International student graduates thrive in Canadian labour market, UW study says

The skills of international students are being put to good use in the Canadian job market, according to a new first-of-its-kind study by University of Waterloo (UW) researchers.

The findings provide a clearer picture of how successful international students are once they complete their studies at post-secondary schools in Canada.

In fact, it goes a step further, suggesting there's no evidence of skill underutilization.

"They are doing just as well as the Canadian-born students. I think that quite simply just points to the economic potential of Canada's international student program," said UW economics professor and study co-author Mikal Skuterud, in an interview with CTV News Kitchener.

His research partners were Joel Blit and Ruiwen Zhang. As a team, they examined a wide range of sources for their study, including students' grades, immigration data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), and income tax returns from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

"It took me 10 years to get approval for this data linkage," Skuterud said. "We didn't do the link, it was done by Statistics Canada. It linked up with all the [students'] immigrations records and their T1 income tax forms. So this is the first time this has ever been done in Canada."

While students never consented to linking up their grades with their T1 income tax form, Skuterud said it was done in a very secure environment.

"I don't have access to these data,” he explained. “I did the analysis in a Statistics Canada data lab. It's a secure environment where there's no internet connections and also all the data is completely anonymized. So there's absolutely no way to identify individual people."

University of Waterloo success

The study also found the international students who attend UW are more likely to stay in Canada and become permanent residents, as well as earn more than their Canadian counterparts when compared to the national average.

More specifically, they explained, international students who graduated from UW between 2017 to 2019 earned as much as 37 per cent more a year after they graduated than their Canadian-born counterparts.

Roughly 70 per cent of UW's international students wind up becoming permanent residents in Canada post-graduation – a rate that is double the national average, the study said.

Study recommendations

Based on the findings, the researchers are recommending Canadian policymakers revise the decade-old admittance requirements which have previously accentuated issues across the country's labour and housing market.

They also suggest there should be a transparent pathway for international students seeking economic-class immigration to Canada by selecting candidates with the highest expected future Canadian earnings.

"We have many decades of data to show that immigration is not well-served when it's focused on plugging holes in labour markets, but it is well-served when it's focused on just trying to raise the average human capital than the average labour market skills of the of the population," said Skuterud. "We should be distinguishing between students graduating from different fields of study and also from different institutions."