A Kitchener startup that prides itself as one of the largest online platforms for foreign student recruitment — promoting Canada as a destination of choice — has let go of some employees in Ontario amid a volatile international education market in this country.
The news came a day after Ottawa announced plans to further reduce the number of international students admitted and restrict access to postgraduation work permits. The opportunity to work in Canada toward permanent residence has helped make the country a top destination for people to come and study.
ApplyBoard said four per cent of its global team members — located in Ontario, Canada — are no longer with the company. Its website claims it has 1,200 team members around the world.
The company said in a statement Friday afternoon that “we remain fully committed to our HQ in Kitchener.”
In a statement to the Star the day before, ApplyBoard said it made a “difficult decision” to restructure parts of its workforce to better serve its customers and align with its long-term strategic goals. This decision, it said, was part of a strategic direction that prioritizes its global expansion, agility and innovation in an evolving sector.
“We made the tough but necessary decisions to ensure ApplyBoard’s future success,” said its CEO Meti Basiri, who co-founded the startup in 2015 with his two brothers. The three came from Iran to study as international students.
“We deeply appreciate and thank every departing team member for their contributions to ApplyBoard. We continue to actively invest in our technology, teams and global expansion. ApplyBoard remains committed to its mission of making education accessible to students around the world, unlocking their potential through the power of education.”
ApplyBoard told the Star that Basiri was not available to speak further on the reorganization or changes to the business. Nor did it respond to a reporter’s questions about the implications of the move to the Canadian international student market.
Earlier this week, a smiling Basiri did speak with BetaKit, a Canadian startup and tech news website, after announcing the company had secured a $100-million credit facility from RBCx, the RBC’s tech banking and innovation branch, to “triple down on growth.”
“We’re thinking about student mobility and how it’s going to change over the next decade. So how can we set ourselves up for more expansion?” Basiri told BetaKit in an exclusive interview about the financing.
The article said ApplyBoard plans to use the money to expand beyond English-speaking countries to 20 new destinations, and bring European and Asian schools to the platform by 2030.
“You bring someone into your country, they get a degree from your school and you embed them into your workforce. They become far more successful than immigrants with foreign credentials,” Basiri told BetaKit.
“English-speaking countries will continue their fair share (of international recruitment), but the pie itself is getting bigger, so new players will have bigger portions of (it).”
The company said on its website that it has built partnerships with more than 1,500 primary, secondary and post-secondary educational institutions, and works with at least 6,500 recruitment partners around the world to drive diversity on campuses across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Ireland.
ApplyBoard also boasts that it has grown to become the world’s largest online platform for international student recruitment, assisting more than one million students. In 2022, it was named one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Canada by Deloitte.
Amid an affordable housing crisis, rising cost of living and climbing unemployment rates, Canadians started blaming the federal government for bringing in too many migrants to Canada, and the runaway growth of the international student population came under the microscope.
It prompted Immigration Minister Marc Miller earlier this year to impose a 35 per cent reduction in new study permit applications processed and tighten rules to bring down temporary residents’ share of the overall population from the current 6.1 per cent to five per cent over three years.
On Wednesday, Miller announced an additional 10 per cent cut to the study permit application intake next year from 2024 and further tightened the eligibility criteria of postgraduation work permit.
ApplyBoard’s growth had coincided with the surge of international enrolment in Canada, which has seen its number of foreign students skyrocketing from 457,828 in 2015 to about one million last year.
“It’s safe to admit that we have allowed certain aspects of this to get overheated, and probably for too long,” Miller told reporters Wednesday, referring to the overall growth of the temporary resident population, a good chunk of it made up of international students and postgraduation work permit holders.
Lisa Brunner, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies, said technology-enabled recruitment support platforms have become increasingly influential over the past decade, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic.
For decades, schools have paid recruiters to find international students, but it is time- and resource-intensive, especially for the smaller institutions. Those who would like to study abroad can also find it intimidating and confusing with all the options and different admission criteria and tuition rates.
“That’s where these private, for-profit companies step in,” said Lisa, who has done extensive research on international education.
“They create online application platforms which attempt to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for international students. Behind the scenes, they ‘aggregate’ international student recruiters and partner with schools, then act as matchmakers.”
As the platforms grow, schools without contracts with them can get left behind, which she said over time makes the operators so influential in the international education ecosystem.
In a 2022 episode of CBC’s Fifth Estate that examined international student recruitment in India, Basiri said Canada is a “dream country” in many senses, a land for people to build something better.
“I’m always a big believer (in) access and transparency,” he told the show’s host, adding that he started in Canada by delivering pizzas. “That’s what ApplyBoard could do. That’s what we have done, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do, build a transparency for the students to make the best decisions.”
This week, Basiri told the BetaKit that he’s happy with where the company is and will be headed.
“We have a huge run rate and we don’t have challenges,” he told reporter Bianca Bharti. “We’re focusing on the next phase of our work.”
Correction – Sept. 20, 2024
This article has been edited to remove a statement saying the company did not respond to a question about the future of its headquarters in Kitchener.
