A post from a Canadian employer on Reddit has gone viral for claiming that he is blacklisting all graduates from Conestoga College due to the incompetence of many foreign graduates from the Kitchener, Ontario-based institution.
The anonymous employer, who posted the blacklist notice on a subreddit dedicated to the college earlier this week, said he was “absolutely shocked at just how poor” job applicants from Conestoga were.
“Every position got absolutely flooded with Conestoga applicants. The first few seemed very impressive, so we gave them a shot and did interviews. Literally none of the 4 we interviewed could speak to us in English properly. It seemed like they all followed the same script (down to the same words), and struggled to answer any technical questions,” u/Mysterious-Most7165 wrote.
“Along with that, 3 of the 4 applicants had serious hygiene problems (sweat smell, not dressed professionally, one of them used our washroom and made a mess all over the floor and didn’t flush). This is literally unheard of for us,” he added.
“Then, as the days rolled on, we realized that we were being flooded with the same resume changed slightly for each applicant. Even worse, almost all the resumes were filled with false credentials and experiences.”
Despite receiving around 3,500 upvotes and over 1,000 comments, which would put it as the top post of all time on the board, the post was hastily removed by the moderators. The employer confirmed that previously, the college had received a good reputation, but it has “changed completely (for the worse)” in recent years.
The change appears to have come as Conestoga College accepted 31,412 international students, the majority from India, from January 2022 to April 2023. Kitchener, the city in which the college is located, has a population of only 240,000 people, and the rapid growth of the campus has become a point of contention for locals concerned with affordable housing in the area.
The amount of Indian applicants at Conestoga was around four and a half times the amount accepted by the University of Toronto, and approximately 75% of the amount accepted by the top 15 largest research universities in Canada combined.
But the post from u/Mysterious-Most7165 is hardly the only indication that the college’s focus on admitting Indian applicants has taken a toll on its reputation.
Another post on Reddit from four months ago revealed that instructors at Conestoga have been forced to reduce their lecture time from 2 hours to 1 hour due to students with poor English skills and a “general lack of interest in the program” not being able to pass otherwise. Other posts on Reddit similarly discuss less obvious “blacklists” that have been imposed on students from the college.
In a more disturbing trend, the current top post on the Conestoga subreddit is from a female student who says that she has felt “increasingly uncomfortable and unsafe on campus,” due to the behavior of male Indian students who “clearly do not respect women or the values” of Canada.
“I have been followed by groups of men on campus as a single female. My friends have been groped on the GRT buses,” the anonymous student wrote. “I have had photos taken of me while walking on campus. I am constantly stared down by men no matter what I wear. I have heard sexist language/comments.”
She continued: “I have considered reporting it to the school, but it’s hard because I don’t know who these men are and I can’t just go and say ‘it’s the Indians!’ Obviously it’s not all of them … I am literally afraid of the men behaving this way though so I’m not going to go ask for their names.”
