It started a few years ago with North West and Suncrest colleges.
"Since 2021 we've been working with several other colleges on recruitment and admissions for international students to come to rural Saskatchewan," said Great Plains College’s Vice-President, Programs and Students, Keleah Ostrander. "Our collective goal was to enhance the reputation of Saskatchewan colleges in the international market in a cost-effective way. So this year we're excited to announce that Carlton Trail has joined that partnership."
The partnership has helped each school recruit more students into our province.
"It's been excellent," Ostrander said. "To date we've recruited over 900 international students from more than 30 countries to all of the partners. This is in fields such as healthcare or early childhood education or hospitality, where often the domestic interest is not sufficient for the labour market needs. An important part that lots of people don't know about international education is this helps to sustain domestic access by supplementing with international students so that it's a reasonable cost per student to allow domestic programs where there isn't sufficient interest to run without any disruption."
Their recruitment has been focused on labour markets Saskatchewan has had a harder time filling with local workers.
"Unlike some of maybe like the bad actors that you often hear in the international education circle," Ostrander said. "Saskatchewan colleges' whole philosophy is only to have international student seats in programs where there is labour market needs and ultimately that can't be filled through domestic."
Ostrander estimated about 350 of the 900 students attended Great Plains College.