International Enrollment in Flux and What It Means for Canada

This session will explore the unique challenges facing Canadian higher education institutions as international enrolment patterns and domestic government policies shift.

International student recruitment is a truly global challenge, facing institutions from North America to Australia. Surges in one destination country drive shortages in others. Institutions around the world also face two common concerns: rising costs associated with recruiting students and increasingly unpredictable student streams.

Rather than presenting a final set of answers, this conversation is designed to share early findings and emerging signals from our work with institutions around the world—and invite partner input into which Canadian-specific challenges (e.g., recent student caps) would be most valuable to explore next. We’ll discuss preliminary insights into:

• Responding to pressures for increased recruitment spend by asking critical threshold questions (e.g., ‘At what point does scholarship and agent investment begin to erode margin?’) while making necessary investments in a competitive market.
• Defining what healthy diversification really looks like in practice—early thinking on which markets may no longer be financially viable or may be too high risk, while also spotting and investing in promising new markets across degree level, geography, and modality.
• Setting realistic enrolment strategy and goals, taking into volatile student flows, developing government policies, and changes in applicant behaviour.

Join us to learn how peers are beginning to adapt to the changing environment, to react to early insights, and—most importantly—to help shape the direction of future research, tools, and guidance as we respond together to the pressures created by evolving international enrolment trends.

Session

Click the Register button to sign up.

Attendance is best suited for Provosts, CBOs, Chief Strategy Officers, Vice President of strategy, VPEM, and Vice Presidents for International. Registration is limited to four attendees per institution

• Thursday, February 19, 2026 | 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time