International graduate students should not be charged different fees

For decades, I heard the reasoning on my campus and elsewhere that international students in Canada should pay a different tuition fee – around two to three times the domestic student rate. This is not only for undergraduate students, most of whom are supported by their parents in their native countries and sustain themselves by doing low-paying, odd jobs at the expense of their academic availability. The differential fee principle is also applied to graduate students, who are contributing to the research success of their supervisors, collaborators and departments. 

 I have known international graduate students who have spent their nights stocking shelves in grocery stores for extended hours making minimum wage only to fail their courses due to sleep deprivation and be forced to discontinue their academic pursuits. Some of them return to their native countries without fulfilling their dreams and those of their parents and feel disgraced in their communities.

In many other countries graduate students are funded by the budgets of universities and/or their national agencies without being charged tuition fees. In Canada, graduate students are supported, at least partially, by their supervisors’ research grants. In a sense, charging a higher fee to an international graduate student is a tax on the supervisor’s often meagre research funds. Those funds could be better spent directly on research by purchasing better equipment or engaging more students, including domestic students.  In my international collaborations, I have met many students from other countries (the U.S. included), who told me that their professors do not have to worry about how their students are supported because the universities took care of that. Alas, our reality is different.

 The justification for the differential fee that I heard, is that the parents of undergraduate students (or students, themselves) do not pay taxes in Canada and yet gain access to our government-funded educational system. If differential fees are going to be justified on economic grounds such as this, then a more important calculation has been overlooked: these native countries and societies already invested enormous sums of money, time and social capital to raise, nurture and prepare their students for successful professional futures. This investment is an effective transfer of funds to Canadian society and its taxpayers from the home country, at least offsetting those lost tax funds imagined in the argument. 

 Like those countries, we also invest in our children from infancy into their late teens to become highly qualified professionals. I don’t have statistics, but I would guess that about 10 to 20 per cent of our youth meet or exceed our expectations. The same percentage may hold for other nations; however, a good portion of this “cream of the crop” is included in the population of international students who are coming to our universities. The selection process of skimming other nations’ talented few through university admissions only helps to enrich the Canadian talent pool. It is time that we reconsider our fee policy and perhaps even discount the tuition for qualified international students. It is in our best interest to be a welcoming place for select, meritorious young people and offer them good academic and financial structures to enhance our own academic communities, while making them feel rewarded. It is good for all of us: institutions, professors and students alike.