People walk past the Ladner Clock Tower on the UBC Vancouver campus in April, 2025.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
The number of international graduate students given permits by the Immigration Department to attend Canadian universities dropped dramatically between 2024 and 2025, new figures show.
The figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada reveal that Ottawa’s policy of restricting international student numbers, which coincided with falling public support for immigration, has had a proportionally greater impact on master’s students than people applying to universities as undergraduates.
The federal government has recently launched a social media campaign to attract more graduate students to Canada, including by broadcasting that their family could apply to come with them.
Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab, speaking at the Canadian Club in Toronto on Wednesday, stressed that Canada wants to attract “the best talent to Canada,” including leading researchers.
Ottawa has removed its cap on international master’s and PhD applicants for 2026, a move Ms. Metlege Diab said would help attract global talent.
The federal government introduced a cap on international student numbers in January, 2024. It has led to the number of international students in Canada dropping by a third.
The clampdown on international students, spearheaded by former immigration minister Marc Miller, was not focused on international students attending top universities or graduate programs.
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Mr. Miller said the goal was to target colleges and private universities that charged high fees for low-value degrees to international students who saw studying here as a route to permanent residence in Canada.
But the changes appear to have had a wider deterrent effect, including on graduate students.
A breakdown of the IRCC figures, disclosed to The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, shows that between January and September, 2024, there were 28,605 new study permits issued to master’s degree students. But in 2025 over the same period that number dropped by 46 per cent to 15,390.
The number of permits issued by the Immigration Department to allow students to study for bachelor degrees dropped 40 per cent, from 33,250 between January and September, 2024, to 20,045 over the same period in 2025.
The starkest reduction in study permits was to foreign nationals applying to study at Canadian colleges.
There was an 82-per-cent decrease in the number of study permits issued to international students to study at colleges, from 101,025 between January and September, 2024, to 18,105 in the same period last year.
There was a slight drop in the number of study permits issued to doctoral students between 2024 and 2025, from 3,305 to 3,225, the figures show.
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At Ontario universities, the reduction in the number of international master’s and bachelor degree students was less dramatic than in Canada over all. There was a roughly 14-per-cent drop for both bachelor and master’s students, according to the Council of Ontario Universities.
Steve Orsini, president and CEO of the council, welcomed the shift in emphasis by the federal government to attract skilled graduates.
He said the previous federal government’s policies toward international students “were blunt and impacted all international student enrolments,” which led to a fall in Canada’s global standing as a destination for students.
“The previous federal government changes sent a clear signal that international students were not welcome,” he said. “We are very pleased that the current federal government is focusing on attracting top talent.”
Dan Hurley, head of public affairs in Canada for Navitas, a private company that partners with universities globally to recruit international students, told The Globe on Tuesday its student-recruitment agents working on the ground have found that interest in studying here has dropped. He said Canada lags behind key competitors such as Australia and Britain.
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Ms. Metlege Diab said in a statement that “to restore balance and strengthen the integrity of our international student program and to better set students up for success, we took action to address rapid, unsustainable growth and vulnerabilities that were putting some students at risk.”
She said the federal government is now “taking steps to attract more graduate-level students, given their critical contributions to research, innovation, and Canada’s labour market.”
Isabelle Dubois, a spokesperson for IRCC, earlier told The Globe that the recruitment of graduate‑level students is “an important focus of our social media strategy.“
A recent post by IRCC on X says: “We’re looking to attract the world’s brightest and best students!”
The post lists several advantages, such as fast application processing and family members being able to come, too.
IRCC has granted thousands of international students extensions to their permits so they can continue their studies.
The IRCC figures show that between January and September 2024, the Immigration Department granted 172,150 study permit extensions, with another 195,770 extensions approved in the same period in 2025.