Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas - eviltoast
Opinion: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas
www.theglobeandmail.com
Granting an ever-growing number of these visas to people who we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best

Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.

We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada.

Why is Canada trying to attract so many international students? Because it’s easier than properly funding post secondary institutions:

international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)

The housing crisis has a bunch of causes, from Airbnb, to shitty taxation policies, to NIMBYs, to regressive zoning. Tying student visas to available, reasonably priced housing would be a simple first step to reducing prices.

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    in cases like this I’m not suggesting less student visas but schools need to coordinate with the cities to ensure there is enough housing in the area for the number of students they intend to intake.

    I think that’s all anyone is suggesting. Certainly that’s what the op-ed mentions.

    IMO a big part of post-secondary education is meeting other people and understanding their points of view. Remote learning makes that a lot harder. We should be letting international students in, but the schools need to ensure they have reasonable housing.