What changed, who's paying attention, and what leaders navigating students, councils, and constrained budgets need to consider now.
For student executives and institutional leaders responsible for health benefits, 2025 was not a normal year.
Federal policy upended international enrollment. Permit caps forced institutions into emergency planning. Mental health demand surged past what campus resources could absorb. Healthcare costs climbed while budgets froze. And through it all, students kept asking harder questions about what they were actually getting for their fees.
Leaders who expected stability found themselves managing crisis. Leaders who expected their existing partners and structures to adapt found, in many cases, that they did not.
This is not a temporary disruption. The forces that made 2025 so difficult are structural. And for those responsible for student health benefits, 2026 will require honest evaluation of whether current arrangements are still fit for purpose.
Student VIP has spent this past year in conversation with student associations and institutions across the country. What follows is a synthesis of what the sector experienced, what it revealed, and what it means for the decisions being made right now.
For years, student health benefits operated on stable assumptions. Enrollment was predictable. International student growth was reliable. Mental health was a secondary concern. Cost increases were manageable. Plans designed a decade ago still functioned adequately.
2025 dismantled those assumptions.
International cohorts shrank under permit caps. The students who did arrive faced a healthcare system less equipped to serve them. Mental health went from "available if needed" to "overwhelmed and insufficient." Drug costs spiked. Provider networks that looked adequate on paper failed to meet students where they actually live.
Many institutions discovered that their existing arrangements were built for a reality that no longer exists. The partners, the plan designs, the service models that worked five years ago are now creating gaps, frustrations, and risks.
The uncomfortable truth: in a year this disruptive, staying with legacy structures is not the safe choice. It is often the riskiest one.
There is a natural tendency to stick with existing providers, especially during uncertain times. The logic feels sound: why add change on top of disruption?
But that logic assumes the current arrangement is stable. For many institutions in 2025, it was not.
Students unable to access timely mental health support. Claims processes that created more confusion than resolution. Coverage gaps discovered only when someone needed care. Service teams unreachable during the weeks that mattered most.
These are not minor inconveniences. They are risks: to students, to institutional reputation, to the leaders accountable for benefits decisions.
Re-evaluating your current arrangement is not recklessness. It is due diligence. The question is not "why would we change?" It is "do we have evidence that what we have is actually working?"
The pressure on student health plans no longer comes from one direction.
Students expect coverage that reflects their actual lives. Mental health support available at 2am. Pharmacy access that fits their schedules and budgets. Claims processes that do not require three phone calls and a week of waiting. Plans that cover pre-existing conditions, gender-affirming care, and the realities of being an international student navigating an unfamiliar system.
Councils and associations expect accountability. They want utilization data. They want satisfaction evidence. They want to know that fees translate into value, not just coverage documents.
Administrators expect risk to be managed. They need confidence that partners can scale during peak periods, that service failures will not land on their desks, and that the institution is protected when something goes wrong.
Meeting these expectations simultaneously requires a different kind of partner than what sufficed in previous years.
Every benefits provider now claims robust mental health coverage. That claim no longer survives contact with student reality.
Waitlists. Limited hours. Counsellors unavailable in the languages students speak. One-size-fits-all approaches that miss the cultural and personal complexity of mental health support. Coverage that exists on paper but fails in practice.
The conversation has moved past "do you offer mental health?" to "can you prove it's working?"
Through the I.M. Well program, Student VIP delivers unlimited 24/7 counselling in over 240 languages, designed to reduce the barriers that prevent students from seeking help early. No session limits. No waitlists. Support that meets students where they are, when they need it.
This is what mental health infrastructure looks like when it is built for current reality rather than inherited from a previous era.
Federal permit caps and PGWP changes dominated headlines in 2025. But beyond the policy disruption lies a service reality that too many plans still fail to address: international students do not use health benefits the way domestic students do.
For domestic students, provincial coverage exists as a foundation. The student plan is supplementary. Opt-out rates are high because the stakes feel lower.
