New report highlights flaws in student visa reform attempts

By September of 2025, when almost all of that year’s student visas would have been issued, the number of new student visas issued by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had fallen to 50,370 – 80% lower than IRCC had predicted for 2025.

The number had also fallen more than twice as far as IRCC had predicted and was 66% lower than the 2024 number, which itself was 67% lower than in 2023.

Between 2023 and 2025, the number of new international study visas issued by Canada dropped by nearly 90% from 456,690 in 2023 to 50,370 by September 2025 (a partial year) states International Student Program Reforms, published by the Auditor General (AG) of Canada last month.

These declines far exceeded those foreseen in January 2024, when IRCC announced plans to reduce the number of international students in the country by 35% in 2025 as compared with 2024 – and beyond the declines foreseen by two subsequent announcements, which each lowered the target number by 5%.

The report paints a picture of a department unable to design accountable student visa programmes and unable to adequately predict the impact on applications, acceptances and overall enrolment of international students.

Additionally, IRCC failed to anticipate that the first reduction of 35% (announced in January 2024), would disproportionately affect smaller provinces. For example, Saskatchewan experienced a more than 60% decline in the number of international students as opposed to the predicted 10% increase.

Between 2010 and 2023, the percentage of international students in Canada increased by 121%. Two main factors caused IRCC’s volte face in January 2024.

The first was the country’s housing affordability crisis that was partially caused by the fact that colleges and universities did not have on-campus housing for hundreds of thousands of students, which threw them into the local rental market, driving up rents.

The second was the fact that many for-profit private colleges were little more than diploma mills and acted as a back door to attaining a work visa. Subsequent to the 35% reduction in the department's target for student visas, two additional reductions of 5% were announced.

In 2024, IRCC expected to issue 348,900 new international study visas, down from 456,590 in 2023. However, even though approval rates increased from 42.7% in 2023 to 57% in 2024, IRCC approved fewer than half of its target of 348,900 because the total number of applicants cratered from 792,200 to 363,007, a decline of 54%.

In 2025, IRCC processed 134,195 applications for new study visas (a year-over-year decline of 63%). It issued 50,370, or 80%, fewer new study visas.

David Robinson, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, told University World News: “The decline in international students was obviously far more than what institutions anticipated, or perhaps even what the government anticipated, but the result has been devastating. Across the country.

“We're seeing programme closures, enrolment caps, hiring freezes, and even layoffs for the first time, and likely in over a generation,” he said.

Disproportionate impact on provinces

The IRCC projected, the AG notes, that “provinces with large populations that also have historically high numbers of international students such as Ontario and British Columbia” would see the greatest decline in the number of international students and that four provinces, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan and Alberta, would see increases of 10%.

Instead, each of these four provinces saw declines of 30%, almost 60%, nearly 63% and 65%, respectively.

In the case of Newfoundland and Labrador, the difference between what the IRCC told the province to expect and the reality was just under 70 percentage points. For Quebec it was about 45 percentage points.

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were told to expect 10% declines. According to the AG, the figures for each province in 2025 are more than -60%. Canada’s smallest and least populated province, Prince Edward Island (population 182,000), expected to see a decline of about 18%; the actual figure is 50 percentage points higher.

Ontario, which with 16.1 million people is 39% of Canada’s population of 41.5 million, was told to expect a decline of just over 40% in international students authorised to study in the province. The decline was 75%. IRCC predicted a decline in British Columbia’s international students of about 18%. The actual decline was 65%.

Experts speculated that these declines were caused by two other changes in the international student regimen introduced in January 2025.

The first – the requirement that international students submit to the government letters of acceptance from accredited colleges and universities – was intended to reduce the number of students enrolling in for-profit private colleges that amounted to “diploma mills” and other colleges and universities to attest that there was a seat for these students.

The second was a requirement that students provide a letter attesting to the fact that they had CA$20,000 (US$27,800) available for living expenses.

The AG found that “neither the new letter of acceptance verification system nor the increased financial requirements accounted for the extent of the decline in approval rates”.

Of the 841,000 letters of acceptance submitted between December 2023 and 2025, almost 94% were “confirmed as genuine by the designated learning institution”. Nor, says the report, can the decline be attributed to prospective students having insufficient funds.

“Although refusals due to insufficient finances increased by 18% in 2024 compared with the previous year, these refusals had risen steadily since 2022, with the sharpest increase between 2022 and 2023 – before any increase in the financial requirement. In addition, financial refusals had dropped 4% in 2025.”

To help explain the magnitude of the decline, Robinson pointed to a number of issues that are not dealt with in the AG’s report.

“In addition to putting caps on international students, the government also announced changes to the postgraduate work permit and limited the number of hours that students could work. They also changed the spousal benefit that allowed students who were married to be able to bring their spouse along.

“All these things sent a signal that for people who were looking at Canada as an attractive location for all those reasons, it was no longer as attractive,” he said.

Further, Robinson noted, as has been covered in these pages, news stories were highly critical of Canada’s treatment of international students.

“I also think there was just a reputational hit. We had a lot of stories that were coming out at the time about how international students were being very mistreated by very dubious college providers, particularly in Ontario and British Columbia, that contributed to this precipitous decline,” said Robinson.

Slow responses to integrity concerns

The AG was extremely critical of the Student Direct Stream (SDS), which had been established in 2018 to expedite visas for residents of 14 countries, including Antigua, Brazil, China and Colombia but was used mainly by students from India.

In both 2022 and 2023, Indian students constituted 96% of the students in the programme, and in 2024, they accounted for 87%. The SDS programme was shut down at 2pm on 8 November 2024.

“We found that the department was slow to act on integrity concerns it had identified with the stream, such as higher rates of fraudulent documents, reports of students not actively pursuing their studies, and increased asylum claims by students approved through the stream,” which was a significant percentage of the entire number approved.

Despite India having been designated a “high-risk” country for fraud, the AG found that applications made through the SDS “were subject to a ‘light touch’ eligibility review by processing officers”.

During the period when SDS applications rose from a 61% approval rate to 98%, IRCC did not increase the scrutiny of applications even though the IRCC itself “identified integrity risks” in 2022, and in 2023 knew that “the stream was being targeted by non-genuine students seeking entry into Canada”.

Nor, the AG noted, did IRCC act to ensure that individuals falsely claiming to be students who were identified actually left Canada.

Between 2023 and 2024, based on reports filed with IRCC by colleges and universities, IRCC officials knew that some 153,000 students were “non-compliant with study permit conditions”.

According to the AG, IRCC officials said “that the department had temporary funding to investigate only 2,000 cases annually from 2023 to 2028”.

The inability of the IRCC to deal with non-compliant individuals with dispatch undermines faith in the immigration system and the international student system, said Robinson.

“One of the stories that comes out of the auditor general's report is the degree of understaffing within the department to follow up on these issues. This raises a lot of issues around trust.

“A lot of the people gaming the systems were international student recruiters who were hired by universities and were not always being honest with students and were selling international student visas, basically, as a gateway to residency in Canada.

“That’s why we had a lot of non-compliance: people were showing up and not going to the institutions that they were supposed to go to,” said Robinson.

Understaffing has, he added, another deleterious effect on the international student system. Because IRCC is understaffed, scientists are coming to the Canadian Association of University Teachers to complain that they haven’t heard whether their graduate students are going to get their work permits or study visas.

“This is causing a lot of impact on our research capacity. If we don't have grad students who are supposed to be showing up to work in labs and assisting with professors on research projects, we have another big problem,” said Robinson.

“The whole thing is just a huge mess.”