How recruiters in India use false promises to lure students to Canada - The Fifth Estate

In this edition of The Fifth Estate, how far are international

students

willing to go to obtain an education in Canada? The average Punjabi family will have to work 74 years to pay one year of tuition and the lengths Canadian universities will go to recruit them. it's been numbers driven numbers numbers numbers numbers and that's literally what anyone cares about we reveal the deception selling dreams to desperate families we're going to look back in 20 years and how we'll look back at this as a scar like an Exploitation of this specific group of young people and the tool that accepts the

students

.

We have a connection with a funeral home in India. They are sending dead bodies every month. I'm Mark Kelly in Toronto colleges and universities around the world. We are now in a race to recruit international students and Canada is totally on board, so why the race? Post-secondary schools in this country charge international students five times the tuition that domestic students pay for the same education. We researched and found out what international students are told. and what they sell is a far cry from the Canadian dream they thought they were paying for. This is the Fifth Estate.

They are full of hope. They were

lure

d here with the promise of a better future on May 17 from Alpha College. Nobody. otherwise they are saying we can't give them seats, instead they are outside their university in Toronto, claiming they have been lied to with great explanation, sold a second rate school experience. A lot of hope, as if we thought that the university is our family. The university does not think about us and wants Canadians to know their story, like all stories of hope. This begins with a dream. Gurdeep Singh has spent years working hard on the family farm growing wheat and rice in the breadbasket of India.

He has returned. -Breaking a lonely job, but here's the reward: all his sweat and sacrifice allowed him to send his only daughter, Dilbrate, to school in Canada. Singh says he sold two trucks to raise the $28,000 to send her to Toronto, abroad, about her future with few jobs. Prospects here in rural Punjab One of India's greatest exports is the country's youth Singh says that in his village alone about 300 young people have gone to study abroad, taking with them the hopes and dreams of those who have left. Left behind with no guarantee of success Talks abroad to your parents every day to alleviate the loneliness and pressure to succeed, do you feel that pressure?

However, you don't want to disappoint your parents? I don't want to say yes, I feel the pressure that we have to tell them something. to comfort them and say no, don't worry dad, I'm fine, I'm doing well, so it's kind of like living, but why do you have to lie, I mean, we really don't want them to get depressed. I want you to cry for us because we were sent here to have a great life. Instead, like many, she feels they were sold a lie. The face of Canada's universities is changing in the last five years.

The number of international university students has more than doubled. most are from rural India and are enrolled in small professional colleges and many are struggling to make it computer programming nursing healthcare administration before even entering a classroom international students newcomers like these queue up for numbers social security to be able to get a job that their parents struggle to do; work only covers part of their costs. I am here to get my SIM number and I am waiting here since 6:30. and finding a job is not easy either. Dilpreet needed work so much that she took a job in a plastics factory. 100 kilometers from where he lives, it's like it's too far from my house, so they provide me with dry clothes, so it takes about two hours to go there and two hours to come back, so it's like 12 hours of work, four hours of travel, so it's like 16. hours in total and I have to manage my university.

I have to manage my house and everything, and finding a house in a red-hot real

estate

market puts even more pressure on these students. There is little available, little affordable, making them an easy mark for unscrupulous owners. I went from being an only child in India to sharing a house full of students who should never have met before, so we're the basement, we're like six people in the basement, so we're like 15 people in just one of the houses, which It's crazy, it's too messy and it's like it's too congested who are the six people in the basement, so they're all students.

The heartless core took the same beaten path as many of those students from Punjab to university in Canada. She is a shy 19-year-old girl who carries the weight of expectations. from her family at home how much has your father paid so far for your education about 30,000 and where did he get thirty thousand dollars by mortgaging the land or some bank loans she tells her parents about her life in Canada living with seven strangers working shifts nights to pay his expenses but after investing all this money they tell him there is no turning back now I can't live without my father it's my first experience even when I went to my uncles house and called my father and again and again, Can you come, please, can you come, bring me home?

What did your father say to you when you told him you should? You're a brave girl and it takes courage to stand up for yourself, that's what this group is naming and shaming employers who are exploiting international students. This protest led a restaurant owner to settle with a student for sixteen thousand dollars in unpaid wages with students drowning in debt. They are vulnerable. Bad pay. Overworked. you take medication at Punjabi Community Health Services in Brampton, you mentor struggling international students like this 25 year old, how is your thought process similar now? Gail found him sleeping in Parks, addicted to drugs, life in crisis, brought him back to his parents.

