The 45-year-old Town & Country Shopping Centre in Victoria, B.C., before redevelopment.Duane Prentice/The Globe and Mail
Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer who focuses on business, technology and society.
So, as widely reported recently, international students have been using private colleges – really, “diploma mills” – as a way to sidestep the country’s immigration rules.
That there are now more than a million international students in Canada likely drives up wait times for health services and housing prices. And so the issue was met this week with an immigration policy to cap the number of student visas the country makes available each year.
The policy appears to be a step in the right direction. It should, hopefully, squeeze out those private colleges that prey on international students who are looking more for citizenship than education.
But still there remains the more difficult task of actually doing something about the quality of education that students of private secondary schools and colleges receive. Private education is far more broken than coverage of this latest flare-up lets on, and it’s by no means a problem unique to international students. In effect, international students at diploma mills are simply doing what domestic students have done for decades.
What to know about Ottawa’s two-year cap on international student visas, and other measures
It’s not that hard for Canadian high-school students to buy their seats in the country’s most coveted university programs. For a few thousand dollars, students can enroll at private credit-granting “schools” – usually in strip malls – where they’re almost guaranteed top marks. What these students pay in fees, they can often recoup in scholarship money.
The Globe and Mail reported on this issue in 2004, and almost nothing has changed, except maybe that these sham private schools have grown even more popular in recent years. I know, because a decade after The Globe’s story broke, I took a course at one.
At the time, I was hoping to attend the bachelor of commerce program at Queen’s University in Kingston, and gaining acceptance was, and still is, fiercely competitive. The program’s acceptance rate, at 6 to 7 per cent, is about half that of Harvard’s MBA. And, all around me, students also vying for a spot in the program were turning to strip-mall private schools that seemed to be doling out near perfect grades.
I was tortured by the thought that I might lose out on a spot in the program to a classmate that had essentially purchased their grades. So, I took Grade 12 English at one of these private schools. If memory serves, for just over $1,000, I scored a comically inflated 97 per cent. I got into the commerce program, and frankly, I don’t regret paying for my English grade. After all, I was competing with troves of students who had done the same.
The whole thing bears a striking resemblance to the issue of pay-for-citizenship private colleges. At some of these institutions, as many as 90 per cent of students are “no shows,” and in all likelihood are just paying the college for the visa and work permit it affords them. Morally, it’s no different than a domestic student who buys a grade they don’t deserve.
Clearly something beyond a cap on student visas needs to be done to restore the country’s meritocratic values. Shoddy private schools need to be held accountable, regardless of whether they target international or domestic, or high-school or college students.
The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be much data on these private schools, and any available data is wanting. At a minimum, provinces would need to know the acceptance, enrolment, graduation and employment rates at each of these schools. Ontario purports to make this data available, but it’s chock full of missing fields.
There are thousands of these private secondary schools across the country, but do the provinces know how many students attend them and on average how inflated their grades are? If they do, they aren’t sharing this information with universities, and despite auditing these private schools, rarely if ever shut them down.
Some universities have taken matters into their own hands. The University of Waterloo in Southwestern Ontario made headlines in 2018 for its “secret list” of high schools for which they adjust applicants’ grades. But if this effort is going to bring about meaningful change, it requires provincewide co-operation.