Laurentian University saw a 154-per-cent increase in its international student enrolment as of the first day of class this fall.
Enrolment figures for the university were revealed during the Oct. 20 meeting of Laurentian’s board of governors. You can review the report yourself on page 54 of the board package for the meeting.
All of the figures provided are for full-time equivalent (or FTE) students. FTE is a calculation showing how many students would be attending if all were enrolled full time.
Last year, Laurentian had an official fall 2022 enrolment of 542 FTE international students (although that number stood at 504 on the first day of class).
The university had planned for an international student enrolment of 784 FTE students this fall (so up 42 per cent), but the number that showed up for the first day of class blew even that estimate out of the water.
There are currently 1,281 FTE international students at Laurentian, a year-over-year increase of 777 students, or 154 per cent.
However, among Canadian, or “domestic” students, as they’re referred to in post-secondary parlance, there has been a drop of 244 FTE students, or five per cent, at Laurentian year-over-year.
This is slightly better than the expected seven per cent drop in domestic students.
There was an official fall enrolment of 5,175 FTE domestic students at Laurentian fall 2022 (that number stood at 5,077 on the first day of class 2022). On the first day of class 2023, Laurentian had 4,832 FTE domestic students.
Overall, Laurentian’s FTE enrolment is at 6,113 students as of the first day of class in September. Back in the fall of 2022, enrolment was at 5,581 on the first day of class, and the official fall 2022 enrolment was 5,729.
That translates to a year-over-year enrolment increase of 10 per cent, ahead of the expected two per cent decrease in enrolment that was expected.
Michel Piché, Laurentian’s interim vice-president, finance and administration, said Laurentian continues “to see pressure from our domestic enrolment …
“In some ways that was predicted to happen as a result of the CCAA proceeding. But we're still finding a place to stabilize so that we can start growing again, because domestic undergraduate enrolment is really what we need to work on going forward, although we're seeing favorable enrolment overall.
“Most of that comes from international graduate students, and specifically in various specific programs such as computer science and engineering, and many of those programs are only for one or two years.
“So although it's good from a revenue perspective, it's not really something that we can count on to be sustainable in the coming years. Where undergraduate students expect to be at Laurentian for anywhere from four to six years, international graduate students will be here for maybe one, two, maybe three years maximum.”
Dan Scott, a LU board member representing Laurentian’s senate, reminded members of the board that he had warned as early as the April meeting many more international students than had been planned for were likely to show up this fall.
Based on the number of international students who had provided confirmations, he said he had recommended that the budget be adjusted accordingly, and “that did not happen.”
The response last spring from the board and administration was that it was likely there would be a great decline in the number of students confirming their attendance to those who actually show up on campus, he said.
The result was that “as we approached the start of the fall term, there were stories of a number of programs that were madly scrambling to attempt to hire professors to teach courses in the classes, which did get such significant increases, including some stories that there were classes that went three weeks into the term without professors,” Scott said.
“I want to underscore the importance of ensuring that we're able to follow through on our commitments to the students that do show up and would like to ask what plans there are to attempt to do a better job of addressing this and not to have us in reaction mode, and potentially impacting the reputation of Laurentian, and rather be much more proactive in planning for these kinds of increases.”
Laurentian interim provost Brenda Brouwer acknowledged that it’s always difficult to know whether international students will “get their visas, whether they actually arrive.”
“While sometimes stories can suggest one thing, the realities, as far as I understand them to be from working with those programs that have taken those students, was that they were expecting that, okay, there's going to be an overshoot, and things were put in place as quickly as they could to ensure that there were professors in the classroom,” she said.
“There were indeed some occasions where there were challenges, but ironically, not in those programs it overshot.”
Brouwer said Laurentian is engaged “in strategic enrolment management, which we'll look at what our capacities are, in terms of intake, and keeping in mind what our retention rates are as well, and flow through.”
Housing concerns for international students has very much been in the news this fall in other Northern Ontario communities.
“I want to let people know, reassure people, I hope, that part of those discussions and the enrolment management is also with housing and student support services,” Brouwer said.
In terms of these students, “it’s not solely about monetary,” but about “what we can deliver academically,” and ensuring there’s an adequate and appropriate and “actually an over-the-top kind of experience for our students.”
Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA) president Fabrice Colin pointed out the necessity of recruiting domestic students to maintain LU’s bilingual nature (anglophone and francophone) and tricultural mandate (English, French and Indigenous).
He also stressed the need for resources to be put in place to cope with the increase in student population in many programs.
Colin gave the example of the master’s program in computational sciences, which has been identified as a high international student enrolment program.
With the departure of many mathematics professors as a result of the CCAA who could have taught courses in this program, “we faced courses with an enrolment of 120 graduate students,” he said.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
