Joe Stokes is University Registrar and AVP International at Ontario Tech University.
With all of the international visa changes, what do you see happening with Canada’s international reputation going forward, and how does that impact universities?
I think our reputation as an international study destination has basically been obliterated. I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and I’ve never known Canada to be anything but number one or number two in terms of preference for top English-speaking study destinations in the world. Recent surveys now peg us in fourth place among the big four.
We’ve gone from being a highly desired study destination to one where there’s significant concern. I think this is going to follow us around for the better part of a decade. If we look at other major issues that have affected study destination popularity, we can see parallels. In 2006, for example, Australia experienced violence against Indian students, which led to significant protests from students who felt they were being targeted. The result was a total enrollment collapse of Indian students in Australian universities, and it took almost a decade to recover.
Similarly, in Canada, we saw an example when the Liberal government—specifically Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister—tweeted against the Saudi government. The Saudi government responded by recalling thousands of King Abdullah scholarship winners back to the kingdom. That damaged the Saudi-Canada relationship on the education front, and it didn’t recover until this year—again, the better part of a decade.
I think our reputation has now been severely tarnished, and we’re no longer seen as a study destination that’s strongly tied to immigration. That sentiment is going to follow us for quite some time.
“International students bring so much more than revenue. They enhance classroom diversity, contribute to the research enterprise, and help make institutions truly global.”
Without expecting you to have all the answers, what do you think is the way forward from here? How do we restore our reputation, if we can?
Restoring our reputation isn’t going to be a short-term game. There’s no quick fix or silver bullet here. We have to live within this new reality of curtailed immigration and work together across all education sectors—K-12, colleges, and universities. Internationally, we’re seen as one sector: “Education in Canada.” So, we need to collaborate to put our best foot forward as a whole.
With that comes hard work in identifying the parts of Canada’s value proposition that go beyond immigration. Look at the United States—they’re not an immigration-first study destination, yet they’re still the largest in the world. They actively discourage students from immigrating, but people still pay significant tuition fees for a U.S. education. Canada is a world-class education system, and we need to see ourselves not as disadvantaged by immigration reforms, but as offering education of such high quality that we can rise above this challenge.
Connecting Canadian education to the global labor market is going to be key—not just to Canada’s labor market. If immigration is no longer a pathway, then the degree outcomes need to connect to global opportunities. The value proposition for students has to be more than the potential for a postgraduate work permit.
With all these caps limiting new international students, do you see universities focusing more on retention strategies to ensure the students they have complete their programs?
Yeah, I think so. For the longest time, not every institution, but some, have taken a strategy of trying to get the highest enrollment with the least amount of overhead. Those days are over. And that ties into what I was saying about the value proposition of Canadian education. It’s not just about getting “bums in seats.” It’s about retention, student satisfaction, student success, mental health, and engagement on campus.
The only way you get a student to a positive labor force outcome at the end is by keeping them through to graduation. So, I think we all have to get comfortable with the idea that internationalization is going to cost us more money for fewer students, but that’s the path forward.
What about the revenue fallout? How are you seeing institutions navigating this?
In Ontario, we’ve already seen one community college cancel 40 programs, and another close a campus. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Projections for revenue shortfalls in this province alone are in the hundreds of millions of dollars this year, scaling to what could be billions in the coming years.
There’s no recovery from that unless provinces address the chronic underfunding of post-secondary education. Otherwise, institutions are going to have to make deep cuts, and those cuts will reverberate across everything—from the quality of education to the research enterprise at some institutions.
Obviously, this will affect different institutions in different ways, depending on their reliance on internationalization. But we have institutions in this country where 70% of the student body is international. How do you come back from that?
Do you foresee any revisions to that chronic underfunding? Or maybe a proactive move from provincial governments to help fill the gaps? Or is that wishful thinking?
It’s hard to say. If we look at history, we’ve seen reductions in funding across most provinces, whether that’s tuition freezes, rollbacks, or cuts to grants. So this isn’t just an Ontario problem—it’s a Canadian problem.
In some provinces, tuition has been frozen; in Ontario, it’s been rolled back and frozen. In Alberta, grant funding has been cut. Meanwhile, the cost of delivering education keeps increasing, especially with record-high inflation. And now, the potential to rely on international tuition to offset those costs is no longer there.
So, based on the track record, it seems unlikely governments are going to step in and do much.
“There’s no recovery… unless provinces address the chronic underfunding of post-secondary education.”
Going forward, what does competition between institutions look like in the international market?
I think some institutions will simply get out of international education altogether because it’ll become too costly to maintain a stable revenue stream. Smaller institutions, especially, might make that choice.
For larger, research-intensive institutions, though, internationalization isn’t optional. It’s crucial for the research enterprise, rankings, and classroom composition. But even for them, it’s going to cost more money, and they’ll have to adjust to that reality.
At the lower-ranked or non-research institutions, I think we’ll see huge competition, which could lead to ethical challenges or new issues we haven’t yet anticipated. Institutions are going to do whatever they can to mitigate these revenue losses.
But it raises a broader question: if education is a public good, why has it become necessary to rely so heavily on non-public dollars to stay sustainable?
That’s a great point. Last question—so much of this feels out of our hands. What advice would you give to someone working in international recruitment at a Canadian institution today?
The biggest thing is to understand your institutional context. The role of internationalization varies greatly depending on whether your institution relies heavily on international student dollars, research output, or other factors.
You also need to make sure your institution understands the benefits of internationalization. This whole immigration policy shift has put a spotlight on revenues and financial health, which is a shame. International students bring so much more than revenue. They enhance classroom diversity, contribute to the research enterprise, and help make institutions truly global. Those benefits haven’t disappeared just because immigration pathways have been curtailed.
We need to focus on those positives and work hard to remind people of them, rather than getting too caught up in the revenue implications.