For international students, the plan is often their only access to healthcare in Canada. They need to understand how to find a doctor. Whether prescriptions are covered. What happens if hospitalization becomes necessary. The questions are urgent, the stakes are high, and the consequences of poor service are severe.
Student VIP's international medical plans are built around this reality: no large exclusion lists, pre-existing conditions covered from day one, gender-affirming care included. Insurance designed for today's students, not structured around insurer convenience.
Serving international students well requires genuine expertise, not an afterthought bolted onto a domestic plan. Leaders should ask their current providers: what specific evidence exists that international students are being served effectively?
Student health does not exist in isolation from student life.
Food insecurity affects a significant portion of post-secondary students. Financial stress compounds academic pressure and mental health challenges. A benefits plan that ignores these realities is incomplete.
Student VIP secured the first partnership of its kind with Sobeys, bringing reduced medication costs and grocery savings to students through their benefits plan. This is not a marketing exercise. It is recognition that student wellbeing requires addressing the full picture, not just the clinical components.
Innovation of this kind does not come from providers coasting on legacy arrangements. It comes from partners actively looking for ways to do more for students within constrained resources.
Any provider can deliver decent service in a quiet month. The question is what happens when thousands of students need help at the same time.
September 2025 brought the predictable back-to-school surge, amplified by enrollment confusion and policy uncertainty. Student VIP's member experience team handled close to 2,800 student inquiries that month, nearly triple typical volume.
The results: 99% satisfaction rating maintained. Median first response time under 90 seconds. 95% of inquiries resolved directly, without escalation to carriers or third parties.
These numbers are not presented as marketing. They are presented as evidence. Evidence that service quality at scale is possible. Evidence that students can receive answers instead of transfers. Evidence that a benefits partner can be built around student advocacy rather than cost minimization.
For leaders evaluating their current arrangements, the question is simple: what happened to your students during the most demanding weeks of 2025? If the answer is unsatisfying, that is information worth acting on.
The institutions that navigated 2025 most effectively shared a common trait: they stopped treating risk management as a checkbox exercise.
Real risk management means asking whether current partners can actually deliver under pressure. It means examining whether coverage gaps exist and who bears the consequences. It means evaluating whether plan design reflects current student needs or outdated assumptions.
Student VIP has contributed over one million dollars toward student scholarships, healthcare programming, mental health initiatives, and student employment at partner campuses. That investment reflects a belief that student success and plan sustainability reinforce each other when the partnership is built on genuine alignment rather than contractual obligation.
For leaders evaluating benefits strategy in the coming months:
Loyalty to underperforming arrangements is not a virtue. If students are not being served well, if service quality collapsed during peak periods, if coverage gaps created real harm, those are legitimate reasons to explore alternatives. Re-evaluation is responsible leadership.
Ask for evidence, not promises. Any provider can describe what they offer. Fewer can demonstrate what actually happened when it mattered. Ask for September data. Ask for satisfaction ratings. Ask for resolution rates. The answers reveal more than any proposal document.
Student needs have changed faster than most plans. Mental health, international student support, financial insecurity, digital expectations. Plans designed for a previous generation of students will increasingly fail the current one. Alignment with current reality matters.
Agility and focus can outperform scale. Size does not guarantee service quality. The largest providers are not automatically the best. What matters is whether a partner is genuinely oriented around student outcomes and institutional needs, or simply maintaining legacy arrangements.
Student VIP has served Canadian post-secondary institutions for nearly four decades. Through regulatory shifts, market cycles, and evolving student expectations, the focus has remained constant: helping institutions deliver health benefits that students actually use and value.
2025 tested that focus. The results speak through the data: service quality maintained under pressure, innovation delivered through partnerships like Sobeys and programs like I.M. Well, and continued investment in the infrastructure that turns coverage into care.
For those questioning whether their current arrangements are still working, Student VIP welcomes the conversation. Not a sales pitch. A genuine discussion about what students need, what is possible, and whether better options exist.
Because the greatest risk in 2026 is not change. It is assuming that what worked before will continue to work now.
Henri Tex, Student VIP Connect on LinkedIn
