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Canada runs one of the largest and most varied education systems in the world. Ninety six universities. Public colleges and polytechnics in every province. Forty eight CEGEPs in Quebec that no other province has an equivalent to. Publicly funded school boards from Newfoundland to the Yukon, independent and faith based schools alongside them, seminaries, conservatories, flight schools, trade and apprenticeship centres, language schools, and thousands of private training providers that most Canadians have never heard of and never needed to.

Almost all of that is invisible in the immigration conversation. When people talk about international students in Canada, they talk about universities. Toronto, McGill, UBC, Waterloo. When the conversation gets more specific it gets as far as public colleges, Conestoga and Seneca and Humber, and stops there.

Private career colleges are back in the news in 2026, and not for good reasons. In July, Ontario disqualified students at five private career colleges from OSAP over what the ministry described as high risk admissions practices, inadequate attendance tracking and deficient academic progress monitoring. In the same month Quebec suspended or declined to renew the operating permits of four private colleges, leaving students to file fresh applications just to hold their status. The recurring themes are the ones the sector has been accused of for years: recruitment that competes on commission rather than fit, admissions standards that bend to whoever is paying, and teaching that would not survive a serious audit.

That is 2026, after the correction, after the caps, after the sector had already been cut down. During the peak it was considerably worse. Bad enough that the federal government intervened directly in a field of provincial jurisdiction, which Ottawa does not do casually.

So how bad was it, actually? Not in anecdote. In numbers.

First, a Guess

Think about every kind of institution that can accept an international student in Canada. Universities, public colleges, CEGEPs, school boards, private schools, career colleges, language schools, flight schools, seminaries. All of it.

At the peak of the boom, how many of those institutions actually had study permit applicants naming them?

Now the Public Side, Province by Province

Of those 1,132, the institutions that could be matched to a school still designated today break down like this. Public means universities, public colleges and polytechnics, CEGEPs, and publicly funded school boards.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column. Tap any heading to sort.

Ontario and British Columbia between them held 394 of Canada’s 603 private institutions, 65 per cent of the total. Two provinces, roughly two thirds of the private sector. Ontario alone held 233, more than the public systems of every province outside Quebec combined.

Quebec is the outlier and the reason is structural, not moral. Its CEGEP network and its school boards are individually designated, so the public count is inflated relative to everywhere else. Strip Quebec out and the rest of the country had 152 public institutions and 532 private ones.

Look at Ontario again. Sixty one public institutions. That is every university, every college of applied arts and technology, every school board in the province that took an international applicant. Against 233 private ones.

British Columbia is starker still. Twenty four public. One hundred and sixty one private.

Where This Data Came From

None of this is published. IRCC does not release approval and refusal figures by institution, and it does not publish how many designated learning institutions are public and how many are private. It has never published either.

In 2023, immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens filed an access to information request and received a 29 page document. It is a plain table with no commentary: every DLI number that appeared in a study permit application between 1 January 2022 and 30 April 2023, how many applications IRCC approved, and how many it refused. No school names. Just numbers.

I took every DLI number in that document and matched it against IRCC’s current designated learning institutions list to recover the names, then classified each institution by sector. That is where the tables on this page come from. The full workbook is linked at the end so you can check any of it yourself.

What the Data Actually Shows

The first thing it shows is that both of the stories people tell about this period are true, and each is misleading on its own.

The Approval Gap

Here is where it stops being a story about institutions and starts being a story about the person filling in the application.

Where the Volume Actually Went, 2022 to 2023

These are the twenty private career colleges that drew the most study permit applications between 1 January 2022 and 30 April 2023. Between them they account for roughly half of every application made to a private career college in those 16 months. Read the refusal column.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column. Tap any heading to sort.

Thirteen of the twenty refused more applicants than they approved. Cambria College in British Columbia refused 82 per cent of the 4,404 people who named it. Cornerstone, in the same province and the same sector, approved 82 per cent. Sector alone does not explain that. The institution does.

