In January 2024, the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced it would be capping the number of new international student permit applications for 2024. That was a reduction of about 35 per cent from the number issued the previous year. It further established individual caps for each province and territory based on their populations and the rate of growth they had shown in international student admissions over the previous years. A press release at the time said this would “result in much more significant decreases in provinces where the international student population has seen the most unsustainable growth.”

Then-immigration minister Marc Miller has couched these measures in terms of protecting international students from “bad actors”—schools that grant effectively fake degrees to profit from international students—amid the context of an immigration system in need of reform. He has also said he was concerned some international students use these schools as a back door into working in Canada.

“Basically, people are working during the week, doing some [school] work on the weekend and then getting perhaps a three-year ability to work in Canada and hoping that they’ll be able to stay here,” he told the CBC. The number of schools of this kind, which he referred to as the educational equivalent of puppy mills, had exploded in the past few years and it has now likely reached the hundreds, he said. “This has become big business and you have a lot of players trying to make a quick buck out of this.”

A press release accompanying Miller’s announcement added that the measures were intended to protect the integrity of Canada’s immigration system while ensuring students are only brought in if they have access to the resources they need to succeed. However, at a press conference in September of that year he told reporters the pace of immigration in Canada had changed and its immigration system was seeing new threats, as reported by the Toronto Star. There was an untenable number of people wishing to move to Canada, he said.

Much of the national conversation surrounding immigration has centred on the housing crisis and whether there are enough places for existing and new Canadians to live.

While the initial slate of changes applied only to undergraduate students, additional changes introduced in the fall of 2024 altered the terms of the cap to include post-graduate students as well. They also reduced the cap for 2025 by a further 10 per cent, added language requirements to the eligibility criteria for post-graduation work permits and restricted the granting of work permits to the spouses of students studying in Canada.

As neither one of Miller’s “bad actors” nor a large university, Zink says, Dio does not stand to benefit financially from increased numbers of international students. On paper it charges a tuition differential for international students, he says, but this is offset by the school’s tuition waiver policy, which equalizes tuition for students coming from a list of provinces in the Anglican Communion where there are fewer resources for theological education and where students are less likely to be able to afford tuition.

“We care about our students,” says Zink. “If we admit them and they’re here, we want to see them succeed. And that means not just academically, but it means in life we want to help them succeed for however long they’re going to be in Canada.”

As a result of this, and because the school was already navigating Quebec’s two-level provincial and national approval system for international students, Zink says, the initial changes did not have a serious impact on the school. But when the changes to spousal work visas came down, he says, they began to see students decide they could not make the financial arrangements of studying in Canada work. A December 2023 change, which doubled the amount of money students must prove they have to pay for cost of living on top of tuition from $10,000 to $20,635, has further reduced the number of students who can afford to come to Dio.

The Atlantic School of Theology (AST), located in Halifax, has seen a drop in the number of its international applicants, says academic dean Susan MacAlpine Gillis, but it has seen a drop, from six or seven last year to only two this year. Like Dio, AST has been predominantly geared toward postgraduate education, but in 2023, it introduced a Bachelor of Theology program. Speaking to the Journal in early April, she said applications to its B.Th had surpassed those to its M.Div program this year—but that no international students had applied.

Nova Scotia’s rules require AST to charge international students more in tuition than Canadians, says the school’s president, the Rev. Heather McCance, but the school equalizes the difference with bursaries for international students taken from the school’s donated funding. International students are therefore not a significant factor in AST’s finances, she says. But the few who come do bring valuable enthusiasm and perspective from parts of the world with a very different cultural relationship to religion.

She tells a story about one student from Nigeria who is a permanent resident—not technically an international student, but still an example of an international perspective in the classroom, she says.

“He was talking to people about how surprised he was that the Canadian church is shrinking when in Nigeria, of course, the Anglican church is growing,” she says. That seemed to challenge classroom assumptions about the global context of Christianity and the possibilities for the church’s future, she says. “So I’m really glad that we have folks like him in the class to be able to ask those questions.”

