While a lot of agents can ably recruit students, not many have the competence to fill study visa applications resulting in the often shockingly high African refusal rates, Borderpass’s Max Donsky said.
“While African students are as good as those from any other place, many African agents lack the resources and the support to put up high quality applications,” he told The PIE News.
Companies that use immigration lawyers or recruitment companies with qualified in-house attorneys can properly guide students, he suggested.
“Often, African students are losing money to quacks who have penetrated the industry, charging as much as C$1500 per application while as opposed to a fee of around $200 charged by well established companies,” he lamented.
How to improve visa refusals from African
Mike Henniger from Illume Student Advisory Services said that looking at overall visa
“Many schools do not yet have an optimal plan in place for how to efficiently and responsibly recruit African students who are right for their programs. Achieving sustainable results in Africa does not happen by making a small tweak to strategies that have worked in Asia, Latin America, or elsewhere,” he told The PIE News.
Measures that Illume implements to increase visa success rates include written explanations as part of application processes to explain academic study gap exceeding one year, as well as market-specific confirmation deadlines.
Teams also hold interviews with offer holders to verify both the authenticity of submitted financial documents and the genuine intent of students to study at their institution.
Donsky explained that when the Statement of Purpose document is fraudulently or incompetently filled, a disqualification often follows.
The problem of incompetent agents extended beyond Africa, and has been affecting students from other regions of the world, including Asia, Latin America and some parts of Europe in the recent past. claimed well-known sector commentator Earl Blaney.
The outspoken critic of aggregator platforms and sub-agent networks has fuelled incompetent and inexperienced agents who wrongly advise students, he suggested.
Linking overseas education agents to authorised immigration practitioners could be one way of helping solve the problem, he said.
It would also “assist with student support throughout students’ stay, and dramatically improve the prospects of skills retention to support Canada’s economic class immigration goals”.
“As many as 70% of agents in Africa are new, do not have enough knowledge of the process and the institutions they represent, and often have a problem submitting the right data to the IRCC,” Blaney noted.
Despite the problem, a new report by Canadian firm ApplyBoard analysing Canadian study permit trends, shows that the situation could however be potentially changing for the better.
“Nigerian with the record growth in Canada last year of 113% when compared to 2022 has the fourth-largest student population in Canada, accounting for over 4% of Canada’s total international student population in 2023,” said ApplyBoard’s Brooke Kelly.
“Though changes are expected as a result of Canada’s recent international student cap, 71% of Apply Board’s applicants from Africa were approved for a study permit in the 2023 intake semesters,” she added.
Until now “quacks” have been able to rip students off thousands of dollars in return for poorly filled out documentation.
When to improve visa refusals from African
While a lot of agents can ably recruit students, not many have the competence to fill study visa applications resulting in the often shockingly high African refusal rates, Borderpass’s Max Donsky said.
“While African students are as good as those from any other place, many African agents lack the resources and the support to put up high quality applications,” he told The PIE News.
Companies that use immigration lawyers or recruitment companies with qualified in-house attorneys can properly guide students, he suggested.
“Often, African students are losing money to quacks who have penetrated the industry, charging as much as C$1500 per application while as opposed to a fee of around $200 charged by well established companies,” he lamented.
Aggregator recruitment models
“This is a trend that is not Africa-specific, but rather typical of the impact of aggregator recruitment models,” he added.
It has been witnessed since 2014-15, when volumes of applications from around the world, including Africa, had began growning tremendously, making it harder for the IRCC to handle them in a “competent way”, he explained.
“We have data sets that provide specific details related to what schools and what courses are approved and refused. The data shows very strong correlation between application volume increases and refusal rate increases,” he told University World News in an interview.
As a result, thousands of applications are submitted annually from the sub-agents, of which a large number are not properly completed, or have been completed by students who do not qualify, leading to outright rejection, he noted.
Since the agents have no direct contact with the universities they are recruiting for, they have little knowledge of the programmes and requirements, misadvising students in their applications, he observed. This contributed partly to high refusals of up to 80%.
“Before the aggregator platforms took root, universities and colleges would review the competence of a recruiter but, with the aggregator concept, schools do not know who their sub-agents are. All an agent has to do is be approved by the aggregator,” he observed.
On the other hand, he said, learning institutions at times lie about knowing who the agents are that are recruiting for them abroad, while, in actual fact, they do not, Blaney admitted.
Recruiters in Africa
Blaney noted; “As many as 70% of agents in Africa are new; [they] do not have enough knowledge of the process and the institutions they represent. They lack knowledge to manage the applications and, in the end, have a problem submitting the right data to the IRCC, contributing to higher rejections.
“The bottom line is that, when you look at the Africa data for specific schools recruiting for legitimate programmes in reasonable volumes, you realise that the acceptance rate is higher,” he added.
Africa, he said, is a young, emerging market, unlike a country like India, which is a ‘mature’ market with an acceptance rate of 60%, largely due to the majority of experienced agents, even when they had no direct contact with the universities they recruited for. This was unlike Africa’s main source, Nigeria, which at times experienced very high rejection rates.
At times, he said countries, including those in Africa, suffered low student visa approvals owing to categorisation by Global Affairs Canada, the government organ that oversees the country’s foreign policy, he said.
Blaney explained that, in some cases, the department designates certain countries as potential sources for students, while other countries are categorised as ideal sources of skilled labour, among others, and this affects chances for winning study visas.
Questions remain
While he agrees with some of the points raised by the Canadian, Farook Lalji of Koala Consultants in Nairobi, Kenya, says that Africa’s refusal rate for entry to Canadian universities was unacceptably high, and the reasons, to a large extent, remained a mystery to agents and the victims alike.
Canadian authorities never bothered to explain or in any way communicate with agents to explain reasons for refusal, which happened for students with the same qualifications and documents as the few who get the study visas.
It was also wrong for the authorities to take money from poor students in the form of visa fees while knowing that they would deny the majority of them the permits.
“If the IRCC was placing quotas on students from certain regions or countries, it would be good if it informed agents so that they recruited with the allowed numbers in mind. It is hard to believe that companies such as ours, with 23 years of experience, can have problems filing proper applications for students,” he added.
The data also showed approval rates were even lower for one of the biggest students’ source markets, Nigeria, which was a mere 17.6%, rising marginally to 18% in 2020.
In the meantime, Blaney’s data shows a sharp rise, sometimes of over 1,000% in the number of applications to study in Canada over the past seven years. He believes that the desire to finally settle in Canada and in North America, in general, is a huge motivation to wanting to study in those countries.
Among other things, he recommends that the Canadian government holds an inquiry and conducts further research into the use of education agents, and for the adoption of a 2022 recommendation of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on ‘Differential Treatment in Recruitment and Acceptance Rates of Foreign Students in Quebec and the rest of Canada’ which calls for the regulation of recruiters in the international education sector.
“The Canadian government should develop a two-tier international student intake stream. One stream should be available to all students who are interested primarily in the benefits of international study without immigration prospects attached, and another stream that is focused on selecting students and producing graduates for Canadian labour market entry to fill shortages and economic planning goals,” he recommended in a 2022 report titled IRCC Refusal Rates and Study Permit Application Volume: Correlation between Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) refusal rates and study permit application volumes (2018-21) and related concerns.