International student recruitment: Canada's failing record

DANIEL ZARETSKY AND MEL BROITMAN

Globe and Mail Update

December 20, 2007 at 8:05 PM EST

A recent B.C. higher education delegation is outraged that a Canadian senior visa officer told them that the Indian state of Punjab has the highest crime and forgery rate anywhere and that institutions should be recruiting in South India instead.

B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal is taking up the matter with Immigration Minister Diane Finley. He is reported to have linked the officer's comments, and the implied attitude, with Canada's woeful record in attracting Indian students.

It would be helpful if Mr. Oppal channels the outrage into a more probing review of why Canada underperforms in the complex arena of international student recruitment. These failings are a reflection of the nearly incoherent strategic planning by our provincial and federal governmental bureaucracies and of our higher education institutions' own poor and weakly funded efforts.

First, Mr. Oppal should remind the Immigration Minister that Canada underperforms because when it comes to educational recruitment, there is no "team" in Team Canada. The constitutional delegation of educational responsibility to the provinces has turned Canadian higher education into a patchwork of schemes, with each province pursuing its own strategy or non-strategy, as the case may be.

The Foreign Affairs and Citizenship and Immigration departments should be working closely together in these matters. Instead, our overseas offices are routinely consumed by scrimmages between officials from the two agencies. And on the marketing side, Ottawa spends much less promoting education in India than even single small British colleges do. Even New Zealand and Ireland, with a handful of universities to promote, have cohesive and coherent India strategies that surpass Canada's student totals.

Second, Mr. Oppal should acknowledge that our higher education institutions' lack of international sophistication is part of the problem.

He should note that in India alone, many Canadian universities and colleges engage recruitment agencies that are known to aid and abet fraudulent misrepresentation. Mr. Oppal should allow that educational institutions often disavow responsibility to do rigorous fact-checking, and that their marketing plans are often poorly conceived.

Third, Mr. Oppal should make clear he understands that different markets offer different challenges in regards to - let's call it what it is - cheating and fabrication of documents, and that he respects the job Canada's overworked and under-resourced overseas immigration officers face with these varying challenges. Perhaps the visa officer in this case was trying to point out that our institutions should stay away from areas known for high rates of fraud in favour of those with low rates of fraud unless they invest in more rigorous screening. Honest people should not pay for the errors of others, but screening costs money, and institutions should to be prepared to pay for it.

Finally, Mr. Oppal can move on to some pressing problems within the Immigration Department. Canadian student visas can take weeks or months to process, while student visas for the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand come through in as little as a single day. There is a great deal of inconsistency and unpredictability among our visa officers - many lack the comprehensive training necessary to perform what is complex work. And there is no meaningful administrative remedy to serve as a feedback loop for government to identify systemic problems. A foreign student could study for an entire year or two in Australia while awaiting the disposition of her right of appeal to the Federal Court of Canada in the hopes of a later reversal of a visa refusal. Moreover, Canada lacks a more evolved and integrated system of checks against abuse, like the U.S. SEVIS system. We have no formal procedure for educational institutions to report to Ottawa when a given international student arrives on campus - or doesn't.

Ideally, Mr. Oppal and the minister will conclude that this collective let-down has led to a most un-Canadian outcome: a multicultural country that presents an unwelcoming face to many international students. Far too often, their fees, expenses, intellectual capital and long-term commercial ties end up in other countries.

The international student recruitment brief is an important one and has been largely long overlooked in this country. Perhaps, with more attention, there will be more awareness that the country's poor record with international students is the result not only of immigration department deficiencies, but of a much greater panoply of made-in-Canada shortcomings.

Daniel Zaretsky and Mel Broitman are the principals of Toronto-based Higher-Edge, an international education consulting company with four offices in India.