Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (York University) on How Canadian Institutions Can Support Global Talent

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Christine Brooks-Cappadocia to discuss the role of international students in Canada and the impact of immigration policy changes. 

Transcript

voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Angie Kamath, who is Dean of the School of Professional Studies at New York University. Angie and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss digital transformation in higher education and the opportunities ahead to meet various demographics. 

Shauna Cox (00:02):Christine, welcome to the Illumination Podcast. I'm so glad you could join me today,

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (00:06):Shauna, it's a pleasure to be here.

Shauna Cox (00:08):We're here to talk about attracting global talent, especially from a Canadian continuing education perspective. So I want to first kick off our conversation by asking you why are Canadian universities increasingly focused on attracting and engaging more international audiences?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (00:28):Absolutely. Well, there's two answers to that question, and they're not unrelated. The first is obviously revenue. It's no secret that Canadian universities have seen declining government funding over the last 50 years, but the more important reason is that international students bring in diverse viewpoints and experiences. Universities are focused on innovation and building new knowledge. You can't do that without new experiences. And international students are a really good way to foster that level of innovation. We need

Shauna Cox (01:06):International students is nothing new to Canadian institutions, I would say. So what role were Canadian CE divisions kind of playing in interacting these students?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (01:18):Right, Continuing education units are an educational category that's defined by what we don't do. We don't serve primarily traditional students and we don't primarily do degrees. So the way we interact with international students is really varied, but there's a growing number of our units that provide short professional focused programs for international students and domestic Canadians who want to launch careers in the Canadian workplace quickly. So we think of us as a finishing school for the skills and experience people already have. So whether that's a domestic student translating their degree into something, a frontline hiring manager can understand, or an international student izing their workplace skills and polishing up their already great experience and educations from their home countries into more of a Canadian context.

Shauna Cox (02:35):And diving into that a little bit more, now I'm going to reference IRCC, but for our audience, just in case anyone doesn't know what that stands for, is Immigration refugees and Citizenship Canada. So how have the R-I-R-C-C changes over the past year? We've seen a lot of changes in Canada in that past year, impacted the capacity for universities to bring international students to Canada.

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (03:04):They've had a tremendous and a negative

(03:08):Experience for us. So Canadian universities have always placed a great deal of care on how we support our international students. Good example is York. During the pandemic, we supported financially and emotionally. Every single international learner who came to Canada during the pandemic was supported through quarantine with both their hotel and food bills. But actually having a senior level member of the administration call and check up on them each and every day with a video call just to make sure being in a new country is hard, being in a new country, in a hotel room in quarantine really hard. So we just wanted to make sure everybody was supported through that process. So changes at IRCC were brought into for good reasons. There's been some abuse in the system, but what happened was a blanket approach without consultation. So in many cases, they took a small number of bad actors and instead of dealing with those issues, punish the entire industry in ways that are really counterproductive.

(04:19):So the introduction of program or provincial attestation letters was one thing. There was a gap in the amount of time, at least in Ontario, we couldn't recruit between the end of January and the end of March, we lost momentum for both for our degree programs, but also for our postgraduate certificates like our school offers. So we lost momentum, which is really important to getting students in so that they can achieve their career girls quickly. They need some certainty. Since then, it's been tiny little change after tiny little change. We all joke that Friday afternoons you're going to learn something new from IRCC. That creates uncertainty in a market. And if you are packing up your life and moving around the world to start a new career, you want some certainty that the rules that you're applying to will still be in effect when you're done your education.

(05:17):And so we've lost that degree of certainty. The most recent changes with the CIP codes where students have to earn a postgraduate work permit, have to have a program of study, which is an aligned classified, I think they're called classified information programs where they have to be in a certain area. Makes great sense. But it's something that we, as university continuing educators, we're already doing. We're already working with our employment community to make sure our students have a good pipeline to jobs when we produce programs. And that every year our programs are co-designed with industry leaders, co-deliver with industry leaders. And when the industry starts to change, we either change our enrollment numbers and or our programming so that students have good jobs outcome. That's true of my colleagues across the country. What worries me about this last set of changes is that the data that we're making these decisions on, so the zip codes are based on Stats Canada data, which is by definition, backwards looking data. It's got to be cleaned, it comes out of stats can, and it looks at what happened before. And as a consequence, there's a further mismatch between what we can deliver our students and where they will get jobs. So many of us don't use stats can data exclusively anymore. We've gone out and gotten fresher forms of data and then use that with discussions with employers, make sure that the data is more proactive than retroactive. And I'm really worried that we're setting students up for uncertainty by looking at the wrong data source.

