Canada's foreign student push a mismatch for job market, data shows

And that’s an update on an investigation that CBC News first brought you in February about the surge in international students in Canada. Our team has obtained new data showing how recruitment of those students failed to match the job market, tilting strongly towards filling spots in business programs instead of sectors with the greatest need for qualified workers. Mike Crawley is part of the team that broke this story and he joins me now in studio this morning. So quite some interesting points here and quite the take away from the story. But what did you find? So Marianne, our previous reporting had showed that public colleges, in particular in Ontario, were what really drove that surge in international students across Canada. And at the time, the colleges, they told us, well, all they were really trying to do was to to what do what the feds and the provinces wanted them to do, which was to bring in a skilled workers into Canada. So we wanted to test that and so we got a national data for a six year period from starting from 2018. And what that data show is that the biggest proportion of foreign students came here for business programs. So you had more than 770,000 students taking programs like business, commerce, management and marketing and far fewer coming in for programs like computing, Health Sciences and the skilled trades. And so the result of this is that you get stories like the one we heard from Akash Singh, he’s an international student from India who paid $34,000. That’s who you see there on your screen now. And for A2, two year business diploma at a public College in Ontario. And what could he get for jobs after graduation? Nothing but working as a security guard and at a McDonald’s. Essentially, we’re using the International Student program as a source for cheap, exploitable, expendable, temporary labor. And that’s not what the international student program is designed to be. That’s not what it’s presented to be. And so in many ways it’s a little bit of a bait and switch. So we also dug into the stats about what were the jobs that were most in need over this time period. And the labor shortages were most acute in fields like healthcare, construction, the hospitality sector, not in things like accounting, marketing and finance, the kind of jobs that you get from a business diploma. So then the question becomes then how did this happen and who’s responsible for allowing this to happen? So Marianne, you know that’s Spider Man mean where like the three Spider Man women are all pointing at one another. That’s exactly what it was like when we asked the feds, the provinces and the colleges about their responsibility in this. And the fact is there is definitely some shared responsibility here. The feds, they’re the ones who issue the study permits that allow the students into the country. They had all of this data about the fields of study that students were choosing and they could see the trend when it was happening but didn’t do anything about it. The provinces they’ve got post secondary jurisdiction and they have the power to control the makeup of foreign students that come to their colleges and universities. But the only province that actually exercised that power was Quebec. And then finally, the colleges, well, they’ve got the power to decide what sort of programs they want to create and how many international students they will allow to enroll in that. So I spoke with Alex Usher. He’s a consultant who has kept a really close eye on Canada’s recruitment of foreign students and he says it’s never really been about filling labor market needs. If you’ve got lots of international students in, then they didn’t need to fund post secondary education quite so much, right? So from their perspective, this was taking a burden off their plate. Look like my institutions can be financially healthy and I don’t need to spend anything. I think that was particularly true in Ontario more more than anywhere else. So this of course, Mike sparking important conversation. But that visual you presented everyone pointing one way or another, So what happens next? So the feds have cut the number of foreign students that are going to be allowed into the country this year. And the irony is is that that is actually forcing the provinces to come up with some priorities. And Ontario says it’s going to prioritize international students who take programs that lead to in demand jobs. The federal Immigration Minister, Mark Miller, today, he’s he’s meeting with his provincial counterparts and he says he’s going to raise this issue of better matching Canadas intake of foreign students with the need for skilled labor. All right. Thanks so much for this Mike. That’s the BJ’s Mike Crawley reporting this morning.