Despite their lack of representation on Governing Council and ever-rising tuition costs, international student enrolment at the University of Toronto is set to increase in the next few years.
According to Althea Blackburn-Evans, director of media relations at U of T, international student applications to U of T have nearly doubled to more than 18,000 since 2010.
The predicted influx comes as the university announced in March of last year that international student fees would increase by 9.2 per cent for the 2014–2015 school year.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) followed suit in December 2014 when their Board of Governors approved a fee increase of 10 per cent for incoming international students.
U of T and UBC are also the only two Canadian universities to host more than 10,000 international students.
According to Blackburn-Evans, the university continues to draw international students because of its strong world ranking. A survey by Emerging, a human resource consultancy based in Paris and cited by U of T, ranked the university thirteenth in Global Employability, ahead of institutions such as the London School of Economics, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and New York University.
“We feel that U of T’s strengths are unique, and our own institutional efforts and successes are worthy of distinct promotion,” says Blackburn-Evans.
In a June 2014 report, the Canadian International Council ranked Canada eighth behind the UK in second and Australia in fourth in its ability to attract international students.
The report, written by Bernard Simon from the Munk School of International Affairs, cites the “absence of a unified and coherent voice [in] promoting Canada abroad” and goes on to say that “Canada is the [world’s] only developed country without a national education ministry or a national education strategy.”
The university is looking evermore to “welcome the variety of perspectives, viewpoints and diversity that international students bring to the already diverse campuses,” Blackburn-Evans says.
The Canadian government is pushing hard to attract more foreign students and has a 2022 goal of doubling the number of international students and researchers to 450,000.
Part of the drive has included changes to make it easier for international students to work while studying in Canada. Rather than having to wait six months after enrollment, international students can immediately start working up to 20 hours during regular academic sessions and full-time during scheduled holidays.
While U of T has maintained consistently high rankings, other Canadian universities have not fared as well. A drop by nearly all Canadian universities in the highly watched Time’s top 200 Higher Education World Rankings is drawing concern about the quality of post-secondary education in the country. U of T remained at 20.
Some experts are pointing to the first decline in 15 years in the number of domestic students as a reason for the drop in the rankings of other major Canadian universities.
According to the Ontario Universities Application Centre, from last year, there were 2.9 per cent fewer Ontario high school students starting at Canadian universities, and the drop is expected to continue until at least 2020.
There were 3,373 international student first-year registrations at U of T in 2014, a 60 per cent increase from 2010. International students now make up over 20 per cent of the incoming first-year direct entry class.
