It’s been almost three months since Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced international students can work up to 24 hours per week off-campus, instead of the previous 20 hours.
The policy has been seen as a positive change by some international students. However, others agree that the 4-hour increase is still not enough to cover their expenses and tuition with the rising cost of living in the country.
Ana Laura Roman came to St. Thomas University in 2023 as an international student from Cuba and Jamaica, where she had earned the STU Presidential Scholarship, which covers half of her tuition, valued at around $20,000 per year.
Roman initially received help from her family when she first came to the country, but she still had to find a job to cover the rest of her expenses, as her home country’s currency exchange rate to Canadian dollars is very low.
One Canadian dollar equals to 109.39 Jamaican dollars.
“When I got here some of my tuition was paid in JMB [Jamaican dollars] and it’s just really bad,” said Roman. “You lose a chunk of your money when you paid it that way.”
Due to labour shortages in 2022, previous IRCC minister Sean Fraiser announced a temporary policy that allowed international students to work full time during the school year. The policy was initially set to expire on Dec. 31, 2023, but was extended until April of 2024.
In 2023, Roman was working 40 hours as a social worker taking care of children with disabilities while going to school full-time.
When the extension ended, Roman had to work within the previous 20-hour limit, which she said severely affected her finances at the time.
“It was pretty brutal, because I [went] from earning maybe $1,500 every two weeks to $800,” said Roman. “It was a very big difference”
After losing her scholarship during her first year, Roman had to find a way to cover her tuition and living expenses by herself, since her family’s financial support was limited.
“My family only paid like a third of my tuition at the beginning of the year, which was a very big help [and] I’m very grateful for that,” she said. “But I do pay for everything else myself.”
Roman said she had to work “crazy hours” during the summer to save up for tuition for the next academic year, which helped her to stay afloat in the meantime, but she had to also find two other jobs on-campus and cut some expenses to sustain herself.
“I definitely put myself on a very strict budget,” she said. “I cut down on things like luxuries. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t eating out as much, I was making all my meals at home and so on.”
International students ‘must be here to study,’ says IRCC
In a press release on April 29, 2024, the federal agency said that temporary policy that allowed international students to work more than 20-hours per week would not be extended and will come to an end on April 30, 2024.
Instead, the IRCC announced that the number of allowed hours will change to 24-hours per week in the fall.
The IRCC said they came to this decision after extensive research, looking at the needs of students, policies in other countries and additional research that “has shown that academic outcomes suffer the more a student works while studying.”
“Working off campus helps international students gain work experience and offset some of their expenses,” said IRCC Minister Marc Miller in the press release. “However, first and foremost, people coming to Canada as students must be here to study, not work.”
International students are allowed to work indefinite hours on campus. Roman currently works around 36 hours a week with her off-campus and campus jobs combined.
Roman acknowledged that the previous hours increase affected her academic performance. Working overnight shifts for over 40 hours a week led her to lose her scholarship in her first year.
“I was working that hard because I needed the money to pay for school, so it’s almost counterintuitive.”
She explained that getting her two on-campus jobs as a peer tutor and student help desk coordinator have helped her be in a better financial position and have also given her more time to work on her assignments, as she aims to get her scholarship back for her fourth year.
However, Roman believes that international students should be able to work more – at least 30 hours a week – pointing out the magnitude of the financial effort many students make to be able to come to Canada and pursue a better life.
“We want to be here. We chose to leave the comfort of our homes and families to be here and to make this country a better place one way or another,” she said.
Roman said she would like the IRCC and the university to take these efforts into account, as she feels like her challenges are not being taken seriously.
Roman would like the IRCC and the university to take more accountability through providing more resources that would benefit students who don’t come from “comfortable backgrounds.”
“[For] those of us who are already coming from a struggling country and then coming to another country looking for opportunities, but struggling along the way, [it] can be even more difficult because you are doing it alone,” she said.
Roman does acknowledge the issues with immigration that led to changes in policy makes it harder for the government to differentiate between the ‘bad actors’ and other international students who are working to achieve a better future.
However, she believes the IRCC is not “trying hard enough” to understand where international students are coming from.
“I just want them to let us know we are seen and that they hear us, because it doesn’t feel that way all the time,” she said.
