Opinion: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas
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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.

  • Intrepidtron@lemm.ee
    8·
    1 year ago

    1. Governments need to get back to investing in our publicly funded universities and colleges. Colleges and universities are broke from government underfunding and are turning to foreign students to fill the gap.

    2. Provinces (especially the Ford government in Ontario) changed the laws, letting private colleges (and private satellite colleges tied to public colleges) run amok, scamming foreign students and benefiting the companies that want to turn our education system into a cash cow.

    We should have a robust public education system that is attracting foreign students and providing them with the same quality of education available to domestic students. The players that look at our education system and see $$$ signs need to go.