Immigration cuts leave an Ontario college, and its city, feeling the strain

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For years, Conestoga College was riding high.

By the end of 2023, roughly 32,500 foreign students were enrolled at Conestoga, an increase of 145 per cent from just two years prior. And that boom period provided the college in Kitchener, Ont., with an infusion of cash: Revenue nearly tripled to $945-million in the 2023-24 academic year, compared to three years earlier.

But things have changed abruptly for Conestoga, which had grown beyond its base in southern Ontario. As the federal government has reined in immigration – largely through a sharp reduction in foreign students – postsecondary schools such as Conestoga are feeling the financial squeeze.

And because of the shift, Conestoga’s changing fortunes are having an outsized impact in the community, leading to layoffs in higher education, weaker sales for local businesses and fewer job seekers.

“It is an epic tragedy, and sad to see,” said Ken Steele, president of Eduvation, a higher education consultancy.

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Policy makers had described the international student boom as one of economic necessity. The country had a glut of job vacancies as it emerged from pandemic restrictions – about one million in the summer of 2022 – and foreign students were seen as ideal to fill them.

“By allowing international students to work more while they study, we can help ease pressing needs in many sectors across the country,” said Sean Fraser, then the federal immigration minister, in a 2022 press release in which he announced that foreign students would no longer be bound by weekly limits on their work hours.

Foreign students often needed the work – both to pay for pricey Canadian tuition and to gain work experience that could help them settle permanently in the country, the objective for most of them.

Conestoga – one of 24 public colleges in Ontario – became a major pathway to Canada. Since 2016, the college has accounted for a total of more than 114,000 study visas, which easily outpaces the next highest college in Ontario for foreign student enrolment (Seneca College at 89,305), according to figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

John Tibbits, the president of Conestoga College, who earned a salary of $636,102 in 2024, said the postsecondary institution was not trying to pad its bottom line, but to help out with labour concerns.

“I think that in Ontario, in the fall of 2022, there were 323,000 job vacancies, and we were asked to try to help solve that problem,” he told the House of Commons standing committee on citizenship and immigration in October, without elaborating on who made the request. “We didn’t try to make money. We were just trying to meet skill shortage needs. That’s all we were doing,” he added.

The vacancies, however, were overwhelmingly in low-wage service jobs that required little education. That’s why many foreign students have been disappointed by their work experiences in Canada.

Among that group is Abhi Thakur, who came to Canada from India, graduated from Conestoga in 2024 with a diploma in business management, and then received a three-year postgraduate work permit that allowed him to seek a position with any employer in Canada. He felt confident about his long-term prospects.

But Mr. Thakur struggled to find a job. Many potential employers around Kitchener-Waterloo told him that his diploma had little value, given that he had not attended a degree program, and that Conestoga was churning out hundreds of graduates in the region annually.

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The summer of his graduation, he started driving for Uber and Lyft, working 12- to 14-hour days shuttling people across the Greater Toronto Area. He has since landed a warehouse job at a Canadian-owned shipping and logistics company and continues to drive for ride-share apps on weekends.

“Definitely not what I wanted to do in Canada,” the 26-year-old said. “My life gets harder every year.”

Now, the program he was enrolled in – strategic global business management – no longer exists.

Conestoga has slashed at least 80 programs from its offerings, many of which had been geared to international students who could get three-year work permits after a one-year diploma. In August, the college shuttered its downtown Kitchener campus, once home to more than 3,000 students. And a few months earlier, it shuttered a campus in Brantford, Ont.

The downsizing has led to successive rounds of layoffs. In July, the college cut 180 support staff and more than 1,500 faculty members, in addition to an undisclosed number of managers, according to the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents many Conestoga staff.

The analysis from Mr. Steele of Eduvation suggests that more than 2,100 staff there have been affected by the financial fallout of international student cuts, the highest number of job losses at any public college in Ontario. In mid-November, two sources told The Globe and Mail, the college embarked on yet another round of layoffs, dismissing administrators and managers. The Globe is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal affairs of the college.

Conestoga College did not respond to multiple queries about its job cuts.

The fallout was perhaps inevitable after international students went from economic saviours to scapegoats. At the end of 2023, the federal government began to feel the heat on its expansive immigration strategy, with many Canadians linking the population surge to excessive housing costs and other social problems.

The Trudeau government brought in caps on study visas in 2024, with a further reduction in 2025. Prime Minister Mark Carney then doubled down on the cuts. In the November budget, the government said it would admit roughly 150,000 international students annually over the next three years, about half of previous targets. Foreign student inflows have dropped precipitously over the past year, including at Conestoga.

As a result of that and other efforts to reduce the flow of temporary residents into the country, Canada’s population growth has slowed to a crawl in recent months. This has had a tangible effect on rental housing markets, where there is less competition for units, but also on businesses that relied on students as customers.

“What gets missed in the whole discussion on Conestoga is that downtown Kitchener really benefited from population growth,” said Mayor Berry Vrbanovic. “Now we are feeling the impacts of it in the other direction.”

In the heart of the city, which was frequented by international students because of Conestoga’s presence, Mr. Vrbanovic said some restaurants are no longer there. He expects more closings. “It is still too early to tell, but it has been disappointing for many,” he added.

Rob Kristofferson, president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, said he believes that a big part of the reason colleges and universities boosted their international student populations was that it was a significant source of revenue.

“Provincial government funding for higher education institutions has steadily declined since the 1990s, particularly in Ontario,” Mr. Kristofferson explained.

A 2023 report from Ontario’s blue-ribbon panel on financial sustainability in postsecondary education showed that funding per university student in Ontario was $11,741 in the 2021-22 academic year, compared to $20,772 in Canada as a whole. For colleges, that number was $6,891 versus $15,615.

In 2019, the government of Premier Doug Ford cut tuition fees for domestic students by 10 per cent and froze them indefinitely, significantly affecting the ability of higher education institutions to sustain themselves financially.

“One of the chief ways they tried to solve that problem was to ramp up the number of international students they let in. Now, that lever has been taken away, to some extent,” Mr. Kristofferson said.

But Mr. Steele believes that Conestoga has been unfairly scapegoated for a crisis created by poor immigration policy. “They did a good job at doing exactly what the feds and province told them to do. But they were vilified. The reality is they did train a lot of students for jobs in the skilled trades, which is what Ontario wanted,” he said.

Mikal Skuterud, a professor of labour economics at the University of Waterloo, said it was a major misstep to use foreign students for labour purposes.

“The international student strategy in Canada went off the rails when it became a program focused on bringing in labour, rather than finding the best talent internationally,” he said. “Now you’ve pulled the rug out from under so many groups. What is the consequence? Trust in the whole system has been seriously undermined.”

Mr. Thakur, the former Conestoga College student, still lives in the same room that he had been renting for $1,000 a month in a four-bedroom house. Other graduates of the global business management program are also struggling, in some cases working for ride-share apps or taking odd jobs here and there to make ends meet. He says he will probably leave Canada when his postgraduate work permit expires in mid-2027.

“I was really hopeful about Conestoga and Canada,” he said. “But there’s too much competition now, and not many options for me to stay permanently.”