Canada hosted almost 495,000 students last year – this means that the country has surpassed its International Education Strategy goal of hosting more than 450,000 by 2022 five years early.
The figures are based on the number of study permit holders present in the country as of December 31, a figure which shows a 41% growth since 2015 according to data by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
The PIE delved into IRCC spreadsheets to understand where growth is and where students go.
Almost all the main source markets are growing, except for Saudi Arabia.
While India has sped up growth and almost reached China’s numbers, study permit holders from Vietnam have almost doubled since 2016.
Our graphs, based on IRCC’s figures of study permit holders present in Canada, are interactive – click on the buttons in the legend to visualise data for a specific source market, or to exclude a dataset from the graph.
