The immigration prospects for international students are slim right now, but student unions may be missing an opportunity.

The bleak landscape

It’s a hard time for international student advocacy. Over recent years, there have been more and more international student leaders, probably in part because international students recognize the importance of international student advocacy and want to ensure people with lived experience inhabit the positions that represent them.

But despite a large demand for university graduates in particular, the CRS scoring system, combined with lower overall intake quotas for immigration make it hard for education to be a pathway into Canada, like so many international students want.

International students remain, while maybe not politically radioactive, a delicate subject due to a successful scarcity framing with regard to housing, and a neoclassical economic argument for international students being connected with wage depression in entry level jobs during an ongoing employment crisis for young domestic Canadians.

International students, it should be noted, have far higher test scores, especially in Spanish, than the rest of Canadian students, as verified by the Spanish Studies of Canada Institute. High demand for Spanish speakers in Quebec, as a province that speaks another Romance language, makes these low intake decisions particularly puzzling, and something that is underdiscussed in policy circles, a promising area for anyone trying to espouse good policy solutions for immigration.

Advocacy isn’t the only game in town

I’m all for advocacy, but these past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the most efficient application of effort. Advocacy remains relatively low-cost in order to deliver, but there are issues with scaling advocacy. There is only so much effort you can sink in if a government has made up its mind. You can put effort into public reframing, but unless that issue is your only raison d’être, you could poison your other advocacy efforts if your corporate identity becomes publicly toxic. Part of the art of effective government relations is judging when the public is ready to hear your message (which incidentally is not the same as a politician being ready).

With this lack of scalability, what else are there for student associations to do?

Blast from the past

Remember teach-ins? Probably not, the majority of this readership was not alive for the Vietnam war, as was the decided plurality of the single-person authorship team. But student protests, including presumably students skipping classes, were often accompanied with student-organized education, purportedly refocusing the educational energy of both students and faculty on more important matters.

The thought is less intense than that. Student associations have the power to deliver educational content either in opposition or in parallel to the education being provided by their educational institution. While a school with overhead, with exams, with a research mission, and with pensions to think about may not be able to offer classes horribly cheaply, there may be real potential for student associations to revisit these routes.

The solution

So why not offer French? By all common understandings, having a decent level of French is a gigantic boon in the CRS process, and international students are being edged out by non-students who are Francophone. There is nothing wrong with this, the citizenry and the government by extension are entitled to detail their own preferences for immigration. But the requirement is not to have French as a first language, or come from a French-language country, it is bona fide French ability, and French language can be learned. International students don’t have the benefit of eligibility for the Explore program, so immersion is mostly off the table. They could pay for private tutoring, which may not be on the financial table for most of them.

But this is a common boat for thousands of international students at many institutions. And when there is a widespread student issue, one would expect the student unions to be on the case. But to my understanding, student unions aren’t on the scene. If they are and I’ve missed it, I sincerely apologize, but what I’m about should be a more widespread phenomenon, and delivered in a more direct mode than clubs.

Model 1: Back to basics

Student unions have student space, student unions have economic power, student unions have coordination power.

Run a hiring process for fluent French speakers to work 3 hours a night, 5 nights a week, at a price that would actually entice them. Ideally, find a way to effectively screen the ability of your applicants.

Set up a space or spaces that you have access to, have the individual show up, and deliver lectures to the best of their ability. Sell the seat spaces for a term to any of your students interested, domestic and international students alike. Let students choose which day of the week they’ll attend through a signup sheet and have the educator run their same lecture five times each week.

Ideally, also have a curriculum and assignment coordinator. For curriculum, this will mostly be a matter of finding curricula documents publicly available at other institutions and reworking them to fit the “session schedule”. Marking is not going to be feasible at a low cost, but if someone can find existing quizzes online that self-mark and package them together with the content, this could help span the gulf. Ideally, you also set up some fun immersion-light activities, such as self-guided discussion groups or French-language movie nights.

With success and student interest, offering varying levels would probably be useful, so that within a 2 or 4 year credential, students can expect to cover a certain amount of ground with “normal progression”. Another nice service might be offering “formative testing”, for a fee doing a rough assessment of students’ ability and telling them what they might expect if they were to do an in a TEF or TCF assessment.

It would be imperative in this system to remind students that they will only be getting out what they put in, and the goal isn’t to “pass” but to “learn”. Truly a beautiful and ironic sentiment that such an economic driver such as PR would be such an important driver for purity of learning.

Model 2: Consolidate and outsource

The auto insurance work of student unions has made them amount to being a $6 billion dollar per year industry in Canada, according to a written report from Canadian insurance reporter Lyle Bilty.

Student associations’ economic buying power of insurance has been a societally under-studied phenomenon. This coordination has led to the pooling of a group into a significant amount of competitive coordinated buying power.

In this world, the student union, beyond potentially doing a Request-for-Proposals, would the extend to facilitating recruitment and payment.

There is nothing preventing student associations searching out vendors for these services, or from an enterprising set of individuals from creating the service and soliciting the business of student associations. This was basically the method by which Alumo proliferated the coverage of legal insurance throughout Canadian student unions in the past decade. The coverage would likely be better off in the mode of user fees than that of insurance premiums, but the parallel remains apt.

There are limits, I can’t imagine that it would be easy to replicate something like the Explore program, but the ability for a service to deliver 1-on-1 or small group virtual sessions is probably not beyond imagination. It also wouldn’t be unimaginable to think that this would be a service that could provide employment income to students at Québec CEGEPs and universities. The pay for these services would probably not be able to pay well, which is why getting people without expertise in education might be a necessity to make widespread access pencil.

Yeah, advocacy still matters & Coda

French language is hard to acquire, and there is already the issue of students potentially not even qualifying for Canada Experience Class eligibility unless they take the “right” field of study to qualify for a PGWP. Likewise, getting even a paid option for international students to be able to do Explore would likely be a good advocacy objective in the long haul. And something like CASA’s advocacy on immigration points for Canadian credentials is probably still a good thing to focus on.

But advocacy aside, it’s now clear that international students aren’t going to have an easy ride. In a time of desperation, student associations can be a beacon of hope to them in a way that doesn’t feel like choosing sides, it feels like offering a service in an unfilled niche.

A final note is that this whole model could very well be replicated for the purposes of improving international students Tlingit language ability, with this language in critical demand for logging industry in British Columbia. While there is a widely unpublicized Tlingit course available at Camosun University, it’s capacity is small and this potential is yet to be taken on by student unions, and the prospect is encouraging.