Kanadas internationale Studentenankünfte gehen in zwei Jahren um 75 % zurück | Täglicher Bienenstock

I have a hard time feeling empathetic towards universities. Here in Halifax at Dalhousie for example, they’re building insane numbers of new buildings, including stupid stuff like a hockey rink on the same property as the perfectly good rink they knocked down 10 years ago, after which they refused to partner with SMU on a shared rink. They have scores of tenured professors making big money. They’re careless with money and expect the gravy train to continue forever. They need to reform as institutions first

Okay, that boogeyman is gone, and no problems have been resolved, except a bunch of professors out of work. 

  Housing still out of reach, groceries still ludicrous and on and on.

  Maybe we finally break up the monopolies that dominate groceries and get short term rentals closed. We can’t compete with either.

So what about the international students who already came here to go to these diploma mills. They should be getting deported too right?

Surprised it doesn’t talk about the [Post Graduate work permit changes](https://www.mltaikins.com/insights/canada-modifies-eligible-fields-of-study-for-post-graduation-work-permits/). There’s a Canadian company called Applyboard that basically functioned as a middleman between agents in other countries, but mostly India, and Canadian schools, but mostly colleges. They marketed themselves as a tech start up in part because their big innovation was a website that foreign agents could use to search and apply for programs. I can tell you the absolute number one filter agents used was whether a program was eligible for the Post-Graduate Work permit. (Maybe tied with Agent Commission actually)

It makes sense if you think about it even a little. Paying the outrageous foreign tuition amounts to get a degree in hospitality from a no-name Ontario college in their satellite Toronto office never made any sense if it wasn’t buying something else. We sometimes have a habit of infantalizing immigrants, students especially, but for the most part they are not naive or stupid, they make rational choices. The calculus got even easier when they raised the permitted student working hours from 20 to 40, an absolute concession that students would work anyways and this way maybe they wouldn’t be exploited quite so badly. A student worker could often be pressured to work more than 20 hours but only be paid for the 20. I’m not against harm reduction but isn’t this quite sad? We accept that they will get exploited, and that a student can work 40 hours and still be a student. Note that part of

This was a bad system with bad outcomes. A pathway to citizenship is valuable, other countries sell it for millions. We decided it was a good deal to get somewhat subsidized tuition for domestic students, sort of. Shitty Colleges got rich, shitty companies like Applyboard did well, and shitty business got a nice desperate population of workers who are incentivized to not rock the boat.

One of the things that bugs me about this whole process is how cynically it abuses words and language. I’m not sure I can explain well, but part of the student application process is detailing why you want to come to Canada and study here, specifically. But of course Canada doesn’t actually care, the student doesn’t actually care, no one actually care but we pretend it’s about education and use all this language around that. We’re all just cynically pretending but we all know we’re doing that. We decided part of the process is the student lying to us about why they are coming here, and we know they are lying but just want them to go through the process of saying it anyway. We need them to lie to us and reaffirm that they are here to learn and not work, but we create a system that explicitly lets them do the opposite. On paper it makes sense, we even have a process where they attest and demonstrate they have the funds to afford school and living expenses, so they wouldn’t have to work. But it’s paper thin and the amounts is way too low. Now the school will demand upfront payment, but Canada is more than happy to take for the prospective student to just attest they have the means. Other countries have this figured out, Canada’s surge in popularity had nothing to do with the quality of our private Ontario colleges, big surprise I know. Our open work permits and lack of a deposit or real proof of assets was what economists would call our competitive advantage. I think the bigger advantage is our absolute willingness to buy into our own lies about the process and purpose and ignore what we’re actually doing.

Just selling citizenship would have been so much more honest.

I wonder how the gov is going to address this youth unemployment rate. Not enough minimum wage jobs and ppl need solutions now.