In remote Canada, a university becomes a magnet for Indian students

On a university campus in northern Canada, an eight-hour drive from Toronto, most of the students filling the classrooms come from a country on the other side of the world: India.

The young men and women stretching on mats in the gymnasium are more likely to come from Punjab or Gujarat, two Indian states, than from rural Ontario. Hindi and Punjabi drowned out English in the lunchtime cacophony of the cafeteria.

In the surrounding city of Timmins, waiters at two new Indian restaurants are not asking customers how spicy they want their dishes. A shuttered bar called Gibby’s has reopened as a Sikh temple, or gurdwara, where students from the school, Northern College, recently gathered.

“We feel like we are in India,” said Mehardeep Singh, 20, a general arts and science major, who led a prayer. “There are only three or four local people in each class. The rest comes from India.”

Northern College traditionally drew its students from the vast, sparsely populated hinterland of the province of Ontario, a region dominated by miners and loggers. Today, as many as 82 percent of public university students come from abroad – almost all of them from India.

How a Canadian university — in a remote town where most Canadians have never been, where winters can feel subarctic — became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces plaguing the country.

Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have become dependent on the higher tuition that international students have to pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can provide a channel to permanent residence in Canada, and for Canada, the students help reduce the labor shortage and increase the country’s declining productivity.

More than 60 per cent of foreign students at Ontario’s public colleges come from India – a dependency that the auditor general of the province identified as a risk for the long-term survival of the schools.

As a result, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s accusations in September that the Indian government was involved in the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist near Vancouver sent tremors through Ontario’s educational institutions.

The episode has strained relations between Canada and India, with the country categorically denying any involvement and expelling 41 Canadian diplomats.

At Northern College – where Indians make up 96 percent of all foreign students – officials said they would intensify efforts to recruit more students from Africa and Indonesia to reduce their dependence on India.

“We don’t want all our eggs in one basket,” said university president Audrey Penner, adding that if tensions between India and Canada continue, “our market could dry up regardless of the efforts we make.”

Founded in 1967, Northern, like other Ontario public colleges, was founded to develop a workforce suited to the region. That meant training young people to work in mining, technology and healthcare.

Before Northern College looked abroad, its student population peaked at about 2,000 a quarter-century ago, said Dr. Penner, but declining regional birth rates and migration to larger cities pushed enrollment back to about 1,300 a decade ago. At the same time, Northern and other colleges faced cuts in government funding and tuition freezes.

Northern – and other colleges and universities in Canada – began looking abroad aggressively. The Canadian government said it is on track to receive 900,000 foreign students this year, three times as many as a decade ago.

Indians are by far the largest group, accounting for 40 percent of all international students nationwide, the Canada Bureau of International Education. China is in second place, with 12 percent.

There were 40 international students at Northern College in 2014, now there are 6,140. Enrollment got a further boost after Northern, like other outlying public colleges, opened a campus in 2015 by partnering with a private university in suburban Toronto. Today, about a third of Northern’s foreign students are in Timmins and three other smaller northern campuses. , while the rest are on the Toronto campus.

Northern appeared to be tapping into an increasingly wealthy segment of India’s population, with many students saying they were the first in their families to study abroad.

Arbaz Khan, 25, said he was not only the first member of his family but also the first Muslim in his village in Gujarat to study in Canada. Because his family owned farmland and his father was a politician, he was able to secure a bank loan of about 30,000 Canadian dollars, or about $22,500, for some of his tuition and other costs to study at Northern.

“I want to live my life independently,” said Mr Khan, who is studying business administration. “I want to build my own empire with my own hands and my own two feet. That’s why I chose to go abroad.”

Annual tuition varies by course of study, but for foreign students it is generally around 16,000 Canadian dollars, about four and a half times what Canadian students pay.

Some Indian students were initially reluctant to study in such a remote location.

Maninderjit Kaur said she probably wouldn’t have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India – who arranged her enrollment at Northern – had told her the exact location of the school.

She recalled landing at the Toronto airport in 2018 and then hopping into an Uber, believing Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.

“I was in the car and Timmins never came,” said Ms Kaur, 25, as she recalled the drive through endless forests with no mobile phone service. “I’m afraid they’ll take me somewhere else.”

Now Ms Kaur works in marketing at university and owns a petrol station in the city with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.

But despite the initial reluctance of many foreign students to study in a place as remote as Northern, Dr. Penner, the university’s president, that she had an ace up her sleeve: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges can apply for postgraduate work permits that lead to permanent residency and citizenship.

“We can say that if you come here, we can pretty much guarantee that you can stay here and live here and make a home for yourself,” said Dr. Penner.

A snapshot of some of Northern’s Indian students offers insight into how they could change Timmins.

Harmandeep Kaur, 22, is studying to become a police officer. She had left India, she said, “to live my life the way I want.”

She saw herself settling in Timmins with her own family. She is fine with an ‘arranged or love marriage’, as long as her husband accepts the irregular working hours of a police officer.

“If he has plans to go out for the weekend and I have to do my work, he should understand that,” Ms Kaur said.

Early childhood education is a popular field of study among international students because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are hired immediately after graduation, allowing them to apply for permanent residency, Ms. Holmes said.

“We’re just desperate,” Ms Holmes said, as six students – one Canadian and five Indians – looked after a group of toddlers visiting a classroom in the North.

Ms. Holmes once worried about her program’s survivability, but enrollment has now reached capacity.

Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it has been blamed for worsening housing shortages. The Canadian government recently took steps to stem the increase, including doubling the amount of savings international students must demonstrate.

At Northern, the college revoked admissions to several hundred international students this year after realizing the city of Timmins lacked housing, said Dr. Penner.

Jobs to help pay for college were also a challenge. International students are allowed to work off campus for a maximum of 20 hours per week during their studies.

But in Timmins, a city of 42,000, too many foreign students are competing for a limited number of positions at the Canadian and American chains where they typically find jobs, many Indian students said. Many have had to dip into their savings or ask their parents for money, they said.

“I have seen many students who have been here for four to five months or even eight months but have not found a job yet,” said Mandeep Kaur, 23, a student who stopped by the Sikh temple to pray. “They get depressed.”

But if students ultimately get permanent residency, she says, “then I think it will be worth it.”