The relative labour market performance of former international students: evidence from the Canadian National Graduates Survey

Canada is increasingly looking to international students as a source of postsecondary tuition revenues and new immigrants. By 2014, international students accounted for 10 per cent of graduates from Canadian postsecondary institutions, up from three per cent in 2000, and 11 per cent of new permanent residents, up from seven per cent in 2010. This article compares the labour market performance of former international students (FISs) entering the Canadian labour market during the first decade of the 2000s to their Canadian-born-and-educated (CBE) and foreign-born-and-educated (FBE) counterparts. [The authors] find that FISs outperform FBE immigrants by a substantial margin and underperform CBE individuals graduating from similar academic programs by a relatively modest margin. [They] also find some limited evidence, particularly among women, of a deterioration in FIS outcomes through the 2000s relative to both comparison groups. [The authors] argue that this deterioration is consistent with a quality tradeoff as postsecondary institutions and governments have reached deeper into international student pools to meet their demands for students and new immigrants without a commensurate increase in their supply.

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