In India, loneliness they miss their families because they are not used to living alone at home. In India, that's a major factor for mental illness, depression, stress outside the home, away from family. We are hearing reports of a large number of suicides among international citizens. students in Brampton who come here there are multiple reasons for the deaths on average we have a connection with the only funeral home which is lotus Funeral Home on average they send four to five bodies only International students every month what every month, four to five bodies of all international students in India are sending dead bodies back, you know, with so much at stake, are universities part of the solution to helping students or are they part of the looming problem?

Look closer, they are doing everything they can to find more ways to attract more students, their lobby is more students, more students, more students, whether it's increasing class sizes, whether it's irresponsibly bringing in students who don't have enough support to offer. I mean it doesn't matter it's the numbers so that's the problem, if competing for international students was a sport Canada would be on the podium, we came in third place behind the US and Australia in the race for students, those students raised 23 billion dollars a year. year in Canada's economy, so what do you get for your money?

Ask Dilbride Core. An advisor urged her to enroll in a college she had never heard of and knew nothing about. I don't know why he just suggested this university to me. I'm having it now, so they said okay, you have this university, understand this, so what university is it? Alpha College Saint Lawrence Alpha college so I'm currently in my second semester there, if you haven't heard of Alpha College either this could be the reason. It is a small Career College located on the outskirts of Toronto, one hundred percent of its students are international, 99 from India, but Dilbrite wonders if Alpha is such a sought-after university, why are there no Canadian children enrolled there if I have like 500 students?

I've never seen a Canadian student in that, so it means we're all international students and we're the ones supporting that university, that's it if international students don't go to that university. I guess no one will go to that university because I haven't seen it. a Canadian student there anyway Alpha is a private for-profit university that partners with St Lawrence a public university in Kingston Ontario these public-private partnerships allow public schools in outlying areas of Ontario to cash in on the bonanza of international students who want to study in and In Toronto, the problem is that, of course, no one had a plan for those numbers, but the bottom line is that the focus has been numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, and that's Literally what everyone cares about, right?

How many international students can we? packing and how much money can we get Earl Blaney runs an immigration and advocacy group he is the international student gold rush that started 10 years ago after the federal government declared that Canada needed more skilled immigrants since then in Ontario for example , public universities saw a 15 percent decline in domestic student enrollment but a 342 percent growth in international student enrollment. I want to learn more about the role of universities in all of this and how they have seen their appetite for international students change over the last decade. His appetite is insatiable.

They are doing everything they can to find more ways to attract more students, their lobby is more students, more students, more students, that's how the industry has changed, it's gone away from international students, so we really like to get the best of this. let's do what the policy says to pack it right and that's how the industry has changed and it's pretty ugly, ugly, in many ways, many Canadian universities are overwhelmingly dependent on international student money to stay afloat and little attention is paid to the quality of education they are paying for just last year Ontario's auditor general raised red flags saying there are quality audits at public universities, but as for their private partners, most of their programs have not yet been subject to an independent quality assurance audit and again and Christina decarre are Teachers at St Lawrence College say there are many reasons why international students struggle to keep up at school.

Several of them live in certain circumstances where they can't even necessarily have a bed let alone a desk. They share a computer. They don't have a bed yes, yes, they sleep in shifts, yes, some of them do, yes, some of them do, so you're not necessarily renting a room, you're renting a bed and that's not yours 24 hours a day. day, it's yours eight hours a day, well. I've talked to a recruiter who says, look, the game is now about numbers, numbers, yes, they are people, people, people, they are individuals, they are young, they are embarking on a dream, on a journey, if they come to class and they haven't eaten so they're not going to learn if they do they've stayed up all night to do a night shift because their boss told them and they didn't mean they're not going to fall asleep in class or um if they face some other type of stress, like homesickness or being exploited by a landlord, all of these things come into the classroom, so when you teach you're not just teaching the material you're teaching. the people who are there and you have to face these challenges to help them learn, thank you, so if you think universities are now putting on the brakes to stem the flow of international students, think again.

This is a Ply board based in Kitchener Ontario. The company's mission is to educate the world. Their international student recruitment on steroids. Apply Board is one of the world's largest online platforms for international student recruitment. With offices around the world. Apply Board connects students with schools so they can study abroad. What do you think has been the main attraction? for students who want to come to Canada why Canada I think is a dream country in many ways. I believe that Canada is an aligned and conscious people that wants to build something better. Our only team, we strengthen and grow side by side.

