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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

ApplyBoard is quite big now, they raised $375 million recently and was the fastest growing tech company in Canada in 2019 as ranked by Deloitte. They have been quite successful in the specific field they are in.

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.

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Yeah, it always bothered me that international students had to pay 2x the cost at Waterloo. Like I understood conceptually why it was that way, but morally it felt very wrong.

Depending on the province, but it is your parents who paid for your tuition with your taxes. So international students don't come much cheaper, or expensive to universities.

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.

I seriously doubt that my mom’s taxes covered the 2x difference that out-of-province students paid. It’s a socialized good which is fine, but there’s something wrong with having a discriminated price. It’s selecting for funding ability rather than the quality of the student, which should be the only goal of education.

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)

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