Background: The Context That Made This Research Necessary

The institutional, policy, and historical context that makes this research necessary

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Research is always shaped by the conditions that made it urgent. This page describes the context that produced the questions at the centre of this dissertation: the policy landscape, the institutional arrangements, the demographic shifts, and the historical forces that converged to make the international student experience in Canadian higher education one of the most pressing equity issues of the current decade.

The Internationalisation of Canadian Higher Education

Canadian universities began recruiting international students at scale in the 1990s, a shift accelerated by the contraction of federal and provincial funding that followed the 1995 federal budget cuts. As public funding declined, tuition differentials expanded. Domestic tuition was regulated; international tuition was subject to market rates. The fiscal logic was straightforward: international students could be charged what the market would bear, and the revenue could be redirected to offset funding shortfalls without triggering the political consequences of raising domestic tuition. What began as a revenue strategy became a structural dependency.

Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) theorized this shift as academic capitalism: the integration of universities into market logics such that knowledge becomes a commodity, students become consumers, and the university operates as a market actor rather than a public institution. Their analysis, grounded in the United States context, maps precisely onto the Canadian trajectory. Newfield (2016) extended this analysis to document the systematic defunding of public higher education and its consequences for equity, access, and institutional purpose. In Canada, the consequences fell unevenly, and international students absorbed the greatest share of the risk.

By the early 2020s, international students represented a substantial and structurally indispensable portion of university enrolment across the country. At Thompson Rivers University, where this research was conducted, international students constituted approximately 45% of the student population by 2023, contributing an estimated $180 million in annual tuition revenue (Thompson Rivers University, 2023). The institution’s budget, staffing levels, and programme offerings had become contingent on the continued arrival of these students. Kezar et al. (2019) described this process as the creation of a “gig academy”: an institution that systematically replaces stable, publicly accountable arrangements with contingent, flexible, and ultimately precarious ones. The precarity extended beyond faculty labour to the students themselves.

The Structural Position of the International Student

International students in Canadian universities occupy a structurally contradictory position. They are celebrated publicly as evidence of institutional diversity and global reach. They are recruited through elaborate marketing campaigns that promise belonging, opportunity, and transformation. They are invited to bring their full cultural and intellectual identities into classrooms described as inclusive. And yet the institutional arrangements surrounding their presence tell a different story.

International students pay four times the tuition of domestic students while navigating institutions built around domestic student norms, Western epistemologies, and English-language cultural assumptions. Sidhu (2006) described this as the central contradiction of global higher education: the commodification of diversity proceeds simultaneously with the marginalization of those whose presence generates it. Students arrive as revenue sources and are incorporated into institutional rhetoric as diversity assets. The gap between these two framings is precisely the space this dissertation investigates.

The structural position of the international student is further shaped by immigration precarity. Study permits are tied to continuous enrolment, which means that academic difficulty, health crises, financial shocks, or programme changes carry immigration consequences with no domestic equivalent. The student who withdraws from a course or takes a medical leave is navigating more than academic administration: they are potentially jeopardising their right to remain in the country. This precarity operates as a form of institutional power, constraining students from raising complaints, accessing support, or exercising the consumer rights the university simultaneously claims to extend.

The 2024 Federal Study Permit Cap: A Policy Rupture

This dissertation captures a specific and historically significant moment in Canadian postsecondary policy. In January 2024, the federal government announced a 35% reduction in study permit approvals, citing housing pressures and programme integrity concerns (Government of Canada, 2024). The cap was framed as a temporary corrective measure. Its effects were immediate and structural.

For students already enrolled, the cap introduced a new dimension of institutional anxiety. International students who had arrived under one set of promises suddenly found themselves repositioned as political problems rather than institutional assets. For institutions, the cap disrupted enrolment projections and accelerated conversations about over-reliance on international tuition that had been deferred for decades. For researchers, it provided a concentrated moment of visibility into structural arrangements that had previously operated beneath the surface of institutional rhetoric.

The participants in this study documented their lives during this window. Their photographs carry the weight of that historical context. Any analysis of what they showed must be read against this backdrop: these are students whose conditional belonging had just been made explicit in federal policy.

The Canadian University on Indigenous Land

This research was conducted at Thompson Rivers University, located on the unceded traditional territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl’ecw. That territorial acknowledgement is analytically necessary rather than performative. The contradiction of offering belonging to international students on territory the institution itself occupies without consent sits at the centre of the architecture of exclusion this dissertation documents.

The Canadian university was built as a colonial institution. Its structures of knowledge production, its credentialing systems, its spatial organization, and its epistemological assumptions were designed within and for the colonial project. Indigenous scholars, including Battiste (2013) and Tuck and Yang (2012), have documented the persistence of these colonial logics within contemporary university culture. The international student, recruited from the Global South and positioned as a revenue source on unceded land, enters an institution whose colonial architecture has been redecorated but remains structurally intact. This context is background. It is also data.

My Own Position in This Background

I taught at Thompson Rivers University for twenty-five years, nineteen of them in the Faculty of Student Development and Continuing Studies teaching business ethics, organizational behaviour, leadership, and diversity to predominantly international student populations. I was a contract faculty member for the entirety of that time. I held no job security, no benefits, and no meaningful institutional voice. I organized alongside contract faculty colleagues, chaired the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia, applied for six tenure-track positions at the institution and was passed over each time. In May 2025, I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award. The same month, I was laid off.

This background is analytical material as well as personal history. It is the origin of the concept of asymmetrical precarity that structures this dissertation. I know this institution from the inside. I also know the experience of institutional precarity from inside the institution. That positioning shaped every methodological decision, every interpretive frame, and every conceptual contribution this study makes. The researcher is always part of the background. In this study, the background became the data.

Summary: Why This Background Required This Study

The convergence of these forces created the conditions for this research: the structural dependency of Canadian universities on international student revenue; the epistemological marginalization of international students within those same institutions; the acute policy rupture of the 2024 cap; the colonial architecture of the institution itself; and my own positioning as an insider researcher with nineteen years of direct classroom experience. These are the conditions that made this study both possible and necessary.

What was needed was a methodology that could hold this complexity without flattening it, centre student voice without appropriating it, and produce knowledge that would return to the communities that generated it. That is what blended witnessing was designed to do.

References

Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Purich Publishing.

Government of Canada. (2024). Study permit: About the process. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/study-canada/study-permit.html

Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labour in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Newfield, C. (2016). The great mistake: How we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sidhu, R. K. (2006). Universities and globalization: To market, to market. Routledge.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Thompson Rivers University. (2023). TRU facts and statistics 2023. https://www.tru.ca/

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.