This corporate video. shows the co-founders of the company, Three Brothers, who came to Canada as international students. We are also very happy that a plywood uses an army of

recruiters

to enroll international students and feed that appetiteinsatiable demand for Canadian colleges and universities. How many agents do you have in the market? earth uh with Santa call them a recruiting partner and there's a partner there's a I'm corrected, how many recruiting partners do you have? However, you appreciate that and that's a word that Fly actually invented, so recruiting partner and they're where we are. working around 10,000 with a recruiting partner is a network we have built over the last five years in 60, over 70 countries apply to the board are paid to recruit students for hundreds of Canadian colleges and universities so they don't have to do it themselves.

The aggregator model is basically just a large scientific corporation, they make scientific recruiting agreements with the university and then they sublease that recruiting agreement to 10,000+ subagents on the ground with whom they have absolutely no direct connection to the university, the university does not have capacity. to evaluate them, they don't have the ability to review their work or behavior with student

promises

made with advertising, whatever, and some

promises

are empty promises, let them pack it themselves, just ask these volunteers from Khalsa Aid, an aid agency International with a chapter in Brampton Ontario our most important projects are internationally.

We established water projects in remote towns around the planet. We have established solar projects. We work with governments. We work in natural disasters. We work on man-made disasters like war and things like that. that's what we do that's what we're known for that's what we're not known for is filling grocery bags and giving to international students that's not something we've done so far Singh says Canada has created its own humanitarian crisis by charging international students up to five times the tuition. Canadian students pay for the same education. The average Punjabi family will have to work for 74 years.

I think it's 74 years to pay one year of tuition, which is a huge burden for a family. Well, that's not a 25-year mortgage, it's a 75- or 74-year mortgage that you and I have to pay off in the hopes that you know that maybe our son can have a better life than ours. We consider that domestic students now contribute more money. to the budgets of public universities in Ontario than the Ontario government. We go to India with a hidden camera to reveal how deceptive agents can be when recruiting students for Canadian universities. The agents on the ground who regulate them.

There is no one to regulate them. them and this is really the sad part here in India, the discourse directed at the youth is clear. Canada needs immigrants. Canadian post-secondary schools need students. This is where the sales work begins and as you will see, so does the deception hello to all the children who dream of studying and settling abroad there is a long line of companies waiting to make money from them these students are preparing to your high stakes English proficiency exam these prep programs cost about $300 each a foreigner dies so we're supposed to just read the questions before the questions.

What is important to read? It is estimated that more than a million Indian students take these classes each year in hopes of getting that golden ticket and an education in coveted countries. There are many good educational facilities available for students, so I think that is why I want to go to Canada. I would love to go there just because it is environmental and safe and even all the institutions provide very good facilities in terms of education. Basically I want to stay there, have my white collar. work and live the life I have always dreamed of this school is regulated the problem most are not it is estimated that there are 5,500 English proficient schools in Punjab alone some give struggling students a passing grade for a price that prepares them for fai

lure

even before they leave India.

I'm calling from the company. Hear how they call a student who passed the exam to verify her English proficiency. What was your last semester of college? I want to study this course because I want to make my career as a business administrator. I applied for an MBA at Victoria University in Australia. Do you have any questions for me? No, ma'am, thank you. The result, teachers tell us that some students show up to class in Canada without being able to speak English. Think carefully about the students who would be speaking during class. It took us a while to realize that they were translating each other, so I feel good, so let me form small groups of four and find someone who is very good at English and make sure they can translate for people who don't. are.

But it took me a while to realize that that was what was happening, but I mean, I know they have to pass an English proficiency test to get here. People are very good at writing tests, but not very good at speaking English. Yes, English to come and study. in Canada Shady education agents pay agents to help them get into Canadian schools and then apply for a student visa and this is where things get even murkier: the self-proclaimed number one education agent in India in this ad He says there is no English, no problem. he guarantees students a visa to Canada again, all for one price.

