Andrew Drinkwater
As we approach 2025, Canadian post-secondary institutions face an unprecedented period of contraction. The ripple effects of international enrollment declines will be felt across budgets, programming, and staffing. Yet, hard times have often been the catalyst for strategic reinvention
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know I take issue with Canada’s lack of timely, accessible, and useful public data. Therefore, kudos are in order for the Association of Atlantic Universities who provided their 2024 Fall enrolment data by October 15. Having early access to this data means institutions can better anticipate and plan for the impacts, rather than react after the fact. Here’s what the latest numbers reveal:
- International Full-time Undergraduate student enrolment is down by almost 12%. Largest drops at Dalhousie (-23%), Cape Breton (-18%), and Memorial (-16%).
- International Graduate enrolment is down about 11% in Atlantic Canada. This was surprising because in 2024, graduate students were exempt from the study permit cap. This data suggests they feel Canada is no longer welcoming.
- Graduate enrolment went up at Cape Breton University (38.5%, +241), UPEI (7.3%, +265), and Universite de Moncton (32.6%, +232). Others were down.
- University of New Brunswick saw international undergraduate enrolment rise by 10% (+153) and Mt. St. Vincent University saw a rise of 12% (+71). Universite de Moncton was up about 5% (+80) but is also the only Francophone university in the region.
While this data is helpful, it is descriptive only: it helps us understand what happened, and uses historical patterns to identify these trends. The analytics maturity model contains 5 levels: Descriptive (Basic), Diagnostic (Reactive), Predictive (Proactive), Prescriptive (Strategic), Cognitive (Transformative), as shown in the diagram below.
Figure 1: Analytics Maturity Model (Davenport & Patil) Napkin.ai
With this insight, we can move towards predicting the future (Predictive Analytics, bottom of chart).
You may recall our previous blogs on changes in international study permits in Canada, (nationally, within provinces, questioning allocations, and discussing program restructuring).
Most of those were based the Canadian federal government has reduced international student intakes in Canada. The first announcements came out January 26, 2024 – which talked of a 35% year over year cut in international study permits for 2024.
An updated announcement came out September 15, 2024 that stated a further 10% cut would happen in 2025.
The September cuts seem small, but were actually wider ranging:
- Many college students would no longer be eligible for a Post-Graduate Work Permit (PGWP) unless they’re in a discipline that is well connected to the labour market using a scheme that the government appears to be still working on.
- They included graduate students under the permit cap for the first time.
The communication around these changes has been less than optimal, and we’re left with the impression that students think Canada doesn’t want them anymore. Universities Canada reports a 45% in international applications to universities, and estimates range as high as an 80% drop for Ontario’s colleges.
For this article, we’re going to compare the results of two scenarios:
- Known Allotments: we created this scenario in January 2024 and updated in March 2024 as allocation information became available in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia (and BC, but only at a very high level of public vs private). This scenario remains as it was then, with the exception of a fix to the new intake data in Nova Scotia where we had colleges and universities reversed. This scenario assumed growth in graduate programs (especially course-based masters programs) which were exempt in 2024 and no longer are.
- AAU Actuals at October 2024: this scenario is based on the Known Allotments, but with intakes adjusted to our projected new intakes.
Note that we are only looking at universities in Atlantic Canada for this comparison. Colleges, and universities elsewhere in Canada, are excluded.
Looking at the AAU scenario, we can see that over 5 years, each province will drop total international enrolment by 32-53% (on average, 47%).
This projected drop relative to 2023 is nearly 14,000 students, or around $330 million in 2024 dollars, the majority of which will be felt in Nova Scotia (which has more enrolled international students than the other three provinces combined)
For this purpose, we’ve used international undergraduate tuition rates for 2024 from Statistics Canada.
I know this sounds like a lot, but consider this: undergraduate full time visa enrolment (alone) was 19,989 in 2023, and likely would have grown if not for federal cuts in 2024. If we’re conservative and say it would be flat, that’s about 100,000 students over 5 years. Dropping 12% in 2024 and 2025, then growing 5% per year in 2026 and 2027 means we still lose 23,844 students relative to plan. If true, this represents a cumulative loss of revenue relative to 2023 on the order of $440m. No one has that in their contingency.
Several universities (and colleges, but this data is focused on universities) have admitted they are substantially below their cap for 2024. Demand has just dried up:
“The number that we have down — we can still easily take in double that number of students,” said Wendy Rodgers, UPEI's president and vice-chancellor. “We have room for them. International tuition revenue at UPEI is expected to drop about $3m in 2024. This aligns with the AAU data showing a drop of 161 undergraduates (tuition is about $20,000 per student) (via CBC).
AAU unfortunately does not release numbers specific to new students, but we can proxy it by taking the overall proportion of students who are international and multiplying that by the proportion of students who are new. For UPEI, this suggests that first years are about 251 and transfers are about 135. We didn’t calculate new graduate admits, but 265 graduate level visa students are about 5% of UPEI’s overall enrolment. For sake of argument we can assume that about 25% of that total is admitted each year, so 66 were admitted in 2024. All else equal, that means UPEI admitted about 452 new first year, transfer, and graduate students, well short of the 692 allocations we estimated they were eligible to receive.
These students are no longer enriching communities with vibrant experience from around the world. They aren’t supporting local businesses. They aren’t helping Canada build new technologies or new houses, or deliver better healthcare. They simply didn’t get the chance.
Of course Canada as a study destination grew faster than anticipated over the last 10 years. The sector can’t turn back the clock to absorb these cuts. Capacity to teach students has increased markedly in that time, and you can’t just unwind that.
Atlantic Canada’s universities and communities will need to work together to adapt and innovate. How they respond to these changes will determine the region’s academic and economic vitality for years to come. It will take a collaborative effort to identify efficiencies, areas to cut back, and how to get the federal and provincial governments to work together to envision what the sector will look like in the years ahead.