Northern Ontario colleges rely on students from India to survive. What if that revenue strategy fails?
CBC
Students are taking a break between classes on this sunny September day just outside Pures College's Scarborough campus, where diplomas are issued from Timmins's Northern College.
It's a familiar back-to-school scene — one that plays out across Canada. Except at Pures College in suburban Toronto, almost all the students are from India.
"Wherever I go, there are Indians," says Joseph Kadasani, a second-year business management student. "I don't feel like I'm in a foreign country right now."
Fellow business student Khushleen Kaur echoes a similar sentiment.
"I thought I would be interacting with different cultures. But here I am with all the Indian students. It's not a very international experience."
According to data from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, almost 80 per cent of all students enrolled at Northern College come from abroad, and almost all of them are from India.
Other northern Ontario-area colleges have similar data.
For example, seven out of 10 students enrolled in North Bay's Canadore College are international students, with 94 per cent of them listing India as their country of origin.
Like other institutions across the province, northeastern Ontario's public colleges have partnered with private colleges in southern Ontario over the past decade.
The arrangement allows them to fund operations in northern campuses by tapping into the lucrative international student demand for public college diplomas in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
In a 2021 report, the office of the province's auditor general concluded that, were it not for the international students' fees they collect from private college partners, Canadore, Cambrian and Northern College could have incurred annual losses in recent years.
Data gathered from these institutions' annual reports show how the reliance on international student programs has only increased since 2019, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic.
It's a trend that's happening across Canadian colleges and universities, but the data is particularly stark in Ontario.
For the 2023-2024 school year, international students are expected to make up half of the student body in the province's public colleges.
