For Providence University College, 2025 has been a bittersweet year. First of all, it marks the private school’s one hundredth anniversary, a milestone meriting a major celebration this past month. Unfortunately, the momentous event has been clouded by the school’s need to restructure and rethink some long-held ideals.

Last year, the federal government put a cap on international student applications for a two-year term, effectively reducing their numbers by about one-third. The stated intention was to help alleviate the strain of housing shortages felt across the country.

In implementing this directive, each province was granted an allowance of students, and it’s been left to the provincial government to allocate them amongst postsecondary institutions. 

For Providence, the news has been bad. As a school that relies heavily on international students, they saw their international student numbers drop by more than ninety percent from previous years.

“It’s begun to affect us,” says Dr. Kenton Anderson, Providence’s president. “We haven’t really experienced the full weight of it yet, because we have all of these students that we recruited under the old system. It’s a two-year program, so it takes a little while for the effect to be felt.”

By 2026 and onward, he says, the impact has the potential to be quite significant.

While the federal student cap was originally introduced as a two-year program, Anderson says that not everyone is convinced the situation will ever return to the way it once was.

When the cutbacks were first announced in January 2024, only undergraduate students were affected. Immediately Providence was tasked with moving all its programs to the graduate level to accommodate.

By September of last year, however, the federal government extended the directive to include graduate students, causing schools everywhere to pivot and restructure once again.

For those students who are already in Canada and partway through their education track, the change doesn’t affect them.

“Keep in mind, international students include American students,” Anderson says. “That’s a major market for our services that we are no longer able to pursue. That’s huge.”

What makes the policy tricky to implement in Canada is the fact that immigration decisions are made at the federal level while education is managed by each province. When the two portfolios cross paths, provinces are forced to find ways to comply.

“The province didn’t ask for this,” says Anderson. “The federal government created this policy around immigration and student study permits and required all the provinces to figure out how to do it.”

Losing the Winnipeg Campus

Apart from restructuring their programs, Providence has also had to say goodbye to their recently acquired Winnipeg campus. Purchased in 2023, the building once occupied by Booth University College was to become Providence’s newest urban campus, providing space for 700 new students and affordable housing for 400.

This year, before that dream had even been realized, Providence sold the building.

“Graduates have less need for dormitory residences, so we couldn’t really support that building anymore,” Anderson says. “We are now operating out of leased space—wonderful space—but we don’t have housing anymore.”

The loss of international students has an impact on the Otterburne campus as well.

“The proportion on the Otterburne campus of international students has never been particularly large, but these students do bring diversity to the community. It’s good for our Manitoban students to be able to rub shoulders with students from all these different places. We’re becoming much more homogenized [now].”

According to Anderson, Providence administration isn’t sitting on its hands, waiting for things to change. They have started working on other programming ideas which might open new streams of revenue.

One of these solutions may include taking education to the students if the students can’t come to them. That would mean sending Providence instructors to foreign countries, operating under Providence governance from afar.

Making this difficult is the fact that Providence has catered to students from about 20 different countries, including India, Africa, and the Philippines.

Why do they choose to educate at Providence? Anderson says it’s because the school is intentional in its directive. It’s also a smaller institution, making for a less intimidating experience for foreigners.

Working with the Province

In the coming weeks and months, Anderson and his team hope to create some collaborative space with the province to see if more international student allocations could come their way.

“We appreciate and understand that [the province has] felt the need to prioritize the publicly funded schools over privately funded schools,” he says. “They don’t really owe us anything. Nevertheless, we believe that what we’ve been doing is good for Manitoba, certainly good for the city of Winnipeg, and it’s good for us here in Otterburne because it provides much needed revenue that allows us to flourish.”

International students based out of Winnipeg, he says, can provide an economic boon to the city because that’s where they shop and live. As well, many of them are willing to fill blue collar service jobs that native-born Manitobans don’t want.

“We train them and help them develop in their leadership capacity. We help them to become productive for the Manitoba economy. So we feel it would be a substantial loss [to the province].”

Indeed, training international students has been a part of the school’s mantra almost since the very beginning. The principle is written into early documents created by the school’s founders.

“They express Providence’s interest in reaching the world,” says Anderson. “They weren’t just interested in reaching the local communities. The intention was that we would be a global entity affecting [everyone, everywhere].”

How would they do this? By creating leaders of good character to go out and serve their communities. If Anderson has any say in the matter, Providence will continue with that mantra well into the future.

“The Minister of Advanced Education has confirmed that she will be visiting our campus next week, on September 18, and she’ll be coming for a significant time, whereby we’ll be discussing these matters, and other things. We are hopeful that we might find a way to increase our allocations so that we don’t have to lose this tremendous program.”