While all students in Canada have faced dramatic fee increases over the last decade, tuition fees for international students have become particularly burdensome in recent years. By fall 2012, average tuition fees for international undergraduate students were $18,641—more than three times the already high fees paid by Canadian citizens. At some universities, international students pay over $20,000 a year in undergraduate tuition fees, and over $25,000 for some graduate programs. In addition, professional programs such as medicine and law can cost a staggering $57,000 a year. High differential fees are an unfair burden and a barrier to post-secondary education for international students. Ultimately, such fees could threaten Canada’s ability to attract and retain foreign scholars.

The Root Cause: Government Underfunding

International students were not charged differential tuition fees prior to the late 1970s. During the negotiations of federal transfer payments to the provinces in 1976, the federal government suggested that introducing differential tuition fees was an acceptable way for the provinces to generate additional revenue at institutions. Over the next several years many provincial governments responded by cutting or eliminating grants that had previously been provided to post-secondary institutions for the purpose of funding international students. By 1982, all provinces except British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador were charging differential tuition fees. In Ontario, fees charged were as high as $6,960.

Throughout the 1990s, tuition fees in Canada skyrocketed for both international students and Canadian citizens as federal and provincial governments cut funding for post-secondary education. Cash-strapped university administrators increasingly turned to tuition fees to cover operating expenses. In 1988, government funding accounted for roughly 84 percent of university operating budgets. Today, that figure has dropped to just over 50 percent.

Governments and post-secondary institutions know that high tuition fees are unpopular with students and their families. However, because international students have little direct political influence in Canada, many provincial governments and institutional decision-makers see them as an easy target. In some provinces, governments have completely deregulated fees charged to international students so that universities are free to exploit them as a replacement for government funding. Differential tuition fees have thus become an important and politically convenient way of generating revenue for many post-secondary institutions in Canada.

High differential fees are an unfair burden and a barrier to post-secondary education for international students. Charging differential tuition fees to international students is drastically out of step with the long-term needs of Canadian society. According to the federal government’s own research, immigrants who have previously worked or studied in Canada have the easiest time integrating into the Canadian workforce and prospering in Canadian society. Differential tuition fees could threaten Canada’s ability to attract and retain foreign scholars from diverse backgrounds and work directly against the Canadian government’s professed goal of building an educated, prosperous, and innovative society.

While international students already contribute over $8 billion annually to the Canadian economy, their potential contribution as residents and citizens, if naturalised, would present a boon to the Canadian economy and lessen shortfalls in the aging labour market.