Wednesday, October 30, 2024  |  Category: Brandscape™

Ebb Tide for Atlantic Universities

Oct 2024 (Published weeks earlier on Eduvation Circles!)

I’ve spent a good chunk of this month updating enrolment data for the 200 Canadian colleges and universities in my Brandscape™ database. (Subscribers asked me to provide the breakdown by international vs domestic students, even though it doesn’t affect the calculation of per-student marketing spending. And the database covers the past 16 years of enrolments – so that’s more than 6,400 headcounts to get straight.)

Statistics Canada’s PSIS database is great for consistency, up until Fall 2021, for public colleges and universities. (They provide headcount data as of a Fall “census” date chosen by each institution, and split domestic and international numbers.) For more recent years, I have to turn to provincial ministry databases and association sources like Universities Canada (which provides Fall 2023 headcounts, although just the total.) For 2022 and 2024, I have to scour the internet for annual reports, enrolment reports to senate, media releases, news coverage, or whatever else I can find. It can easily take hours for an institution – and yes, I’m conscious that the effort will be rendered pointless as Stats Can gradually releases updated numbers themselves – 3 years from now!

As you can expect, I really appreciate the openness of the Association of Atlantic Universities, who have already released their “Survey of Preliminary Enrolments” for Fall 2024, and maintain annual results on their website. Longer-term comparisons are up to me, but it makes it comparatively straightforward to generate consistent, accurate graphs like the following. (The 5-year average is derived from 2017-2021, because for most institutions elsewhere in the country, the post-StatsCan data is less consistent.)

It’s easy to see that, for most of the 16 years, Dalhousie’s graduate and undergraduate enrolment has been steadily growing. Domestic enrolments began to fall in 2015, but have more than recovered since 2020. In the past 2 years, international enrolments have started to subside – although it’s not catastrophic yet.

StFX operates on a much smaller scale, of course – the left axis peaks at 6,000, not 25,000 like Dal’s – but you can tell immediately that they are far less dependent upon international enrolments. Perhaps that was a missed opportunity for StFX, but it’s a good thing now, considering the IRCC headwinds buffeting other institutions!

Memorial U, for example, has seen domestic enrolment decline 26% since its peak in 2010, and 19% in the past 3 years alone. They have “backfilled” these losses by growing international enrolments 260% since 2010 – but those have dropped 16% this year over last, and that’s of course only the beginning. (If international students enrol in 4-year programs, for example, you would expect roughly 25% of them to start new each Fall. A 16% decline could mean the entering class is 60% smaller!)

And then there’s Cape Breton U. CBU is a national outlier for sure, which exceeded its own expectations by growing international enrolment 740% between 2017 and its 2023 peak, when 76% of their students were on study visas. The negative press and growing pains made it obvious to CBU that they needed to rein things in, so even though the 17% decline this Fall is identical to MUN’s, it was part of CBU’s plan. Still, these declines are happening long before IRCC’s policies start to bite universities.

Beware the Undertow!

It’s not hard to tell that there’s more pain ahead for institutions like MUN and CBU, though – and anyone else depending on international enrolments to keep their programs open, much less to offset deficits caused by tuition caps and waning provincial funding. The AAU makes it comparatively easy to see what’s happening in Atlantic universities. Elsewhere in the country, it takes weeks of digging through Senate reports, dashboards, media releases and press coverage to cobble together post-2021 data. Which is, of course, where the story really gets interesting!

Join Eduvation Circles to read my most recent blogs analyzing the enrolment trends at half a dozen Stable Ontario Universities, and 5 more Struggling Ontario Universities. And of course, the real story is what’s happening at Ontario Colleges – coming shortly!

And if you’re interested in full details on enrolment and marketing at 200 Canadian colleges and universities, consider subscribing to Eduvation’s Brandscape™ market intelligence reports.