I teach in a public, English-language Cegep in Quebec City that has 1,000 students. It is St. Lawrence Campus of Champlain College, which is located in Lennoxville as well.
The vast majority of our students are francophones who come to do their Cegep in French; that is the choice they make. As you say, people have to be bilingual now when they graduate.
I have been teaching there for 30 years. Clearly, from year-to-year, there are more students who want to go to university outside Quebec City. That means not just Ontario and New Brunswick, but also Montreal. When students leave for three, four or five years, it is difficult to get them back.
Two years ago, in 2004, a study was done of 1,080 secondary IV, secondary V and Cegep students. They were asked how they saw their future. The answers of the 400 English-speaking students were then separated out, but the answers were the same for all respondents: the priority was employment. For anglophones, even in Quebec City, bilingualism was not an asset for finding a job. At least they are not convinced it is. However, the Quebec City Chamber of Commerce always says the opposite, but young people do not seem convinced of this. For their part, francophones associate their university education with the vitality of the community they go to study, as you just said. They wonder whether there will be a future for them in the place they go to study. However, they do have some reasons to come back to their community: friends, a job, family and so on. When a group of friends leave to go to university, they all stick together in their new community. So that is a problem. We do a lot of work with young people to try to organize certain activities to offset the situation, but of course it is a huge job.
Even newcomers help us out a great deal. They could actually replace those that have left. They want to become bilingual, but they also want to remain in Quebec City. We can succeed in keeping and integrating them into our community.