Canada has been focusing on Punjab and give me an idea what it is like there for students who meet

recruiters

and meet these agents only in the state of Punjab or in northern India. We will probably see thousands of travel agents acting as educational agents, so it is actually quite a large industry in India. Ravi Lokan Singh runs a global student recruitment company. He is one of the good ones. He says many are not and I don't want to. Call them education agents at all because I don't think they are promoting education, I think they are just promoting a way to get to Canada and I think this is very important to me because after working in this trade for 31 years, I find it very difficult . to work in Punjab Market Per Se because there is really no advice this agency promises easy and fast visas notice no mention of education the advertisements empty promises are everywhere in India come to Canada Vini Harry will make your dreams come true the agents in in the land who regulates them well, there is no one to regulate them and this is really the sad part of this: these agents charge fees to students for their services, but Canadian universities also pay them to recruit students up to two thousand dollars for each student enrolling we wanted to see what promises the agents were making to the students and their parents this father and his son who were interested in a Canadian education agreed to use a hidden camera while meeting agent after agent the foreign student would need to work at least 50 hours a week on minimum wage to cover the cost of tuition and living expenses and many also send money home.

The father then inquires about a well-established university in Toronto, but the agent directs him to a little-known professional university. Hanson University is probably paying for that. agent a higher commission when contacted the school did not confirm in any way then another agent with a great promise is so easy that there are currently more than 250,000 backlogged people waiting to have their permanent residence approved even after the father and the son left at the agent's offices, other recruiters approached them on the street in this ruthless competition, they will promise almost anything in order to get some business. Australia New Zealand, the UK and Ireland have signed a joint code of conduct for the ethical recruitment of international students to ensure agents are honest, transparent and act with integrity Canada decided not to sign up, it's a shame, if you ask me you'd think There are hundreds and thousands of students.

Upon landing in Canada, some of these classrooms would be filled with students from Punjab, but in reality there is no mechanism to establish a code of ethics in the way students are recruited the system is based on misinformation everyone acts as consultants of unlicensed immigration across the board almost without exception the Canadian government is very aware of that I mean there's no question about it um but the bottom line is that these recruiters, if they don't get the person through, they don't get paid, so they just They shoot as many darts as they can at the board and hope to score high in terms of annual income. right, I mean that's what's happening, if we're wrong we'll abandon the premises right now, but we all know we pay our fees, so what happens when the focus is on the numbers?

This happened last spring. Hundreds of Alpha College students were told their classes had been postponed until a later date on May 17. They send us an official email from Alpha College. Nobody else says we can't give them seats. Alpha took his tuition checks but over-enrolled. Beyond capacity for part of the semester. I would be suspended they said you are on an unofficial break we can't enroll you and uh I come here two or three times and they didn't listen to my problems and they didn't solve it then they told us you were on an unofficial break I completed my first semester at Alpha College and then from the first semester I am being unofficially discharged and who emerged as one of the Dil Creek Corps student leaders, students express concerns regarding spring registration, the deciding factor after months of online classes, this was The first time he saw the university his family paid for, you were here for nine months and you hadn't seen Alpha University, no, so we saw that on the day of the protest.

I said, "Okay, this is my university." Crazy, so before coming here I had something on my mind. Canada is so beautiful. I'm going to come here just to earn well, live a life and have fun on the weekends like we saw in the movies, so when I came here it was different, but yes, it was completely different, the protest went on for almost two weeks, finally Alpha kicked the students off the property, welcome to Canada, we wanted to use the mushroom and there was a little snow, no students allowed, you think okay, the university is mine, so this is the university where I'm going to spend years and months and I'm going to make memories there and all that, but when they just say you're not allowed you can't even use the bathroom, that's heartbreaking, even the timid and distressed core joined the protest. she felt like she had nothing to lose my friends like from other universities what they called me what are you doing like it's not safe it's not good like what are you doing they thought protesting was a bad idea yeah they thought and uh then I said it's because our rights, then if we cannot defend our rights, then who can?

Ultimately, the students won Alpha regressed, there were no deferrals. The Fifth Estate obtained this document describing what went wrong in the fall of 2021, he signed up for Alpha. 2,500 international students in spring 2022, just before the protest, the school doubled that number. We got numbers showing that Alpha College has the physical space to accommodate just over 400 students, so the postponement was mismanagement. The postponement was the administrative office, the administrator, the general directors of the school. their inability to keep track of the number of students who were enrolling. I think they were just seeing dollar signs. I think they just have one because it's a private school.

They have interested parties. I think they're just trying to impress them. Also, educational agents. o online platforms recruited 100 of those international students for Alpha, although it was up to the university to decide how many students to accept says that the recruitment system is based on quantity, not quality, we should not sell ourselves to what is the most easy, what is the quickest way. what's the cheapest way, you know what I mean, this shouldn't be part of the determination, it should be, let's bring in the best people internationally to think that we can build a strong Canada and about the agents in Indiana that influenced migration. fire them all, so what led Alpha to overenroll international students?

