By Joe Friesen

Canadian universities are trying to salvage the incoming class of international students as travel restrictions, quarantine rules and the move to online learning threaten to disrupt what has become a crucial revenue source.

Chauffeur service to a quarantined room, catered meals, daily health checks with a thermometer for every student, even the possibility of chartered flights to get students to Canada – all are on the table as institutions prepare for the fall term.

The financial stakes are significant. In a little more than a decade, the number of international students attending Canadian universities has tripled, to nearly 500,000 in 2019, representing about a quarter of all new university enrolments, according to a recent StatsCan report.

With international students typically paying tuition fees two to five times higher than Canadian students, they now contribute roughly $6-billion a year to Canadian post-secondary institutions – half of all tuition revenue at domestic institutions. As provincial government funding to universities stagnated over the past decade, those fees have paid for rising institutional and labor costs.

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