Why the Average Hides the Worst, 2022 to 2023

If you work in this field you will already be thinking that 49 per cent looks generous, because you know colleges where almost nobody got through. You are right, and the reason is worth understanding before anyone quotes the headline figure back at you.

Forty nine per cent is weighted by volume. It is every application to every private career college divided into every approval. A handful of large, competently run institutions pull it upward. Look instead at how individual colleges performed and the floor falls out.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column. Tap any heading to sort.

And these are not all tiny operations where a handful of applications skews the maths. Restricted to colleges with at least 100 applications, 25 still approved under a quarter of them. MLC College of Business, Technology and Healthcare approved 1.8 per cent of 841 applicants. College Kensley approved 6.3 per cent of 2,487.

By contrast, across 212 public institutions of the same size, not one approved under 10 per cent, and six approved under a quarter.

What the Public Side Looked Like, 2022 to 2023

Public is not uniform either, and the gap between the two largest provinces is wider than most people expect. Ontario’s public institutions approved 64.4 per cent across 540,257 applications. British Columbia’s approved 79.0 per cent across 76,469.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column. Tap any heading to sort.

Conestoga alone took 68,105 applications, more than the entire public system of British Columbia, and approved 55.4 per cent of them. St. Clair approved 45.6 per cent. Laurentian approved 23.9 per cent. Meanwhile the University of Toronto approved 93.8 per cent. Being public is not a guarantee either.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column. Tap any heading to sort.

Not one British Columbia public institution of that size fell below 50 per cent. In Ontario, several did, and the province ran nearly seven times the application volume.

Why We Are Bringing This Up Now

Because the correction that followed did not fall evenly, and because the way it fell tells you what the government actually concluded about this sector.

In January 2024 Ottawa capped study permit applications and introduced the Provincial Attestation Letter. Provinces received an allocation and decided who got to issue them. That decision, more than anything in the caps themselves, is the verdict.

Ontario had 233 private institutions taking international applicants at the peak, more than any province in the country, and when it came time to hand out attestation letters it gave the career colleges among them nothing at all. Read that next to the refusal figures above and it is not a mystery why.

The thing that actually ended the model, though, was quieter. From 1 November 2024, graduates of college and other non degree programs need to have studied in an eligible field to qualify for a post graduation work permit, and private career college programs along with public private partnership programs became broadly ineligible outright. Once the work permit at the end disappeared, so did the reason to enrol.

The 170 That Are Not There Any More

Of the 1,132 DLI numbers in the 2023 document, 170 cannot be found on IRCC’s designated learning institutions list today.

I want to be careful here, because there are three ways that happens and only one of them is a closure. An institution can lose its designation or shut down, in which case its record goes inactive inside IRCC’s system and it disappears from the public page. It can be a primary or secondary school, which IRCC does not individually list at all. Or a digit can have been misread in a scanned document.

What I can tell you is that these numbers were live in an IRCC dataset in 2023, that it is now August 2026, and that they are not on the list. Given what happened to this sector in between, the most likely explanation for a large share of them is the obvious one. Once the intake was reined in, institutions that existed to serve that intake stopped existing.

They were small. Those 170 accounted for under 2 per cent of all applications in the report. That is the part worth sitting with. The institutions that vanished were not the ones enrolling thousands. They were the ones enrolling dozens, and a student who chose one of them in 2022 chose a school that would not survive to see them graduate.

A Caveat on the Data

This is one internal document. It captures institutions that had study permit applications naming them in a 16 month window, which is not the same as every institution in Canada, and it is a scan, which means it carries the imperfections of a scan.

The public DLI list is not a complete census either, and never has been. IRCC states plainly that all primary and secondary schools in Canada are designated learning institutions and are not included in the published list. A 2024 federal regulatory document put the national total at roughly 1,700 to 2,000 designated institutions against only about 700 post-secondary ones in compliance reporting. So there are designated institutions that have never appeared publicly, and there are DLI numbers sitting in IRCC’s administrative data that a member of the public cannot look up.

