Canada seems to be losing the attention of international students so quickly that its institutions might not recruit enough students this year to hit the sharply lower visa caps imposed recently by the Trudeau administration.

After watching overseas student enrolments surge to more than 400,000, the federal government this year announced the imposition of study visa caps aimed at ratcheting down the number by about a third to around 290,000. But at current application rates, Canada’s colleges and universities might get only some 230,000 students from abroad for the coming academic year, estimates ApplyBoard, an online services company.

Universities Canada says its members are “seeing application numbers down” by an average of 40 percent. “Canada’s attractiveness has fallen significantly,” Meti Basiri, ApplyBoard’s chief executive and co-founder, told Times Higher Education. “There is far less demand than supply.”

The reason, explains Basiri, is that the Trudeau administration has taken several other steps in recent months beyond the visa caps, and had threatened more, which together are discouraging many international students from considering Canada. Those additional steps by the federal government include doubling of the wealth requirement for incoming international students, new limits on their working hours and new visa limits on their spouses.

While the full enrolment picture for the coming academic year is not yet known, the apparent speed of the turnaround is shocking. In recent months, Canada’s higher education leaders had been loudly warning of dire consequences from visa caps, apparently unaware that those caps might prove moot because of other factors. “We did what the UK did,” says Basiri of the limits on visa rights for spouses and dependents of students, “and five other things on top.”

Also read: Canada: International students can only work for 24 hours per week