How One BC College Hopes to Recover from Lost International Students

Vancouver’s Langara College, faced with a dramatic drop in international students, is planning a major restructuring that would see its almost 40 academic departments operate under five centres of excellence.

An internally produced slide show shared with The Tyee outlines the post-secondary institution’s new strategic framework, which aims to deal with the loss of tuition fees from international students and attract talented faculty to the Vancouver-based college.

The new framework also seeks project-based partnerships with industry, governments and philanthropic organizations to cover declining public post-secondary operational funding and the loss of international student tuition dollars.

The move comes after the federal government placed a cap on international student visas earlier this year.

Langara has 4,512 international students, the majority studying full time, out of nearly 14,000 students overall. That’s a decrease of nearly 700 international students compared with the spring 2024 semester.

Prior to the cap, international students made up 37 per cent of the student body at Langara, one of the highest proportions at public post-secondaries in B.C. International students typically pay $19,137 in tuition, according the Langara’s website, about six times more than domestic students.

In addition to the five centres of excellence, Langara plans to retain a separate school of foundational studies to provide associate degrees in science, arts and interdisciplinary studies.

The college is aiming to finalize the plan by next March, for a May 2025 implementation.

Langara Faculty Association president Pauline Greaves is concerned the changes are being pushed through too quickly and will leave faculty members in the lurch.

Temporary faculty members have already lost work as a result of the drop in international students, Greaves said, but Langara’s administration hasn’t shared information about the extent of the cuts.

The Tyee contacted Langara for an interview with president Paula Burns or provost Pouyan Mahboubi, but they were not made available.

Instead a spokesperson sent The Tyee an emailed statement, which said the framework is still under development and subject to change.

“We are actively collaborating with our community, industry, government, and other post-secondary institutions to find innovative ways to respond to recent reforms,” the statement read, adding the college has held meetings and town halls, met with faculty and established a campus-wide steering committee and plans to hold an open house for further feedback.

Langara is not the only post-secondary institution in Canada facing budgetary shortages due to the new international student visa cap.

Colleges and universities have increasingly relied on tuition, especially from international students, to cover costs. The majority of public post-secondaries are now facing stark choices for their futures.

Post-secondaries were once motivated by the importance of interdisciplinary education and to “help people become better and happier citizens,” said William Bruneau, professor emeritus in the University of British Columbia’s educational studies department.

But Langara’s proposed framework, which includes dozens of graphs showing enrolment and graduation rates and projections in a variety of courses, is part of a decades-long post-secondary governance trend toward what Bruneau calls “managerialism” — prioritizing the programs that are the most “efficient” at getting students jobs.

But Bruneau said that “we don’t know the future of the economy.”

If we continue to “hook up” the future of post-secondary education to the economy like this, Bruneau said, “we are in for a pile of trouble.”

How we got here

When the international student cap was announced in January, B.C. was home to 175,000 international students, the second highest number in Canada.*

That’s more than double the number of international students B.C. had in 2011, when then-premier Christy Clark announced a plan to increase international enrolment in public schools and post-secondary institutions by 50 per cent over four years.

The BC Federation of Students’ 2019 data shows that despite making up less than a quarter of students, international student tuition made up almost half of the total tuition revenue in B.C.

While domestic students’ tuition increases are capped at no more than two per cent annually in B.C., there are no similar protections for international students. Post-secondaries have consequently jacked up international tuition rates by 64 per cent since 2006, making them four to five times higher than those of their domestic counterparts.

Revenue from international student fees has been relied on more heavily as provincial operating grants for public colleges and universities have declined from over 90 per cent of institutions’ operating dollars in the 1970s to less than 44 per cent today.

Bruneau said international students bring a wealth of knowledge and diversity of perspectives to Canadian post-secondaries, as well as financial contributions to the local economy.

Governments and institutions haven’t done a good job of explaining the benefits of international students to the broader public, he said.

Like anyone studying in a new country, international students need academic and social supports from their school to thrive, and that costs money, too, Bruneau added.

Funding can’t just come “on the backs of international students,” he said, especially when their annual tuition rates are too expensive for most people to afford.

Provinces and the federal government need to invest more in post-secondaries, Bruneau said, while decisions over what programs institutions offer are better left to academics.

“They are confusing training with education,” he said of Langara’s focus on enrolment, graduation rates and graduate employment.

