Canada’s foreign enrolment has fallen by nearly 300,000 students over the last two years

Speaking in the East Coast city of Halifax last month, Canadian Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said that the number of international students in Canada dropped from over a million at the beginning of 2024 to roughly 700,000 as of November 2025.

That is, to put it mildly, a historic drop.

The more detailed data provided by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) underscores the point.

IRCC reports that as of December 2023, there were 673,970 foreign students in Canada with a study permit. Also as of that month, there were another 320,830 students in Canada with both a study permit and work permit. Combining the two groups adds to a total of 994,800 students.

Fast forward to November 2025, and those numbers had fallen to 476,330 and 244,900, respectively, for a total of 721,230 international students.

That amounts to an overall decline of -27.5%, or 273,570 students.

That precipitous decline in Canada's foreign student population was ushered in by new policy settings that were largely introduced over the first half of 2024. Those measures include a hard cap on foreign enrolment, new restrictions on post-study work rights, and surging rejection rates for study permit applicants.

The net effect of those new settings has been to substantially reduce the numbers of new students coming to Canada to begin their studies, another key underlying trend that we see illustrated in the following chart.

IRCC highlights that student arrivals are down by -60% for January to November 2025, compared to the same period in 2024.

Needless to say, with so few new students arriving, Canada's foreign enrolment base will be further reduced over the course of 2026. Canada's Immigration Levels Plan says the country expects to welcome 155,000 student arrivals in 2026 (a -49% reduction from the 2025 target), and then 150,000 per year in 2027 and 2028. This compares to the 293,100 actual student arrivals reported by IRCC for 2024.

More broadly, Canada's Immigration Levels Plan aims to reduce the Canada's population of temporary residents – a category primarily composed of international students and temporary foreign workers – to less than 5% of Canada's population by the end of 2027.

In December 2025, Statistics Canada reported, "On October 1, 2025, there were 2,847,737 non-permanent residents in Canada (6.8% of the total population), down from 3,024,216 on July 1, 2025 (7.3% of the total population). The decrease in the estimated number of non-permanent residents was the result of larger, record-high outflows (339,505) – that is, permits expiring – compared with inflows (163,026), which reflect permits issued."

Canada's larger goals in terms of managing its temporary resident population down (as a percentage of total population) have been hindered by the continued growth in the number of temporary foreign workers over the last two years. Indeed, the number of foreign nationals in Canada with work permits continued to increase until June 2025, and only begin to decline marginally over the second half of 2025. Put another way, most of the reductions that have been observed in temporary resident numbers in Canada to date have come from the declining number of international students.

Canada's total population is projected to reach 41.6 million by the end of next year. In order to come under the government's target threshold to bring the number of temporary residents to under 5% of the total population, the number of non-permanent residents in Canada will have to fall to roughly 2.08 million by then; down from a total of about 2.7 million as of November 2025.

For additional background, please see:

• "Canada cuts foreign enrolment cap by nearly 50% as current year trends below COVID levels"
• "Canada: Study permit numbers are in steep decline in 2025"
• "Measuring the impacts of the first full year of Canada’s foreign student enrolment cap"