No one from Alpha or St Lawrence College would appear on camera to discuss the protest or the plight of their international students. When we return, we will take the students' concerns to Canada's immigration minister, the federal government. The government's 10-year effort to attract more international students from India has created a huge backlog of 160,000 visa applications waiting to be processed, leaving students in a lurch. The stranger asks for help from a higher power. Students abandon these toy airplanes in temples as an offering of hope. that elusiveVisa will come on a wing in a prayer, he says he comes to the temple to relieve his stress and ask God for some help as if he is speechless with so many students from India eager to come to Canada.

The nomination board opened a recruitment. office here to deal with pent up demand LinkedIn those education agents we approach in India with a hidden camera work with a Ply board I've always been a big believer in access and transparency yes that's what a flower could do, that's what we've done and that's what we're going to continue to do to create transparency so that students make the best decision and that's a good point, but we also wanted to know more about what's happening on the ground and, Like you, we are interested in finding more. about transparency, so we showed some of what we caught on camera to apply.

Board co-founder Medi Basiri was actually also saying that you can go anywhere in Toronto and get an office job once you've completed a professional university. It is a fair promise. being able to make students I don't know about office work I think now is the perfect time an opportunity for anyone looking for a chance to find a job like everyone's dream job no I started with pizza delivery and what about the promise of permanent residence and I just want to ask you about that, what they are telling you here is that there is no problem getting permanent residence, the message is absolutely wrong, no one should do it or and it is clearly on our website, our code is being cleaned of conduct, it is actually a It turns out that no one should do it and says that unless your immigration advisor should be able to advise you, no one should apply.

The board says it has made substantial investments in training its recruiting partners and has a code of conduct that is enforced when necessary, as in Earl's case. Blaney, the international student advocate, says treating these students like a product instead of people is bad for them, bad for brand Canada. Can we improve the quality of education? Can we get people jobs? Can we get them skills? Can we get them degrees they will take? house and be successful with absolutely we can do it, but we're not trying right, so that's the problem we're trying to package them in, we're trying to get their money and we're trying to say okay, job well done, no it is. how the students feel about it, like they want something and we're not delivering it, period, no one seems to want to take responsibility 100 like who's who's who's responsible, right, who's responsible, unfortunately the answer is no one, someone has to be responsible.

Sean Fraser, who are you going to? To be Sean Fraser is Canada's Minister of Immigration, we took the students' fight to his office in Ottawa. There have been reports coming out that Canada is now getting an international reputation for our post-secondary schools that are treating these kids like cash cows, you know? It's something that really worries me a lot, there are certain private vocational universities that I'm convinced have come to exist just to make money off the international student program, it's completely unacceptable what we do about it, I think we need to do a better job working with the provincial governments to say we are hearing stories coming from institution X, it's really problematic for us , they are trying to increase their acceptance of international students to an extraordinary number, we are concerned that it may be no one is cracking down on these agents, no one is cracking down on the institutions that are taking the money right, where is the responsibility if Are there examples of promoters who are tied? to the institutions that are taking advantage of students, then we have to work with the provincial governments to tell them that they have a problem with these particular institutes if they do not need my permission to withdraw the designation of an institution from the program that we are highlighting. case where there was a school in Toronto, I mean, they went from 2,500 students one year to 5,000 students the next year, they only have room for 400 students in the building, then they told these students that they were over-enrolled and they had that putting them off these kids had to protest they are paying for their own exploitation is disgusting I have no patience for that is not what it was designed for the program is designed to provide education to students and benefit Canadian communities do not allow fake operations open to abuse of innocent students who have in mind what Canada could be only to be let down because they were sold a

false

declaration of assets, so the students have been heard, but their fight is far from over.

I think let's look back on this in 20 years and how will we look at it? Well, it's like a scar, like an exploitation of this specific group of young people. I think it is unethical to recruit someone when they are not. She will be able to succeed as for Dilpreet, she learned some hard lessons about being an international student in Canada after all these protests and everything that happened, this experience really made us feel that they only want our money and they only want us to give them money. and they like it again and again and they get rich by lining their pockets and they don't really care about us at all and what about her father, Gurdeep Singh, who bet his farm on his future?

He wonders, after all the money he spent, was it worth it, but him? he says he is very proud of her daughter urging her not to give up now stay brave he says he keep fighting for your rights don't lose faith and one day you will reach your destiny