Faced with tightening US immigration policies, more students living in the US are applying to Canadian art schools, with Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax telling ARTnews recently that it has seen significantly more interest, applications, and acceptances this year.
The shift comes as the Trump administration has rolled out several new policies for international students, including threatening to block Harvard University from enrolling international students, announcing it would “aggressively” begin to revoke the visas of Chinese students, and adding social media account reviews to students’ and scholars’ visa applicaitons.
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US art schools have seen international enrollment grow dramatically over the last two decades, and a downward shift in enrollment would change the student body of institutions like the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the School of Visual Arts.
In Canada, however, NSCAD first saw a surge in interest last December, around the application deadline and shortly after Trump was elected to a second term.
“Leads increased almost 50 percent from last year—and that was just from the US,” NSCAD president Dr. Jana Macalik told ARTnews in April, noting that the uptick included not only US citizens but also international students already studying in the country.
The most dramatic changes: a 220 percent spike in US applicants to NSCAD’s undergraduate programs for fall 2025, a 186 percent rise in acceptances, and a 66 percent increase in students responding to those offers.
While NSCAD typically draws applicants from nearby East Coast states like New York and Connecticut, Macalik said the university began receiving applications from across the US last December.
“Like 23 different states have been represented this year in terms of applicants,” Macalik said. “People are really finding us.”
According to Macalik, student feedback has made clear what’s driving both the surge in interest and the broader geographic spread.
“They’re really looking at it because of trans experiences, disability, same-sex marriage, women’s rights—all those kind of components of their freedom in the US being a concern for these students,” Macalik said. “The sort of the fear of persecution in the US is making them want to go elsewhere, look elsewhere, definitely, if they’re international students, but even from the US students.”
Like many art schools, NSCAD’s community includes many nonbinary, queer, transgender, and neurodivergent members who also seek mental health support. The school has also heard directly from parents.
Parents “want their students to come to a to a school that is going to be accommodating, supportive and sort of expressive in a manner that is supporting those students’ interests in the arts,” Macalik said, noting Nova Scotia had the highest gender diversity amongst people between the ages of 15 and 30 compared to the other Canadian provinces.
Macalik added that NSCAD’s recruitment team noted these most recent numbers from US-based applicants surpassed interest from students in China, the country that is usually the institution’s largest source of international inquiries.
These numbers from NSCAD also align with more students based in the US applying to or expressing interest in studying at Canadian universities like the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo, according to a Reuters report published on April 15.
A University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) spokesperson also told ARTnews the institution was “seeing a meaningful increase in applications over previous recent years for the 2025-26 academic year from potential US students, including for UTSC’s Visual & Performing Arts, Arts Management and Media programs (students choose their major Art History, Media Management etc after first year).”
The Alberta University for the Arts (AUArts) in Calgary, Alberta saw its website traffic from US-based IP addresses more than double between January and April compared to the same period last year.
“After the election, it just went crazy. It just went completely crazy, upwards,” AUArts Dean of Students Dr. Pablo Ortiz told ARTnews in late April, noting that much of the web traffic was coming from Washington State, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Texas. “We are considering doing more work to raise awareness in short-haul U.S. markets in the 2025 and 2026 recruitment campaigns, but we won’t see the effects of that campaign until this time next year for sure,” Ortiz added.
AUArts actually saw a decline in applications and acceptances from US-based applicants, but that drop was due, a spokesperson told ARTnews, to “the combined impact of the Canadian federal government’s international student cap and our own reduction in stateside recruitment efforts this past year, in favor of focusing on increasing recruitment in Western Canada.”
In 2024, the Canadian Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship capped new international student permits at 360,000—a decrease of 35 percent compared to the previous year. The cap was intended to manage population growth, with individual provincial and territorial limits weighted by population.
However, Alberta was allowed to admit more international students in 2024 compared to 2023, and Nova Scotia increased NSCAD’s allotment for international students by 13 percent to 53 students for 2024.
But Ortiz told CBC News that AUArts had not hit its cap because the new federal rules had scared off many international students from applying, causing “a chilling effect on prospective applicants in other countries, who have interpreted them as a sea change in the way Canada views foreign students.”
“By adopting this threatening policies in immigration, there seems to be a clear message that completely changed the perception of the country at the international stage,” Ortiz told ARTnews, noting a decrease of 26 percent in international applications and a decrease of 50 percent of those from the US, which translated, at the end into 30 percent decline in all of our admissions. “Basically, what we’re saying is Canada is no longer welcoming of international students.”
“In light of recent events, we are considering doing more work to raise awareness in short-haul US markets in our 2025-26 recruitment campaign, but we won’t see the effects of that until this time next year,” he added.
In the short term, AUArts expects more US applicants for its faculty and administrative roles, like its job posting for a vice president academic in April. “I think we’re going to see an influx of talent coming to this country, for sure,” Ortiz said.
