Canada’s Recruitment: Six Enrollment Gaps

Recruitment teams across Canada are working harder than ever, yet new student arrivals fell 61% last year, below even COVID levels. The cap on international students is no longer the binding constraint; demand and approval processes have become the true bottlenecks.

The Canadian government has tightened post-graduation work-permit eligibility, rewriting, partially suspending and then freezing the rules within two years. This instability deters students who have committed four years and a family’s savings to a country that appears unpredictable. The result is a sharp decline in enrolments that cannot be fixed by simply pushing more leads.

What Changed Under the Funnel

Historically, institutions had a surplus of applications for each seat. Losing one at a departmental handoff was noise. Today, that surplus is gone. Every inquiry must survive the entire lifecycle because there is nothing queued behind it. A student who goes quiet after an inquiry now risks losing the seat.

The problem lies in the handoffs between units. Recruitment follows up on inquiries, admissions assesses applications and sends offers, and the registrar enrolls students who show up. Each unit reports a healthy stage within its own boundary, but no one owns the space between stages. The result is that a student’s journey can stall without anyone knowing where.

Capilano University commissioned a strategic enrolment management audit earlier this year. The audit, led by Mike Henniger (international recruitment), Jody Gordon (student success and retention), and I (marketing, communications and conversion), produced a checklist of more than 150 best practices mapped across 16 stages of the student lifecycle, from first inquiry to alumni giving. While the audit findings are confidential, the pattern it exposed is not limited to a single institution.

The Six Gaps to Check

1. Who chases the quiet student? Recruitment owns the relationship until an application is submitted, then admissions takes over. A student who stops responding because they are still considering a competitor needs more nurturing from recruitment, not a reminder about uploading a transcript.

2. What happens while an applicant waits? Most institutions track decision turnaround and have a service standard, but almost none have a clear owner for the weeks on either side of that decision. Yield remains invisible until registration, which is too late to act.

3. Who owns the stretch from deposit to first day? Recruitment and marketing are still in touch, student services has begun onboarding, the registrar sends registration details, and finance chases tuition fees. No one owns the sequence, so students receive a flood of messages and may stop reading.

4. Who owns the withdrawal message? Withdrawal and refund communications sit between the registrar, finance and marketing, but they are rarely governed by any of the three. Poor withdrawal experiences can become public complaints that future applicants read.

5. Who owns the students who already left? The group of students who paused or withdrew includes those who ran out of money, couldn’t get a visa extension, left unhappy, or faced family or academic struggles. No team’s targets include a returning student, so the cheapest enrolment source remains untapped.

6. What is the true cost of an enrolled student? Marketing knows what it spent by channel, while institutional research knows who enrolled. Most institutions capture a lead source in the CRM, which answers where someone came from, not how much it cost to get them.

Few institutions track all six gaps, and almost none assign a single person to own each one. Without shared definitions, a gap can remain invisible until it becomes a crisis.

Three Tests You Can Run This Week

• Trace twenty-five student files by hand. Pull twenty-five applications from the last recruitment cycle at random and write down the dates at every stage: inquiry, application, decision, offer, deposit, registration. The biggest gap reveals your weakest link.

• Ask each unit head for their one number. Identify the metric each unit is accountable for and map those numbers along the lifecycle. The stages that no one names are often the stages that leak.

• Mystery-shop your own inquiry form. Submit it from a top source market with a realistic student question, reply once, then go dark. Observe who follows up, whether anyone follows up twice, and which department the second message comes from.

If It’s Everyone’s Job, It’s Nobody’s Job

The fix is not a fancy dashboard or new funding. Name one person accountable for each of the six gaps, publish them in a single report on a set cadence, and review them with every unit in the room. Without assigned owners, the gaps revert to nobody’s job by the next intake.

Capilano’s President, Jason Dewling, framed the question this way: “In difficult times, the ability to identify and own the gaps in the enrolment process is what separates institutions that survive from those that falter.”

For more insights into how institutions can benchmark their recruitment performance, see our stats page or explore the fixtures and squad resources that help you compare your data with peers.