St. Clair College will be suspending some programs this fall due to recent changes to the international student cap.
Starting this September, 18 programs will be suspended primarily based on student demand now that the college has received their allocation from the province in terms of the number of international student offers they're able to make.
Over the last year, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has made a number of changes to the number of study permit applications to be accepted, which has reduced the number of international students coming to Canada by about 40 per cent.
For 2025, the IRCC will issue 437,000 study permits - a 10 per cent decrease from the 2024 cap. Ontario can issue approximately 117,000 permits.
Some of the impacted programs include dental assisting, power engineering, hospitality, fashion design, event management, and some programs offered at the Chatham campus such as office administration.
Michael Silvaggi, St. Clair College President, says those currently in the impacted programs will continue on.
"September is our typical academic year, that's most common. So those programs will not have intakes in September. That means students that are in year two, and year three, obviously continue in those programs because they're not impacted."
He says if there is demand, they can bring the programs back for a winter or spring intake.
"It's an opportunity to potentially re-imagine the program, but at the end of the day if students are showing interest, and applicants are calling us and contacting us, we have opportunities to run those in January and as May of next year. So that's where their application cycle falls right now."
Silvaggi says when the federal government changed the labour alignments on programs, St. Clair was impacted.
"There was a number of programs that no longer had that labour alignment piece attached to them, which had made them unattractive to an international student because there's no longer an opportunity for post-graduate work permit upon graduation. So some of these programs that are suspended used to benefit from having international students - that would no longer be the case."
Silvaggi adds that the programs that are being suspended typically only saw 20 to 25 students.
As the college finalizes their budget, they will also be offering early incentive leaves for staff and faculty to create some capacity moving forward, however Silvaggi says the do not have a "set" number of incentive leaves at this time.
The college is still finalizing the budget which will then go to the Board of Governors for approval.