Shauna Cox (07:07):And I kind of, oh yeah, sorry. Did you have any more?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (07:11):Oh yeah. And the way it was implemented, right? No one talked to, it doesn't look like RCC talked to the provinces. Those of us who are left with trying to manage these programs or trying to figure out what we have to tell the province when Ontario is setting up a pretty good framework, it looks like, but it requires a whole set of operating procedures and organizations that don't currently exist. So the industry being really continuing educators are nothing if not resourceful and nimble. We're working on establishing those processes and guidelines and associations, and we will have a better experience for students because of it. But that's going to take some time.

Shauna Cox (07:54):And I know you mentioned some worry points there and how CE divisions are actively trying to go along with these changes and address them in the best way that they can. So I want to expand on it and ask for those CE divisions specifically. What has been the impact of the changes overall?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (08:17):Certainly a huge administrative burden. Not only do we have to set up new systems to track the pals, we also have to set up systems to attract the SIP codes, but student anxiety is there too. So the number of inquiries from students needing immigration help has just quadrupled. Every time there's an announcement, there's anxiety, even with the students who shouldn't be affected, there's that. But since November 1st, I've had to tell a whole group of students every day when they want to know, will this program earn me a postgraduate work permit? We've never guaranteed that.

Now the answer is at this point, we think yes, but I can't have even less certainty for you. That's a lot to ask of people who want to come here to meet labor and market crisis. It also, it dissuades those who have other alternatives, right? The students are going to other countries when we need, so at York, we do a lot of technology programming and we attract experienced workers from other countries to come here. That talent's going somewhere else because they have other options just when we need them. When you talk to employers, they need tech talent with experience. We've got that. That's what international students tend to look like, but we're driving them to other countries, and Canada's economy will suffer because of it.

Shauna Cox (09:57):And I think that's such a key point to talk about here because CE divisions naturally serve the economy with the meeting labor market needs and working so closely with industry and things like that. So how do these changes negatively impact the capacity for those CE divisions to contribute to a more healthy domestic labor market?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (10:23):Well, we are experts in filling those talent gaps, right? Finding out who might be able to fill any particular labor market gap and building programs to bridge the potential market with the employer and working with the employer to see what those unique needs are. If we cannot bring in the talent, and no matter what continuing education unit you're in, whether you're dealing primarily with domestic students or primarily with international students, the reality is most of our student population is meet up with Canadian newcomers, whether they've earned their permanent residency or not, or they're first generation. If we cut off that talent pipeline simply won't be the students and the people who are interested in upskilling to upskill jobs. The world of work is changing every six months now. We need people who are willing to do this, and that, quite frankly, isn't domestic talent most of the time.

Shauna Cox (11:27):Absolutely. Now, I just want to throw in a question here. It feels like it's such a heavy interview subject and ending on that question where it seems a little bit negative. I want to go a little bit more positive and just ask you, do you have any advice for those in Canadian CE where you hope things are going to go, how they can cope with the changes that are rapidly going and maybe even some reassurance into those students. Again, and I know that that is a big heavy question and responsibility for those units, but is there anything, any advice that you could share with the audience?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (12:04):Absolutely. We're already good at connecting the learner and the employer and making sure this learners are well supported. Double down on that our students need help, right? When we talk to immigration, people involved in the immigration area, whether they're support agencies, whether it's IRCC employers who want to hire newcomer talent and other educators, we're all working towards the same means. We just need to connect those dots and support the learner. So work with those agencies, double down on student experience, double down on working with your employers to connect the dots, because our learners need us more than ever.

Shauna Cox (12:46):Absolutely. It is such a key time to come together, realize we're all in this together, that we will get through it and we can learn something from this. So Christine, I really do appreciate you taking the time to chat with me, but before I let you go, I am going to make things, spin things a little bit more positively, and we're going to talk about food because that's what we like to do here. So you are based in the Hamilton region in Ontario, Canada. So if someone's coming to town, where do they need to go?

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (13:16):Well, there are so many good choices. If I had to pick just one, it would be the mule on King William. It's bourbon, it's tacos, and a little fusion in good music. What could go wrong?

Shauna Cox (13:29):Perfect combination. Again, Christine, thank you so much for joining me. I really do appreciate it.

Christine Brooks-Cappadocia (13:34):Thanks, Shauna. Take care.