All thanks to the Trump’s protectionist rhetoric in the US, Canada has been able to attract 20-30% more MBA students from India this year. Canada has been wooing international students aggressively for almost a decade now. But following Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 and the subsequent tightening of visa norms for students in the UK, Canada has benefited and finally saw a surge of Indian students in the B-school admissions this year.
The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto have a total of 56 Indian students of the total 350 MBA students in the class of 2019. At The John Molson School of Business in the Concordia University in Montreal, applications from India rose sharply by 30% in the fall 2017 session, while 51% of the applications to the full-time MBA offered at the Alberta School of Business in Edmonton were from India.
The founder of Ingeneam and also an Admissions consultant Rashmi Seshadri, said that almost 30% of its clients included one or more Canadian MBA programmes among their options for the 2017 admission cycle compared with only 10% in 2015 due to the ambiguity of Trump policies.
The Vice president of University of Toronto said “During this time, when other countries have an inward-looking approach, Canada has gone a different route with the Canadian PM talking about increasing immigration quota for the best in the world.”
One of the major contributing factor to India’s increasing interest in Canada as a student destination, could be Donald Trump’s protectionist rhetoric. The number of new international students enrollments at a US institution declined for the first time by almost 10,000. According to the annual report of the Institute of International Education.
The Canadian schools have welcomed the growing inflow of students from India.
For the Canadian MBA programmes, India is a very important market. According to a senior director at the Alberta School of Business, Mr. Christopher Lynch, “India is the first- or second-largest international market, China being the other. Some students who had traditionally only considered US or UK schools are now strongly considering Canada,” said Lynch.
Further he added that “We have seen this as over 50% of our applications are from Indian students and we are seeing students specifically mention Canada’s visa rules and multicultural society as reasons they are applying to Canadian schools.”
Ms. Seshadri said, “In November 2016, Canada amended its points-based ‘Express Entry’ immigration to award extra points to graduates of Canadian universities when they apply for permanent residency. Additionally, an automatic three-year work permit after two years of education in Canada is increasingly more attractive, given the growing uncertainties in the US work visa landscape,”.
Arun Jagannathan, CEO of Bengaluru-based admissions consultancy Crack-Verbal, Opined that “About two years ago, it was only those who had relatives in Canada who were applying, Now, all students who come to us, who are applying to the US are also applying to Canada. Canadian schools are recognizing this. Even though you can’t compete with a Harvard or a Stanford, Canada has some good MBA programmes,” he says.
Jagannathan Further said that “A lot of Trump rhetoric came up around late 2016-17 and that Canada’s colleges have gained from that.”
Another compelling reason is that Indians make for excellent candidates, MBA director at School of Business at Trinity Western University, Mr Murray MacTavish, asserted that “We are interested in attracting more qualified Indian applicants. They are attractive applicants as they already are proficient in English, they understand western and global business (and western culture), and many of them come with marketplace experience,” he explained.
Michael Wright, associate dean of graduate programmes at Haskayne School of Business, agreeed that “India is the single biggest country of origin for our international students in the daytime MBA programme and Indian students make up approximately 60-70% of our international MBA students. Their background is typically in engineering or IT. Since 2016, Haskayne accepts students with three-year business degrees from accredited universities in India.”
