Canada's foreign student push 'mismatched' job market, data show

Canada's recruitment of international students has tilted strongly toward filling spots in business programs, while doing little to meet the demand for workers in health care and the skilled trades, according to a CBC News analysis of federal data.

CBC obtained figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) showing the fields of education chosen by foreign students who received study permits from Ottawa to attend college or university in each year since 2018. 

Experts say the figures demonstrate that neither federal nor provincial governments — nor Canadian colleges and universities themselves — focused international student recruitment squarely on filling the country's most pressing labour needs.

"What we're seeing with this data is that oversight was really lacking," said Rupa Banerjee, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who holds the Canada Research Chair in the economic inclusion of immigrants. 

The figures, which have not previously been made public, show that business-related programs accounted for 27 per cent of all study permits approved from 2018 to 2023, more than any other field. 

Over that same time period, just six per cent of all permits went to foreign students for health sciences, medicine or biological and biomedical sciences programs, while trades and vocational training programs accounted for 1.25 per cent. 

Banerjee says the data show far too many foreign students were lured to Canada for post-secondary programs with little prospect of a good job in an in-demand field. 

"Instead of really trying to bring in the best and the brightest to fill the labour market gaps that need to be filled, what we're doing is bringing in low skill, low wage, expendable and exploitable temporary foreign workers in the form of students," Banerjee said in an interview.  

She says the figures point to a failure by both federal and provincial governments to ensure that international student recruitment was in line with Canada's need for skilled workers. 

"Students are graduating from programs that are not particularly valuable in the labour market, that are not allowing them to get the jobs that will then allow them to transition and become productive Canadian permanent residents," Banerjee said. 

The industries with the highest job vacancy rates and the largest absolute numbers of job vacancies have been generally consistent since 2018, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic began: construction, health care and accommodation and food services, according to Statistics Canada data.

Yet from 2018 to 2023, the growth in the number of international students coming to Canada for business programs far outpaced the growth in any other post-secondary field. 

The number of study permits granted for programs in business management, marketing and related support services increased fivefold between 2018 and 2023. No other field of study saw anywhere near that rapid of an increase. 

The number of permits granted to non-business fields increased on average 1.7 times over the same time period, according to the data. The fields of health sciences (2.6 times) and computing/IT (2.4 times) saw the next-largest increases.