Canada’s latest data should put to rest any doubts over slowing international student demand. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) data shows new study permit applications fell sharply in January. Policymakers planned to throttle applications with caps, but the drop has been multiples of the planned reduction.
Canada Saw A 46% Drop In Study Permit Applications In January
Total new study permit applications received by the Government of Canada (GoC) IRCC. For the month of January.
Source: IRCC; Better Dwelling.
New study permit applications processed by the IRCC have taken a sharp nosedive. The agency reported 29.3k applications in January, down 46% from last year. It was the lowest volume reported for the month since 2021, when physical restrictions prevented people from coming to Canada.
International Student Applications Fall, But Remain Lofty
The trend extends a decline that began last year. There were 580.2k new applications in all of 2024, down 33% (-280.6k) from 2023. It’s still a massive amount of applications, but it also happens to be the lowest since 2021. Even though the volume remained high, it’s falling much faster than most anticipated.
International Student Applications Falling Faster Than Planned
The reason behind the falling volumes is partially policy, and partially an eroding global economy. After scaling up immigration, and failing to manage the growth, policymakers have begun to engage in throttling population growth—primarily by reducing temporary residency visas such as study permits.
However, there’s a little more to this reduction. Policymakers are shooting for a 10% reduction in study permits this year, and kicked the year off with a 46% drop. That’s nearly 5x the planned decline, and there was evidence the volume had been tapering before policymakers announced lower caps.
I think students paid the wink, wink, hush hush, inflated tuitions because it was sold along with the idea that people would be able to stay because there was such a shortage of labor.
The gov never said that but it heavily implied they were badly needed. Now that they’re finding out the gov doesn’t actually need them and those visas aren’t materializing, they probably don’t see much value.
Sleazy of the gov to imply its shortage caused by low rates was permanent, but they’re also going to do it again soon since population growth and demography impacts the credit rating. Most likely the reason there’s never been any attempt to measure actual population growth despite acknowledging they overinflated it.
Would you notice the difference between 1% & 2% population growth? Most of the stuff being attributed to “increased population” is actually the traffic redesigns. You slow traffic down by 20%, you still have to run the same traffic through with 20% less bandwidth.
Precisely. News spread back home of the conditions that unskilled newcomers live in to survive and a year’s worth of news supply finally materialized.
This is bad news for Tim Hortons, UberEats and rental unit owners
Beautiful…stop transforming Canada into Indja.
Simon says: But it’s still more than it needs to be
These silly study permits are just a back door fast entrance to landed immigrant status and lots of votes for the liberals The damage caused by this fiasco is inmense.
Good: slash the administration and non-teaching “educators” (especially the ones teaching antisemitism and gender studies) get back to academic subjects, not subjective academia. Maybe some working class kids will sign up.
Finally we are learning the non value broth by the indian foreign students.
Maybe a total ban will make Canada what was 20 years ago
What I heard from students and recent graduates was the cost of living and the lack of opportunity for good jobs. They thought they were coming to a land of plenty, and it isn’t so “plenty”.
Too bad they couldn’t do it with our debt…
This is a good thing. Nobody was benefitting from the 2022-24 surge of this type of newcomers. Colleges are useless, especially in international market and domestically, Canadian employers prefer University grads (which already had people from all over the world). And the students (whether they only wanted PR, or genuinely were fooled etc) weren’t benefitting with this arrangement. Canada is not a country for unskilled newcomers. Hell, even skilled ones suffer these days lol