A comparison of postsecondary enrolment trends between domestic and international students by field of study

Recent years have witnessed a small decrease of domestic student enrolments and a growing number of international students in Canadian postsecondary programs. This study examines the relationship of changes in domestic students’ postsecondary enrolments with the influx of international students during the 2010s. This study provides one of the first empirical analyses of the relationship in the context of Canada, adding to the literature that had been based mainly on the United States and the United Kingdom. Using enrolment data from the Postsecondary Student Information System, a fixed-effects model was estimated to control for institution-specific characteristics and aggregate time effects. It found positive relationships between changes in domestic and international student enrolments within programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at universities and in business, humanities, health, arts, social science and education—as well as legal studies, trades, services, natural resources and conservation—(BHASE) at colleges. An influx of 100 international students in STEM fields was associated with 141 additional domestic student enrolments in the same fields at universities. An increase in the enrollment of 100 international students BHASE programs was associated with 99 additional domestic students in these programs at colleges. Although this finding may be partly because of unobserved time-varying factors boosting enrolments of domestic and international students at the same time, it is consistent with the notion of cross-subsidization that high tuition fees paid by international students provide resources to maintain or expand some instructional programs and potentially subsidize domestic student enrolments. There was no evidence of cross-subsidization across programs. A decrease in the domestic young adult population was associated with a decrease in domestic student enrolments in BHASE programs. Trends in domestic and international students’ tuition fees and trends of the postsecondary-age population were discussed to contextualize the results