What we’re facing

B.C. launched a post-secondary funding formula review in 2022, with plans to release a report in 2023. In response to a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Finance, The Tyee obtained an internal email showing a revised timeline for the review, ending on March 13, 2024. The review has yet to be released.

At Langara, Greaves said, there is an expectation that international student enrolment will continue to decline next semester, further hurting the college’s bottom line.

“We have a lot of programs designed just for international students,” she said.

As an example, Greaves cited the post-degree diploma in business administration, which dropped to just four sections this fall semester — with 25 students per section — down from 12 sections a year ago.

“Apparently they might be running only one or two sections in the spring,” she said.

The reductions have led to temporary faculty losing work hours. But Greaves said that Langara’s administration won’t tell the Langara Faculty Association how many people have lost work. Their collective agreement requires the college to share this information, Greaves added.

“We have temporary faculty who are falling through the cracks, and the way the college has been dealing with them is to basically inform them, ‘We have no work for you,’” she said.

Based on self-reporting from faculty, the Langara Faculty Association believes 27 temporary faculty members lost work hours this semester, and even more will lose work next semester.

The college has said it will communicate how many faculty will be losing January work hours on Dec. 16, Greaves said.

“It’s disrespectful to not let them know until December, when we’re going into a holiday period,” she said.

How faculty will be affected

Out of 727 Langara faculty members, 179 hold regular temporary positions. That means they have contracts with the college, but their jobs aren’t permanent.

Another 73 are temporary faculty members who teach just one to two sections of a course per semester. And there are 20 faculty members who are considered casual, hired at the beginning of each semester to fill in any vacancies.

In total, just under 40 per cent of Langara’s faculty are temporary and therefore in precarious positions, Greaves said. Langara has hired a lot of temporary faculty over the last decade, she added, some of whom have taught for more than five years.

“The concern we as a union have for them is most of them cannot get a mortgage, cannot get a loan, because they’re not considered to have a full-time job,” Greaves said. “Even though they might have two jobs, because that’s how they can afford to live.”

Greaves is also concerned that Burns’ previously stated support of micro-credential offerings, which are shorter than regular courses, will mean that course format will feature heavily in the new strategic framework.

“Then you can hire an individual to come in and teach just for those 12 weeks” or less, she said.

This is similar to the existing continuing studies courses, Greaves added, whose instructors are paid on an hourly basis and are not part of the union.

In their emailed statement to The Tyee, the Langara spokesperson said the micro-credential plan won’t replace existing credit-based courses.

“The offering of micro-credentials is one aspect of a much broader strategic vision, which is being driven by the evolution of educational student demand,” the statement read.

While the faculty association wants more transparency and accountability over the cuts from Langara’s administration, they know the international student cap has put the public college in a bind.

“We do recognize that there’s a problem and some of it is out of the control of the college,” Greaves said, adding the cap has hit Langara harder than other B.C. post-secondaries because of its previously high international student enrolment.

But the faculty association maintains Langara administration has alternatives to cutting hours, such as reducing class sizes to enable the same number of course sections, offering existing faculty retirement incentives or getting permission from the Education Ministry to use the college’s $119-million capital and investment fund to cover the loss of international student tuition.

Greaves told The Tyee the union reached out to administration with these suggestions, and they are in discussion with the college. However, the government has already said no to using the $119-million capital and investment fund, she said.

Approving a finalized framework in time for a spring implementation is too fast of a timeline, UBC’s Bruneau said. But he doesn’t think this framework will go ahead because of conflict with the faculty union.

“This is going to cause too much of a kerfuffle in the staff,” he said. “Working conditions are going to be so radically altered, and that will have an impact anyway on how well you can offer the education that you do. Then the union has a right — in fact, it has a duty — to get involved.”

The Tyee reached out to Anne Kang, post-secondary education and future skills minister, for an interview, but she was not made available. Instead a ministry spokesperson emailed a statement to The Tyee.

“The federal government has made a number of unilateral decisions that continue to impact the post-secondary sector and affect the decisions that some institutions now face,” the emailed statement read, adding that the provincial ministry’s focus has been on implementing the international student visa cap and providing attestation letters confirming that international student applicants are included within an institution’s visa cap.

“We remain committed to working with public post-secondary institutions and engaging with the federal government as our public institutions navigate these financially challenging times,” the statement continued.

* Story updated on Dec. 10 at 2:20 p.m. to correct that in January, B.C. did not have the highest number of international students of any province or territory, but the second highest number in Canada.