46% drop in enquiries for studying in US over last year, 75% for Canada in 2 years: IDP Education

"If we talk about the geopolitical situation, I think primarily it concerns the US and we have seen that in the last… 6 to 12 months, the situation has obviously impacted the plans of students who are planning to go to the US. It started actually before President Trump (came in), so we saw that after June onwards, we did see the visa approval rates go down," Kumar told PTI.

"Typically, what happens is that during the election year, every time we see that visa approval rates go down for whatever reasons. But after President Trump has come, I think he is planning, or there is a lot of noise about some changes which are going to happen, which obviously is acting as a dampener," he added.

Citing official statistics, Kumar said there was a 46.4 per cent decline in enquiries for the US in May this year as compared to May 2024. The Canadian enquiries have also declined by around 70-75 per cent over the last two years.

"In Canada, there have been a lot of changes in the last two years. It started when (former Canadian prime minister) Justin Trudeau and the Indian government got into a dispute. But over time, what has happened is that Canada has also been hit by the US tariffs and 80 per cent of Canadian exports are to the US, so they are very badly hit.

"People think that this is not the right time to go to Canada because they have limited the post-study work right also to only six streams and that is where a lot of students think that if they go and study something else, there is no post-study work and they will have to come back," he added.

Since the Canadian government said that the measures have been put in place till 2027 and after that they will relook at this policy. So, the next two years are likely to be soft for Canada also, Kumar explained.

"If you look at other destinations, big ones, which is the UK and Australia, by and large the demand remains intact, the number of students who are going is absolutely intact.

"Australia in fact formally announced that this year they are going to increase the number of students by 9 per cent over last year, so they are talking about managed growth, so they will allow more students but in a managed way," he said.

Each year, almost 1,00,000 IDP students are studying at more than 800 universities around the world. IDP has over 800 partnerships with top educational institutions across Australia, the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.

IDP has 73 offices in 63 cities in India and guides students and their families through the entire study overseas process – university or course selection, submission of application, assistance with the visa process, pre-departure planning and much more.

"Currently, we are working on strengthening our technology stack because we think that tech can play a big role in terms of running our operations. We are also building some AI tools which will actually help the student. Also our counsellors will be able to provide an even better service… with the help of these tools," Kumar said.