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Foreign students are changing Metro Vancouver like no other city in Canada.

As the University of B.C. prepares to welcome 28 per cent of its first-year contingent as foreign students, Metro Vancouver’s universities, colleges and high schools are not the only things that are changing.

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So is the city’s rental market, restaurant scene and transit congestion.

B.C.’s advanced education minister, Andrew Wilkinson, has boasted this province now has more than 110,000 foreign students a year (roughly one third of the national total), the vast majority of whom settle in Metro Vancouver.

One recent sign of how the wave of foreign students has been altering the city is the construction crew that has been working late into the evening at UBC, to complete a massive complex for the beginning of classes in September.

Called Orchard Commons, the complex was designed predominantly for foreign students. It will provide a new home for Vantage College, created exclusively for about 350 full-fee-paying foreign students (also known as international students).