> According to critics, aggregate recruiters allow institutions to avoid any accountability for the actions of the agents representing them. “It eliminates the link between the colleges themselves and the agents,” says agent Earl Blaney. “The schools are now not even responsible or connected to these agents, but they’re the ones selling the school.” It’s a $21 billion dollar industry, he says, with hardly any rules.
> ApplyBoard says it vets all its recruiters, rejecting 46 percent of applicants. Approved agents are then trained through online webinars and an interactive course. But institutions seem to understand the potential for abuse that comes with working through aggregators. In the past, Langara refused to allow its agents to work with subagents. “The reason for that is because then we lose the control of who these people are, how they’re representing the institution,” says Van Dam. Last year, despite those qualms, Langara signed an agreement to work with ApplyBoard in what Van Dam describes as a trial period. In theory, there’s nothing stopping an agent that Van Dam rejected yesterday from signing up with ApplyBoard and sending kids to the college soon afterward.
I did some research, my girlfriend paid about $4k USD to a similar company in China for help with filling our her visa application and reviewing admissions essay to a university in Canada. Although now she regrets spending that much as she can do all that stuff on her own when she came here. Students can pay to that range or even more which is why Applyboard can raise $300+ million despite having only served 200k students.
International students as an "industry" really does exist.
But international students are much easier for universities to get, for both top universities in Vancouver, and small towns further away. For the later, they are almost like a lifeline.
Certainly, if I’d been forced to pay that rate, it’s likely I wouldn’t have been able to attend. Or more likely would have needed significant student loans which would have drastically changed decisions I got to make without them. Neither scenario seems like a particularly just outcome if the only difference is an accident of geography.
Politically, this is a hot button topic because politicians are accountable to their constituents and since some amount of public funds are used on post secondary education, there’s a sense of entitlement. You can even see that in the “performance based funding formula” that Ford is moving Ontario to. And every price hike was always met with a wave of complaints when I attended resulting in tuition freezes. Trying to advocate for the rights of non-Ontarions doesn’t win you political points but it doesn’t remove the unjustness from the story (especially since that foreign funding is actually acting like a large subsidy for in-province students)