Hmmm… I had not heard off this startup but I graduated a bit before they were founded
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)