When I became president of Selkirk College in the spring of 2022, I joined a college that is deeply tied to the communities it serves. We’re in a rural area of about 90,000 people in the West Kootenay and Boundary regions in B.C.’s southern Interior, and our annual economic impact on the region is around $450 million. The college and its students support about one in 12 jobs in our area. During my first year, whenever I ran errands downtown, people would often make a point of introducing themselves and tell me about their connection to the college.

At the time, Selkirk had about 2,500 students, including 800 international students in business, hospitality, health-care and human-services programs. Attracting international students has become necessary for postsecondary institutions over the last two decades: across Canada, provincial funding has fallen behind rising operating costs. From 2006 to 2024, the share of provincial budgets earmarked for post-secondary education fell by roughly 30 per cent. Meanwhile, many provinces have frozen or limited tuition increases; in B.C., domestic tuition can only rise by two per cent each year. 

Related: These International Students Wanted Citizenship. Canada Killed That Dream.

Provincial governments don’t subsidize costs for international students, so their tuition is higher, generating additional revenue that has made all of our programming financially viable. These newcomers do not replace domestic students. In fact, they help us make more programs available to everyone. They also bring global perspectives to our classrooms—an important addition in rural areas like ours, which are generally less culturally diverse than cities.

Newcomers provide much-needed skilled labour, too, especially in areas where population growth is slow and the workforce is aging. Without immigration, the West Kootenay population could decline by six per cent by 2031; among the working population, it will shrink by eight per cent. Many of our international graduates secure work permits, find local jobs, then make their homes here when they apply for citizenship. Today, if I walk into a hotel, retail store, childcare centre, health clinic or social services agency in my area, I’m likely to see at least one of our graduates at work. 

In January of 2024, Canada’s immigration department announced sweeping cuts to international student enrollment: a 35 per cent slash in study permits, ostensibly to alleviate pressure on housing and health-care systems and to crack down on predatory private colleges and unethical recruiters targeting foreign students. (We now know there’s little evidence for blaming international students for our national crises, but the political tide has already turned.)

Federal changes also narrowed who could stay and work after graduating. Many international students come to Canada as a pathway to permanent residency—a pathway Ottawa actively promoted as a way to bring more young, Canadian-trained workers into the labour force. Until 2023, every postsecondary graduate was eligible for a work permit. Now, graduates from college programs like business, tourism and hospitality no longer qualify—and these are precisely the programs where most of Selkirk College’s international students were enrolled. There’s a good reason for that: tourism generated $1.1 billion in our region in 2022, supporting 760 tourism businesses with 7,340 employees. Many of those workers are graduates of Selkirk College. The restrictions on work permits for business and tourism graduates wouldn’t just be a loss for our college. It would also decimate the communities and businesses that depend on our graduates to keep the tourism industry alive and thriving. 

No one in the college sector was shocked that change was coming. The government had signalled a potential system change for several months. But we didn’t think the implementation would be so drastic, sudden or sweeping. We were confident that B.C.’s public system was ethical and that our students were a net gain for our colleges and our communities. Instead, a single policy penalized responsible institutions alongside those that caused the problem in the first place.

The first few months of 2024 were a blur of meetings and scenario planning as we tried to plan for the consequences. How would this affect our current international students? What would this mean for programs that were only viable for domestic students because international students supported the costs? What would fewer students mean for our communities? And how would our budget be affected? 

Ultimately, Selkirk College will lose over $9 million on a $73-million budget. Our international enrolment fell to roughly 450 students in 2025 and will shrink again to 200 students in 2026. Over the last 20 months, the federal government has issued more than a dozen more policy changes, with little, if any, prior consultation with provinces or colleges like ours. Each revision has forced us to go back to the drawing board to determine how the latest announcement would affect our students, our strategies and our communities. 

The uncertainty has taken a real toll on our people—it’s frustrating and disheartening when the rules keep shifting beneath our feet. There’s also an ongoing sense of whiplash: with each change we have to develop a new set of revenue projections and make a new series of difficult decisions for our college.

This year, for example, we closed two community education centres: storefront classrooms in small communities where instructors taught upgrading skills to help residents prepare for college or university. We’re closing our Nelson arts campus and its three programs in June too. This is a tough blow for the community, which is known for its vibrant arts and culture scene. And my co-workers are grieving: we reduced our workforce by more than 40 people last year and are planning a further wave of cuts for the next fiscal year. Nothing prepares you for sitting down with colleagues you respect and admire to tell them they’re losing their jobs.

As we adjust to this new reality, we’re rethinking how we can best serve our students and communities. We’re revamping our school of continuing studies to focus on labour-market training, such as project management, workplace safety and leadership. We simply can’t afford to offer all the programs we had in the past, so we’ll have to prioritize high-demand, workforce-driven fields, such as health care and human services, forestry, trades and technology. But we feel the loss of what we leave behind: courses that have long enriched our communities, like gardening and cooking, or our certificates in ceramics, textile arts and metalwork. These may not align with immediate labour market needs, but they inspire creativity, connection and a love of lifelong learning in all its forms.

Too often, political policymakers overlook the fact that rural communities are the backbone of Canada’s economic resilience. They are the source of the critical minerals, energy, timber and agriculture that fuel Canada’s export, manufacturing and innovation economies. When policy decisions undermine rural institutions’ ability to educate and retain young people, and to deliver skilled labour to these communities, supply chains throughout the economy will feel the effects.

Shortly after I arrived at Selkirk, I was at a checkout line in the grocery store, and the woman behind me recognized me from a picture in the local newspaper. We had a lovely chat about her son, who had just finished our forestry program and was then working at a local company and saving to buy a house. I’ve heard countless stories like this since then, of our graduates finding meaningful careers and building a future here in our region.

That is ultimately what is at stake in all of these policy shifts, spreadsheets and hard decisions: whether people in rural communities still have a reason to stay, study and pursue a career close to home. Colleges like ours open doors to education, good jobs and opportunity in the communities we serve, so people can build their lives here. It’s the same promise that inspire community members to introduce themselves to me, and that still brings people to my office, or my grocery line, or the coffee shop, to tell me what the college means in their lives. Our work now is to make sure that promise survives this period of upheaval.

Maggie Matear is the president and CEO of Selkirk College