Canada aims for more international Francophone students across the country

France remains the top destination in the world for international students to learn French and to study in French, with Canada in second place. Most students go to Canada for English-language programmes, but for several reasons, demand could rise significantly for French-language programmes as well.

Factors that could lead to a spike in demand include:

• More active student recruitment in French-speaking countries in the past few years. Three Francophone markets were in Canada’s top 20 markets in 2023: France, Algeria, and Morocco. Algeria was up 78% year-over-year and Morocco was up 43.5%. The growth is even more striking when we look back at enrolments in 2019: that year, there were 3,620 Algerians in Canadian programmes of at least 6 months, compared with 13,335 in 2023. A total of 4,510 Moroccans studied in those programmes in 2019 – by 2023, there were 10,310. Other Francophone markets are also growing fast for Canadian institutions: enrolments of students from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Tunisia, and Senegal more than tripled between 2019 and 2023.

• Immigration priorities and policies. The Canadian federal government is taking a different approach to French-speaking immigrants than English-speaking immigrants. Since January 2024, restrictive policies have been in place to curb the number of temporary migrants in Canada, but the government want to increase the number of immigrants in Francophone communities outside of Québec. To that end, it launched the Francophone Minority Communities Student Pilot (FMCSP) in August 2024 to encourage international students to study in French in minority Francophone communities outside of Québec – and then to stay on as immigrants. The programme allows participating students a faster route to permanent residence, and it includes robust integration and settlement supports.

The officially bilingual province of New Brunswick – which holds the second-largest proportion of French-speakers in Canada (30% of the total) after Québec – is a priority region under this pilot, as are several other smaller Francophone communities. For the first year, the pilot will be offered to 2,300 students, and then another target will be set in August 2025.

The government has added an incentive as well to boost applications for students to apply for a study permit through the FMCSP:

“To improve the approval rate, students and their families will be exempted from having to demonstrate that they will leave Canada at the end of their temporary stay. In addition, the required financial threshold will be adjusted to reflect 75% of the low-income cut-off associated with the municipality where the institution's main campus is located.”

Students must be from following countries and enrol in a study programme of more than two years leading to a diploma or degree:

• Bénin
• Burkina Faso
• Burundi
• Cabo Verde
• Cameroon
• Central African Republic
• Chad
• Comoros
• Côte d'Ivoire
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Dominica
• Republic of the Congo
• Djibouti
• Egypt
• Equatorial Guinea
• Gabon
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Haïti
• Lebanon
• Madagascar
• Mali
• Mauritania
• Mauritius
• Morocco
• Niger
• Rwanda
• Saint Lucia
• São Tomé and Principe
• Senegal
• Seychelles
• Togo
• Tunisia

In addition, in 2023, Canada’s popular Express Entry system that qualifies foreigners for work in Canada changed its formula for selection, with French-language proficiency now counting for more points towards approval. The following chart from the Globe and Mail shows that French-language proficiency now counts more towards applicants getting an invite than even priority study areas such as STEM and healthcare. As a result, some Anglophone international students in Canada are now learning French to increase their odds for the Express Entry system.

According to the Globe and Mail:

“Alliance Française, an international non-profit agency that administers the French-language tests – mainly used for immigration purposes – reported the same number of test registrations [in Canada] in the first six months of 2024 as the entire year before.

Samuel Coeytaux, the director of the Ottawa branch of Alliance Française, said his organization has seen a significant increase in the number of people taking the TEF and TCF exams across Canada this year. The organization administered 3,681 exams last year but had already reached that total in the first six months of 2024.

Some clients registering for the exam, he said, don’t have a background in French – ‘people from countries not deemed francophone, like India, China and other countries in Latin America as well’ – but they study the structure of the test and prepare well.”

Québec government leans into enrolling students in French-language programmes

Of Canada’s overall population of about 37 million, 22% speak French as their first language, and 84% of that proportion lives in Québec. Most college-aged students enrol in Québec’s French-taught higher education programmes, with the remaining 22% choosing to study in English. According to Québec’s French-language commissioner, Benoît Dubreuil, that percentage is too high. He has recommended to the government that 85% of courses delivered by Québec’s universities be offered in French.

In addition, Mr Dubreuil wants to see 31% of courses at English universities in Québec delivered in French. This would deter some students from studying at universities including McGill, which is ranked 29th in the world by QS and which hosts around 12,000 international students.

Québec is already very attractive to Francophone students from certain countries. Under mobility agreements between Québec and France, and Québec and Belgium, French and Belgian bachelor’s students are eligible to pay the same fees as Canadians who are non-residents of Québec, and French and Belgian master’s and doctoral-level students are eligible to pay the same fees as Québec residents.

But that’s not all: Québec also has mobility agreements with 39 other countries that allow some students from those countries to avoid paying an average international student tuition fee of CDN$20,000 per year. These agreements have caps attached to them, unlike those with France and Belgium. Currently, about 90 Moroccan students, 80 Algerian students, 65 Tunisian students, 50 Senegalese students, and 50 Mexican students are studying in Canada under fee-reducing mobility agreements.

Mohamed El Mahdi Gaouane, the deputy head of the mission of the Kingdom of Morocco, has stated that he wants to "increase and expand, as much as possible" the number of Moroccan students who receive exemptions.

Francophone international student numbers in Canada and France

The following table shows enrolment trends for top Francophone markets in Canada and France in 2023: