SHIFTING STUDENT BODY
Foreign students are changing Metro in ways beyond just the classroom
Western educational institutions’ attempt to offset lower government funding by attracting the children of wealthy foreigners is increasingly being characterized by ‘self-interest’ and ‘commercial trade. Douglas Todd
Foreign students are changing Metro Vancouver like no other city in Canada.
As the University of B.C. prepares to welcome 28 per cent of its first-year contingent as foreign students, Metro Vancouver’s universities, colleges and high schools are not the only things that are changing.
So is the city’s rental market, restaurant scene and transit congestion.
B.C.’s advanced education minister Andrew Wilkinson has boasted this province now has more than 110,000 foreign students a year (roughly one third of the national total), the vast majority of whom settle in Metro Vancouver.
One recent sign of how the wave of foreign students has been altering the city is the construction crew that has been working late into the evening at UBC to complete a massive complex for the beginning of classes in September.
Called Orchard Commons, the complex was designed predominantly for foreign students. It will provide a new home for Vantage College, created exclusively for about 350 full-fee-paying foreign students (also known as international students).
It also contains two 18-storey residential towers, which will be used to house roughly 500 domestic and 500 foreign students in their first year.
Foreign students fill almost half the 11,000 residence beds on the UBC-Vancouver campus, including in the first year, says UBC vice-provost Pam Ratner. There are not nearly enough rooms for all applying.
The situation is not quite as dramatic on campuses across the country, where roughly 10 per cent of those in higher education are foreign students (which means they’re neither Canadian citizens, immigrants, permanent residents or holders of dual passports).
At UBC-Vancouver, 23 per cent of all of those on campus, or more than 12,000 people, are foreign students. The ratio is highest in UBC’s graduate programs, where about one in three are foreign students.
By far the fastest-growing group of foreign students at UBC (4,300 people) comes from Mainland China. The Chinese group is almost three times larger than the second-biggest contingent, which is from the U.S., followed by India and South Korea.
Across the city, at Simon Fraser University, 18 per cent of undergraduates and 29 per cent of post-grads are foreign students, says associate vice-president Tim Rahilly. SFU’s group of Mainland Chinese (2,500) students is almost 10 times higher than the next largest group of foreign students, which is from Korea.
These figures from Metro’s two largest universities do not include the tens of thousands of foreign students who are registered at Langara College, Douglas College, Kwantlen Polytechnic, Capilano University and a host of private Metro Vancouver colleges.
Nor do these higher-education tallies touch on the thousands of foreign students who are increasingly enrolling in Metro secondary schools, from where, after Grade 12, most are transferring to B.C. colleges or universities.
Many higher education officials publicly maintain that foreign students, most of whom pay full fees, contribute to the cosmopolitan nature of the education and experience on campuses.
But some Canadian specialists in higher education, such as Ontario’s Jane Knight, caution that Western educational institutions’ attempt to offset lower government funding by attracting the children of wealthy foreigners is increasingly being characterized by “self-interest” and “commercial trade.”
Another leading expert, Boston University’s Philip Altbach, warns that the quality of foreign students is rapidly declining as their numbers rise around the world.
Even Canadian government officials acknowledge a key motivation for many foreign students is to gain a toehold to become immigrants and eventually spon- sor family.
Meanwhile, many residents of Metro Vancouver, especially those in the millennial generation, worry about how the presence of tens of thousands of foreign students is influencing the super-tight rental market and overheated housing scene.
Immigration lawyers say some foreign families are using their student offspring for large transnational money transfers. In one case, the news media discovered a foreign “student” listed as the new owner of a $31-million Vancouver mansion.
In addition, it goes without saying the escalating number of foreign students is in different ways affecting restaurants and other retail businesses in the city, not to mention the numbers of people using transit.
Still, the effects on the overall city don’t quite compare to the way foreign students are transforming campus life and competition. Here’s one example. Even though higher education officials often say no domestic students are losing a place to foreign students, administrators at UBC and SFU acknowledge that individual professors are not necessarily told which students are domestic and which are foreign.
As a result, for instance, when students apply for extremelyhard-to-get-into spots in masters or PhD programs, it seems domestic students (including those who are immigrants) often end up competing, in effect on equal terms, with foreign students.
It’s just one of the many issues associated with the rise of foreign students in multi-ethnic Metro.
As residents continue to discuss the pros and cons of trends linked to foreign students, one thing most everyone should be able to agree on is they’re contributing to one of the most riveting stories in town.