon for 25/26 academic year, we believe that could be upwards of 69 per cent international student drop for the upcoming academic year.
“That's based on just not having those programs with the postgraduate work permit."
Skillen said there are key programs that are really aligned with local and regional labour workforce needs.
“We’re very proud of how we grew responsibly in the number of international students that we have studying here at Confederation,” he said.
Skillen said the announcement ultimately means a reduced number of international students studying at Confederation College, which leads to impacts on the type of programming they’re able to offer.
There are a number of omissions that the college staff are quite concerned about, Skillen said.
“Early childhood education comes to mind, absent from the IRCC’s grad work permit eligible list, but certainly a great need locally and throughout our region.
“All of our engineering technology programs within the college sector, not on that particular list.
“We even look at into hospitality industry. Culinary management is not currently on the list. And we've had a lot of international student interest in that program over the years and certainly helps to meet some of our hospitality sector needs going forward.”
“We’d really like to see some of those programs that are not currently on the list added on to the postgrad work permit eligible list,” he said.
At this time, this will not directly affect domestic students, said Silkenen, but that could change going forward.
“Some 45 programs that we have here at Confederation College have international students in them.
“In the absence of those international students or with a significant decline in those international students, many of those programs that our domestic students also take could be at risk because there wouldn't be a viable cohort of students to take a program.
The college expects decreased enrolment to have a severe financial impact, threatening the sustainability of some essential programs.
“We're planning towards what that may look like for the 25/26 year,” said Skillen. “It will be a challenging situation for Confederation College going forward."
Skillen said the changes to immigration policy will be felt thought the region.
“We know this impact is not going to be felt just here at our Thunder Bay campus or in our Thunder Bay local sector.
“But, really, it's going to impact our campuses across northwestern Ontario and our labour workforce challenges across northwestern Ontario," said Skillen.
“We believe there's a role for advocacy at this point in time. Continuing to have dialogue with the federal government, with the IRCC in particular, that's something Confederation College is doing with our partners in the college system, working with Colleges Ontario in that regard.
“We continue to advocate through our program advisory committees here at the college and try to make sure that those impacts that the reduced number of international study permits and students will have," he said.
“From advocacy standpoint, certainly we're hopeful that the government will hear that the time for dialogue is now. A pause on the implementation of these new IRCC policies and study permit caps can be postponed past Nov. 1."
