One of the major factors is language insecurity. Those who study in immersion schools speak French in class but English as soon as they enter the halls. When they finish secondary school, they say they cannot study in French because they are too embarrassed or that they feel they do not speak French well enough and therefore tend toward English-language educational institutions.
Let me give you an example. With Canadian Heritage's assistance, over the past two years we have been awarding scholarships to immersion students who continue studying in French at the college level. This year, the scholarships were awarded to students studying in French at university. Only two out of 25 scholarships were awarded for college studies; the others were awarded for university-level studies.
When we administered the scholarships, the individuals who won them were francophones whose fathers were anglophone and whose mothers were francophone, for example. They went to immersion schools but already spoke French. They won scholarships, but that was not what we were aiming for. However, it is all right that those individuals received scholarships.
When we say there are 400,000 immersion students, there are many underlying realities.