A remote Canadian college in Timmins has become a magnet for Indian students, with 82% of its students coming from India. The college’s reliance on international students, particularly from India, has been identified as a risk to its survival. Budget cuts have led public colleges and universities to depend on the higher tuitions paid by international students. The influx of foreign students has also worsened housing shortages in Canada. Despite challenges, students believe that obtaining permanent residence in Canada makes their efforts worthwhile.
On a college campus in northern Canada, eight hours by car from Toronto, most of the students who fill the classrooms are from a country half a world away: India. The young men and women in the gymnasium are more likely to be from Punjab or Gujarat rather than rural Ontario.
Hindi and Punjabi drowned out English in the cafeteria’s lunchtime cacophony.
In the surrounding city of Timmins, the servers at two new Indian restaurants do not ask customers how spicy they want their dishes.
A shuttered bar named Gibby’s has been reopened as a Sikh temple where students from the school, Northern College, gathered on a recent evening.
“We feel like we are in India,” said Mehardeep Singh, 20, a general arts and science major.
“In every class, there are only three or four local people. The rest are from India.”
Northern College traditionally drew its students from the province of Ontario’s vast, sparsely populated hinterland, a region dominated by miners and loggers. Today, a whopping 82% of the public college’s students come from abroad – nearly all from India. How a Canadian college – in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic – became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.
Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labour shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.
More than 60% of foreign students in Ontario’s public colleges are from India – a dependence the province’s auditor general identified as a risk to the schools’ survival.
As a result, PM Justin Trudeau’s accusations in September that the Indian government was involved in the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist near Vancouver sent tremors through Ontario’s educational institutions.
The episode has strained relations between Canada and India, which categorically denied any involvement.
At Northern College – where Indians make up 96% of foreign students – officials said they would intensify efforts to recruit more students from Africa and Indonesia to reduce their dependence on India.
“We don’t want all our eggs in one basket,” said Audrey Penner, the college’s president, adding that if the tensions between India and Canada persisted, “our market might dry up regardless of any efforts that we take.”
Indians make up the largest group by far, accounting for 40% of international students across the country, according to the Canada Bureau for International Education. China ranks second, at 12%.
Northern appeared to tap into an increasingly rich segment of the Indian population, with many students saying they were the first in their families to study overseas.
Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. At Northern, the college revoked admissions of several hundred international students this year after realising Timmins lacked housing, Penner said. Jobs to help pay for college have also been a challenge.
Still, if students ultimately get permanent residence, Mandeep Kaur, 23, says, “then I think it’s worth it.”