That cuts both ways. It means the 1,132 is a floor rather than a ceiling. It also means anyone telling you they know exactly how many private colleges Canada had is guessing, because the government has never published it.

The Part That Should Have Stopped All of This

Step back and look at what a private career college is actually for. By definition these are vocational institutions. Short programmes. Practical training. Built to get somebody job ready in the shortest time possible. That is the entire premise, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Now hold that against what almost every international applicant is actually buying. They are not buying a certificate. They are buying the work permit at the end of it, and the pathway to permanent residence that the work permit opens.

Here is the part that does not get said plainly enough. A post graduation work permit has never been available to everyone with a study permit. It requires that you graduate from a PGWP eligible institution, and private career colleges, as a class, have never been on that list outside one narrow exception.

Read those dates again. The Quebec exception closed in September 2023. The partnership route closed in 2024. But for the vast majority of the 485 private career colleges in this data, in Ontario, in British Columbia, in Alberta, there was never a post graduation work permit at the end of the programme. Not in 2022. Not before that. The rule did not change on them. It was always that way.

So 485 institutions held designated learning institution status, more than every university in Canada several times over, while the credential they issued was never designed to unlock the thing most of their applicants were actually there for.

None of this was really about education. It was about selling a way into Canada. Nobody was checking where it led.

Which is why the refusal rates in this data are less surprising than they first look. Officers were assessing whether an applicant was a genuine student with a genuine plan. When the programme leads nowhere an employer or IRCC recognises, that assessment gets harder to pass, and the numbers show it. A student who did not know any of this walked into it anyway, because nothing on the school’s website says the words “there is no work permit at the end of this”.

What DLI Designation Actually Means

It means a province approved that school to host international students, and IRCC recorded it. That is the whole of it.

It is not accreditation. It is not a quality rating. It does not promise the school will still be designated next year, that the credential leads anywhere an employer respects, or that a post graduation work permit is available at the end. IRCC says directly that not all programs offered by a DLI are eligible for a PGWP.

Recruiters lean on the word designated because it sounds like approval. It is closer to a mailing address than a licence.

How to Choose, Now That the Rules Have Changed

Start at the end and work backwards, because the post graduation work permit rules have made the field of study more decisive than the school.

Check the programme against IRCC’s eligible fields of study for a PGWP before you check anything else. A credential that does not lead to a work permit is a very expensive language course. Confirm the institution appears on IRCC’s current list under its exact DLI number, not a similar name. Look it up in the workbook below and see what its approval numbers actually were. Ask the school what proportion of its international applicants were approved last year, and ask what happens to your tuition if it closes, in writing rather than on a call. If an agent is pushing one institution in particular, ask what they are paid for the referral. A commission is not wrong. Not knowing about it is.

And if your application has already been refused, the refusal letter and the officer’s notes will tell you whether the institution was the problem or your documents were. Those are two different problems with two different fixes, and treating one as the other is how people lose a second application on the same ground. We go through that in immigration refusals and appeals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Data

• IRCC, Number of Study Permit Applications (Including Extensions) Approved and Refused by IRCC between January 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, Broken down by Year, Application Type and Designated Learning Institution (DLI) Number, released under the Access to Information Act and obtained by Steven Meurrens. Original 29 page document.
• IRCC, Designated learning institutions list, retrieved August 2026.
• IRCC, Post-graduation work permit eligibility, including field of study requirements.
• IRCC, Graduates of certain Quebec institutions, on the PGWP eligibility of non subsidised private Quebec institutions and its closure on 1 September 2023.
• IRCC, 2026 provincial and territorial allocations under the international student cap.
• Statistics Canada, The Daily, 5 May 2026, international student enrolment.
• Download the full DLI by DLI workbook (Excel). Every matched institution with its DLI number, province, campus cities, and approval and refusal figures for new study permits and extensions.

Related Reading

• Obtaining a Study Permit
• Study Permit Requirements and Proof of Funds
• Restoring Your Status in Canada: Work, Study or Visitor
• Immigration Refusals and Appeals