Indian students can again hope to study in Canada. But living there will be a distant dream

Over the past two years, Canada has sharply tightened its international student regime, and Indian students, once the backbone of Canada’s overseas enrolments have been the most affected.

As governments attempt to rebuild trust through diplomacy and trade, The Indian Express spoke to Canadian academicians, who explained how higher education is undergoing its own “reset”.

A clampdown like never before

The clampdown happened as the result of multiple pressures converging at once. At the heart of it was the rapid growth of the international student system without corresponding investment in housing, oversight, or infrastructure.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Gabriel Miller, president and CEO of Universities Canada, said the last two years should be understood as a reset after the system was “turned upside down”. Canada’s higher education model has historically rested on about 100 nonprofit universities offering high-quality, relatively affordable education. That foundation, he said, remains intact.

But what undermined it was the emergence of a parallel ecosystem of for-profit technical and community colleges that aggressively marketed Canada as a migration destination rather than an academic one.

When evidence of abuse surfaced, including fraudulent admission letters and misleading recruitment practices, the government responded with sweeping corrective measures, Miller said.

Acknowledging the significant disruption it caused genuine students, Miller argued that protecting the system’s integrity was unavoidable.

What the numbers show

The scale of the decline in student numbers has been stark. Data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada showed a sharp fall in study permit approvals through 2024 and 2025 following the introduction of national caps and stricter verification measures. Indian students were the worst affected. Government data stated that refusal rates for Indian study permit applications rose to about 74% in August 2025, compared with roughly 32% two years earlier. At the same time, application volumes from India collapsed, as repeated refusals, processing delays, and shifting rules discouraged prospective students.

The impact extended beyond campuses. Statistics Canada data and subsequent reporting linked a rare decline in population growth in late 2025 to the fall in international students and other temporary residents. Provinces and cities that had come to rely on international students for population growth, labour supply, and rental demand felt the effects quickly, underscoring how deeply student mobility had become intertwined with Canada’s domestic economy.

This coincided with a period of diplomatic strain between New Delhi and Ottawa after 2023, creating an atmosphere in which immigration and visa processing became politically more sensitive.

Placing this within a wider global frame, Miller said that trust itself has become scarce in international relations. “What we have seen globally is that a reliable friend has become one of the world’s most valuable commodities.”

Referring to Canada’s own experience, he added that the country had seen “trusted neighbours suddenly behaving in ways that make us worried about the future. So, what we can accomplish with India begins with investing in long-term, trusting relationships.”

The housing crisis

Rhonda McEwen, president of Victoria University in the University of Toronto, told The Indian Express that domestic political pressures in Canada compounded the impact on Indian students. She noted that international students became highly visible in public debates around affordability and capacity in major cities.

“Housing is a challenge in every growing city worldwide,” McEwen said, adding that in Canada, the scale of the pressure meant that “when the government recognised what was happening, it took very dramatic action to address the issue and correct the problems”.

Universities, she said, do not believe students caused the housing crisis, but housing became the tipping point. “There’s always a limit on how much opportunity anyone can offer,” she said, explaining that the housing crunch was “where the problem started” and what made inaction politically impossible.

Major urban centres were already facing severe shortages when international student numbers surged, particularly in regions where private colleges expanded rapidly without investing in accommodation.

McEwen said the government has now acknowledged that international education “cannot expand without parallel investment in housing”. She said that Canada has launched “a massive plan to increase housing supply”, including a new federal agency, Build Canada Homes, mandated to “get as much new housing built as quickly as possible”.

Crucially, universities have been made eligible for federal housing funding, recognising their role as major housing providers. “Canadian universities provide about 130,000 residence beds for students, but we need to provide more,” she said.

Miller framed the housing crisis as inseparable from the broader tightening of Canada’s international education system. The surge in students, he argued, exposed structural weaknesses created when “a small group of profiteers – not universities, but fly-by-night technical colleges – abused the system”.

According to Miller and McEwen, the impact of the reset has been uneven across Canada’s higher education sector. During the period of policy change, Miller said that universities have largely been more insulated than colleges amid disruptions in both application volumes and approval rates. What is critical now, he added, is that “we’re starting to see it stabilise”..

The sharpest declines have occurred in the community college sector, which offers shorter, technical diploma programmes.

Canada’s ‘study, work and settle’ model

After upheaval in the last two years, clarity is emerging.

Miller said students and institutions are beginning to understand how the system has changed. He pointed to a new $1.7 billion Canadian plan to attract young researchers and create academic opportunities as evidence that Canada is not retreating from global education, but reshaping it.

McEwen said that the system is setting the stage for a steady recovery in student numbers, particularly in high-quality university programmes, whether delivered in Canada or through partnerships in India.

The “study, work and settle” model has not disappeared, but education and immigration are no longer being sold as a single package. Long-term settlement in Canada, she added, is now being explicitly separated: “That’s a question of immigration policy.”

Miller said that Canada was restoring the “fundamental strength” of its system: where the chance to get an education with lifelong benefits was the primary offer – not residency.

What Indian students should expect

Work-hour rules for international students have been tightened, restoring a weekly cap of 20 hours of off-campus work during academic terms, with full-time employment permitted only during scheduled breaks. While Canadian authorities acknowledge that many international students arrive on loans and make significant financial sacrifices, both Miller and McEwen stated that excessive work during term time undermines learning outcomes.

According to them, Canada remains more affordable than the US, and post-graduation work opportunities continue to allow students to earn while gaining professional experience. The responsibility of universities, McEwen said, was to ensure students received “strong value for that investment” value that “pays off over their entire lives,” not just during their years of study.

Now, Indian students should expect greater scrutiny and clearer rules.

Miller described the current moment as “the beginning of a new day,” one in which Canada would “slowly rebuild opportunities for students to access high-quality education”. That would happen “carefully over time” in order to create “something that people can count on for decades”.

For students, the message is to plan for quality rather than shortcuts.