The view from the Niagara Falls motel is hardly the slice of Canadiana the students expected.They travelled from their homes in India, anticipating the Canada portrayed in Niagara College marketing materials, complete with a roaring falls and vibrant green vineyards — the perfect setting to lay the foundation for a better life.Instead, these Niagara College students, living in cramped rooms, look out on a pool, in the centre of the motel parking lot, and a little wedding chapel. The only roar is from the steady rumble of traffic along Lundy’s Lane, not far from the bric-a-brac of the Niagara Falls tourist district.The Rockwell Resort is far from a holiday haven, but it is cheap — about $300 a month per student, sharing with one to three others.Money is tight. International students attending Niagara College pay at least $13,000 a year in tuition, compared to an average of $4,400 for domestic students. Some Rockwell residents say they subsist on as little as a piece of fruit and a cup of tea for breakfast before heading off to the Welland campus, a 20-minute bus ride away. “I tell you, for the first four or five months here, I cried almost every day,” says Nikhil Desai, a 21-year-old second-year international business student from India’s Gujarat state, who has lived at the Rockwell for more than a year.“Everything I was told about Canada, about being here, about living here, turned out to be the opposite. Completely opposite. But I can’t go back. There is no going back for us.”Last year, Desai was part of the largest cohort of international students ever enrolled at Niagara College — 4,100 students out of a total of over 11,000. More than 2,900 of those students were from India, and hundreds of them couldn’t cope academically in English. The sheer volume of struggling students triggered a crisis on campus, raising doubts about the credibility of international English-language admission tests. In r ...
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