Students from Punjab who go to study in Canada spend about Rs 68,000 crore in that country, nearly $8 billion, annually. That’s a recent estimate by Sikh Vox, a website on the Sikh diaspora. The estimate is based on the number of students studying in Canada and the average college fees plus living expenditure, etc. According to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), a total of 226,450 visas were approved for Indian students in 2022. Of these, a significant portion, approximately 1.36 lakh students, hailed from Punjab, pursuing various courses with an average duration of two-to-three years, says the report by Sikh Vox. Current estimates from student visa processing agencies suggest that around 3.4 lakh Punjabi students are currently enrolled in various educational institutions across Canada.
But if you include students from other states of India who go to Canada for post-secondary education, the number could be near $20 billion. Such a huge amount of money pouring in every year from India underlines the importance of Canada-India ties. Rising consumer demand in India not only boosts the Indian economy but is now contributing to foreign economies too.
How Indians fund Canadian education system
College fees constitute a significant part of the total annual expenditure of Indian students in Canada, and the Indian money going into the education sector in Canada has made headlines in recent times. Indian students have even left behind the government in Canada in funding of the public education system. International students from India have outpaced the government of Ontario, a province in Canada, in funding public colleges, a recent report has highlighted.
Given that tuition fee for international students is something like three times what it is for domestic students (exact data is difficult to pin down because Statistics Canada chooses not to track tuition fees at the college level), that means that something like 76% of all tuition fees in the sector come from international students, says a recent report published by Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto-based consulting firm that provides research, analysis and strategic advice related to higher education.
As the above graph shows, since a majority of these international students come from India, it turns out that Indian students not only contribute twice the amount of money to the college system, on aggregate, that Canadian students do, they also contribute slightly more than does the Government of Ontario.
These numbers could be shocking for many in Canada, the report says. “Numbers like these tend to induce shock. How can it possibly be that Indian students are paying more into the system than Queen’s Park [the seat of the Assembly of Ontario]? The answer is simply this: Ontario institutions, faced with deep cuts in income, have acted precisely the way the government asked them to — that is, by acting entrepreneurially and securing new forms of revenue. This isn’t a mistake: this is exactly what the Ontario government requires.”
In short, the Ontario government doesn’t have sufficient money to fund its educational institutions and it wants them to earn more from International students, and in the above example, the students from India.
Indian students not only contribute slightly more than does the Government of Ontario but they also contribute twice the amount of money to the college system, on aggregate, that Canadian students do, said the report.
A government analysis from March 2022, which mapped the period when Covid had disrupted International students’ enrolment in Canadian colleges, showed that International students contribute over $22.3 billion per year to the Canadian economy – greater than exports of auto parts, lumber or aircraft.
Why do Canadian colleges need more international students?
Since about 2000, the number of international students at the post-secondary level in Canada has risen dramatically, from just under 40,000 in the late 1990s to almost 420,000 in 2020-21, says the report by Higher Education Strategy Associates. This rise was gradual at first, then very rapid from 2009 onwards.
The report cites several reasons for this growth: international students bring diversity to classrooms across the country and (marginally) because their presence burnishes institutions’ standings in world rankings, which regard the presence of international students as an indicator of quality. However, the main reason is that international students pay much higher tuition fees than domestic students and are thus seen as a way to offset stagnant government funding. In 2021-22, international students made up 17.6% of all university enrolments and 22% of all college enrolments. Growth has been most rapid in Ontario’s college sector, where international student numbers roughly doubled between 2016-17 and 2019-20.
At the university level, international students are a bigger part of the student body in the Atlantic provinces than they are elsewhere; at the college level, it is the reverse, with international enrolments lower in the five eastern provinces but hugely important west of there, especially in Ontario, which accounts for about 70% of all international college students in Canada.
Rising consumer demand in India fuels rush to Canada
Better career opportunities and permanent residency that follows foreign education, especially in Canada, attract Indian students. But the recent rise in numbers of such students can be attributed to rising consumer demand and higher incomes in India as well as more awareness about foreign destinations due to social media.
Indian students opting for higher education abroad are rapidly increasing and their growth outpaced domestic student growth by more than six times in the previous three years to reach around 7,70,000, said a report by consulting firm RedSeer in 2019. The report estimated that the number was expected to grow to 1.8 million by 2024. Covid had disrupted the trend but it’s now coming back on track.
The significant increase in outflow of students over the recent years is driven by better educational quality and outcomes abroad; higher standards of living ; gaps in the Indian education system leading to supply-demand imbalance and upward income mobility of Indian households, said the report.
There has been a massive increase in incomes in India over the past two decades that has translated into growing spends on post-secondary education. Additionally, people are becoming more aware of the benefits of studying abroad and Indians have a rising diaspora in popular destination countries which is leading to more applications abroad and student outflows.
