Information on Visa Students

Question

I received the following request: "I am interested in gaining access to Stats Can info through the Data Liberation Initiative, especially as concerns statistics for international education. Can you please tell me how I may search/access this data?

For example, we are currently in need of the most up-to-date stats on country of origin for visa students in Canada and how many of those come from the U.S."

I thought this would be fairly straightforward; not quite. I found an AUCC publication on Enrolment but the data go only to 2004. And I have looked all through PSIS and found several tables, but none that fit the bill. There's a Daily article from Feb 2008 with 2005-06 data, but they aren't detailed enough.

Any other thoughts? I called our planning folks and they actually provide data to PSIS so we only have our own here taken from our admin system.

Answer

1) It's not Stats Can that collects that info, but rather Citizenship and Immigration. For example, the 2006 Facts and figures at: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/facts2006/index.asp has a bunch of tables on foreign students, including the top 10 countries of origin.

Before 2003, they were reported in:

Facts and figures [yyyy]: statistical overview of the temporary resident and refugee claimant population.
I am not sure whether or not LAC has those on its web site, but I have copies from 1999-2002 (pdf files), if you need them.

2) I have found statistics on foreign or international students enrolled in Canadian universities in OECD sources. Look in SourceOECD under OECD databases: OECD.Stat (2004-2006) or Education Statistics, where one of the databases is called Foreign Students Enrolled (1998-2003).

3) Our Education consultant told me that data on country of origin for visa students in Canada is available as a custom tabulation:

"This would be available from a custom extraction from PSIS. The cost would be $160 for one year and $10 for each additional year added at the same time. Turn-around time for delivery is 5-10 working days and pre-payment by credit card would be required."