Unscrupulous actors and fraudulent promises: Representing the problem of ethical practices in Canada’s post-pandemic international student policy landscape

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Navigating Higher Education Rankings, Ethics, Competition, and Talent Development

Proposal

Canada has long positioned itself as a major player in what has been called a global ‘great brain race’ to recruit international students (IS) (Sá & Sabzalieva, 2018). After rebounding from the peak pandemic years, the IS population reached a record high of over one million in 2023 (ICEF Monitor, 2024) and IS currently make up 17.3% of the entire student body (Statistics Canada, 2022). These efforts are reinforced at policy level, with the federal government preparing to launch the third edition of its International Education Strategy in 2024 (Global Affairs Canada, 2023) alongside the release of many provincial governments’ international education plans (Tamtik et al., 2020). Yet despite plentiful literature on international education policy, there has been ‘surprisingly little attention paid to the Canadian policy context’ (Tamtik et al., 2020, p. 3). This gap in policy analysis is becoming especially pronounced in light of Canada’s increasing vulnerability from international education (El Masri & Trilokekar, 2023).
In Canada – and beyond – a wave of anti-IS sentiment is being fed by a combination of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, political populism, geopolitics, domestic strains, and racism (Harden-Wolfson et al., 2024). In Ontario, where the highest number of IS in Canada are located, a domestic housing crisis has been attributed to the high number of IS in the province, even as accounts abound of the difficulties and abuses faced by under- or poorly-housed students (Su et al., 2023). In neighbouring Quebec, the government’s oscillating culturally nationalist-fiscally conservative outlook (Béland et al., 2023; Graefe & Rioux, 2020) has led to proposals that will effectively penalize the province’s Anglophone universities for recruiting out-of-province undergraduates and IS (Usher, 2023). Across all provinces, growing financial dependence on IS fees is proving increasingly unsustainable (Patel, 2022).
Aiming to recruit ever-more IS as the main, almost singular, international education policy priority has never been sustainable for Canada (or other countries) yet continues to be the main strategy of the ‘great brain race’. This has produced an inherently paradoxical discourse on IS: valued for their revenue generation and until recently, an integral part of Canada’s immigration strategy, but simultaneously admonished due to their temporary status and country of origin, especially for IS who are racialized in/by Canada (Harden-Wolfson et al., 2024; Hutcheson, 2023; Waruru, 2023). These contradictions led to our research questions, which ask: how has the Canadian policy landscape towards IS changed since 2022? And how do recent policies that have been proposed and/or implemented construct the role of IS in Canada? We characterize the period starting in 2022 as ‘post-pandemic’: even though the effects of COVD-19 continue, its impact on policymaking towards IS has shifted and other priorities have emerged on the policy agenda.
Covering the period from January 2022 to March 2024 , we mapped all policy announcements referring to IS made by the federal government, two high-IS recruiting provincial governments (Ontario and Quebec), and three organizations that have expertise in international or higher education in the Canadian context, which we describe as secondary policy bodies. After aggregating and iteratively refining the results, a total of 97 announcements were selected for detailed review. The data analysis led to the identification of nine overarching themes into which the announcements were categorized: economic strategy, ethical practices, financing, Francisation*, global commitment, immigration, recruitment, retention, and student wellbeing. Although the economic rationale for IS policymaking continues to be dominant, we found that IS and international education policy is an increasingly dynamic policy field that is also seen to serve political and social aims. An important finding was the increasing attention by policy bodies to ethical issues, first named as ‘integrity’ and later more specifically as ‘fraud’. As such, this paper focusses on the topical category of ethical practices as a way of understanding the emerging post-pandemic terrain of IS policymaking in Canada. We applied Bacchi’s (2009; 2016) ‘what’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach, which offers a heuristic for analysing how problems are represented in policies.
The presentation of this paper will summarize Canadian federal and provincial policies towards IS, starting in 2002 with the launch of the International Student Program (ISP). Establishing this landscape contextualizes our study of the ‘post-pandemic’ period from 2022. We then outline the policy mapping methodology before explaining the WPR approach. This sets the scene for the subsequent thematic analysis of the ethical practices category, which begins with a timeline of events before analysing each of the six questions laid out in the WPR heuristic. We will examine how the policy announcements relating to ethical practices both absolve and blame IS for fraudulent behaviour. In concluding, we will touch on developments post-March 2024 and address the limitations of this study with suggestions for future research.

*The process of expanding the use of French language whether voluntarily or by mandate and currently a policy priority in Quebec

Authors

• Emma Harden-Wolfson, McGill University

• Shannon Hutcheson, McGill University

• Yvonne Zhang, McGill University