While AST receives some government funding, it has primarily been supported by donations, making it less reliant on trends in public funding than schools tied to major universities, she says. She recalls that as the government reduced funding to post-secondary education—a trend which has continued since the 1980s, according to a fact sheet from the Canadian Federation of Students—it encouraged schools to seek international students as a way of shoring up that funding. Wycliffe College, meanwhile, is tied to a major educational institution that does receive public funding, the University of Toronto. The larger school had already made some adjustments to its reliance on international students after Ontario imposed cuts to the maximum tuition schools could charge them, and the new restrictions stand to continue that trend in Wycliffe’s parent school. As a result, says Wycliffe’s registrar, Jeffrey Hocking, the cap on international students does have an impact on Wycliffe as well. While Wycliffe isn’t primarily looking to backstop its budget with fees from international students, who make up about a quarter of the school’s roughly 200 students, he says, it did make a difference that their tuition was able to rise with inflation. Currently, a domestic student pays about $8,000 a year in tuition, compared with $28,000 for an international student.

The exact impact of the latest changes, which now affect the school’s postgraduate programs, has yet to be seen, says Hocking. Last year, the school admitted 17 international students, and this year it admitted 12, he says. The cap for the school year starting September 2025 is set at seven, he says, though he doesn’t think it’s likely it will have even that many. Early in the year, international interest in Wycliffe seemed to be surging, which Hocking attributes to events south of the border. But since word got out about the caps, he says, there has been a sharp drop in applications.

The loss of guaranteed work permits for students’ spouses, for whom Wycliffe usually keeps several campus jobs available, has also impacted interest, he says.

Hocking thinks international students have been unfairly scapegoated for the housing crisis in Canada. The policies are therefore unfair, in his opinion, and overlook what international students bring to classrooms in Canada.

“So it hurts the college more than just more than one way,” he says. “I would say it hurts our overall educational quality, and it also hurts our ability to function as a community together.”

The Rev. Richard Topping, president and vice-chancellor of the Vancouver School of Theology (VST), says the new policy will mostly mean more work for the school’s admissions committee. In British Columbia, as in several other provinces, the caps are being administered by means of a provincial attestation letter (PAL) system. The province gives the school a limited number of the letters, which they then give to applicants based on their evaluation to recommend them to the federal government for approval. This happens before the final decision is made on allowing them into the country, meaning the school must do its best to pick candidates who are most likely to be approved and most likely to follow through and show up in the fall.

VST has not seen a major dip in interest from prospective international students, he says. The fact that its recruitment officer is from Indonesia, where many of its international students come from, may be helping. The school also hired a legal counselor to give a seminar on how to navigate the admissions process. In fact, he says, while the PAL system has required more comprehensive vetting of each student on the admission committee’s part, it has streamlined other things, like post-graduate and spousal work permits, as they are now both included in the PAL process. Previously, these things were less straightforward due to VST’s status as a non-provincially-accredited school. Nor is Topping concerned about the number of attestation letters the school has been allocated; he says this number seems to have been allotted fairly, based on previous years’ admissions, and to have been well communicated to the school.

“I think it’s a lot about consumer protection,” he says of the new policies. He alludes to concerns about schools that have allegedly been taking advantage of international students, bringing them in to go through subpar programs or without sufficient housing or resources available to live on. “Just because a person is from another part of the world doesn’t mean the same standards don’t apply when it comes to how you treat them.”

VST deliberately recruits international students, who pay the same tuition as domestic students and make up around 20% of its student body, he says, because the school wants to cultivate a relationship with the global Christian community. The ability to share stories and ideas from across the Christian world provides the intercultural competency VST is aiming to instil in its graduates, he says.

Hocking and Topping both estimate that about half of their schools’ international students end up staying to work in Canada, while the other half return to their home countries to apply their education. McCance and Zink did not provide firm numbers for their schools, but both said some students stay, while others return home. None gave any suggestion that their school’s international students were using study in Canada primarily as a path to immigration.