When a private college owned by a scandal-plagued Montreal family imploded, so did the dreams of hundreds of international students. How fraud artists and fly-by-night schools are exploiting Canada’s international education boom:
her family’s faith in her. Growing up as the youngest child in a big family in India’s Punjab state, Nisha—who agreed to speak with me if I didn’t use her last name—always had her sights set on bigger things. After she graduated high school, her family championed her decision to get a bachelor’s degree in education at a nearby university. They were proud when she found a job in a local school teaching English and social studies.
Nisha jumped diligently through each hoop, hoping to arrive and start studying in May of 2020. After COVID-19 halted international travel, she set her sights on the fall semester instead and took advantage of a government program called the Student Direct Stream. In exchange for paying her entire tuition up front—an enormous sum for her family—the government would expedite her study permit. Then, in July, the government announced a new program: a two-stage approval process.
These efforts have paid off enormously. The federal government estimated that in 2018, international students spent $21.6 billion on tuition, accommodation and other expenses—an economic infusion supporting 170,000 domestic jobs and exceeding the impact of major exports like lumber, auto parts and aircraft. At that point, foreign students contributed nearly 40 per cent of tuition revenues at Canadian universities.
Meanwhile, education agents—like the one who recommended M College to Nisha—are funnelling students straight into these schools. According to global education organization ICEF Monitor, as many as half of international applicants to Canadian schools use recruiters. Universities and colleges pay recruiters a commission for each student, typically 10 or 15 per cent of first-year tuition, and sometimes more.
But little in recent years can match the debacle that Nisha—and hundreds of other students—endured. The story of M College isn’t just about one failed school. It’s about a booming international education machine that’s commodified the hopes and dreams of young people, mostly from the Global South. It’s an industry that has been aggressively stoked by Canadian governments—which have done little to protect students when things go terribly wrong.for both the slow burn and the big swing.
Soon, another alleged scheme came to light. Two staffers in the department began noticing that a numbered company in British Columbia was being credited for recruiting students who the employees knew had applied independently. The pair started digging and found that the company was registered to Kolan’s wife. In total, 25 students were falsely linked to the B.C. firm, which received $119,000 in fees from the school board between 2014 and 2016.were asking questions.
be alma mater, which the family itself founded. It was licensed by Quebec’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education in 2019. The family purchased two other schools: CCSQ, with one campus in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil and another in Sherbrooke. And there was CDE College, also in Sherbrooke. RPI had already served as the schools’ recruiters, drawing the vast majority of students from abroad, almost exclusively from India.
When Caroline and Christina were arrested, RPI was still expecting $10.6 million in financing from TD and the Business Development Bank of Canada to cover the purchases of CDE and CCSQ. After the arrest, the financing was cancelled. Then, during the first two weeks of 2021, the province’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education stopped processing study permit applications from M College and CDE while it investigated questionable recruitment practices, among other problems.
Only moments after finishing the exam, an email popped into her inbox from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Her heart sank: her permit had been rejected. The agent who reviewed her application wasn’t satisfied that she’d leave Canada at the end of her stay and didn’t think that the proposed studies—now nearly completed—were consistent with her previous education and qualifications.
Hundreds more were still waiting on their paperwork, or were already studying in Canada, only to find those studies indefinitely paused. All told, approximately 2,000 current or prospective students were affected. Panicked and angry, the RPI students organized protests in Canada and India to raise awareness. They wrote to MPs across the country, especially those with Punjabi backgrounds, like Jagmeet Singh, MP Anju Dhillon from LaSalle, and MP Sukh Dhaliwal from Surrey, B.C.
To Tardif, Nisha’s case was among the most critical of all. The government had granted her permission to study, only to snatch it away after she’d paid tuition and almost entirely finished her studies. She and her family stood on the precipice of financial catastrophe due to the failure of the RPI schools. According to the McCarthy Tétrault team, the federal and provincial governments were partly responsible for the financial fallout.
tion that flagged financial problems, such as the family’s inability to demonstrate that the colleges had sufficient funds for adequate operations. Manitoba is the only province to regulate recruiters. In 2016, it introduced legislation requiring schools to properly train recruiters and review the information they provide to students. It outlines ethical standards for recruiters and requires schools to terminate partnerships with recruiters when those standards are breached.
He says that he’s heard many stories of recruiters telling students they won’t be able to get into a particular well-known college or university and directing them to private institutions instead. Some may be good, but others turn out to be little more than a few floors, or a few rooms in a cheap office building, with underpaid teaching staff. The RPI colleges fit that bill.
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