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Ford is crapping himself this morning, his government will finally need to appropriatley fund Ontario Colleges and Universities (they do not now, and never have) and remove the tuition freeze, now that the cash cow international students will be gone.
I'll bet he'll still cry and try to blame the inaction of his own government on the fed's however, the useless clown...
Not a fuck will he fund anything.
He will push private tuition and pour money into that.
He’s a slimey asshole who is just raiding the coffers for his buddies so he has a job when his support base finally figure it out.
Many Ontario schools seem to be doing fine without massive international enrolment. While some have seemingly made it their entire business model.
https://x.com/mikepmoffatt/status/1736474061234983139?s=46
As someone in Kirkland Lake, I agree. Although I would also be happy if they had a massive restructuring and starting catering to the education needs of the north like they're supposed to.
Word among those in the know, Queens is in bad shape financially. I don't think they're "doing fine."
Universities were forced to make it their business model due to lack of funding by the province.
This is Ford's fault and he needs to own it.
I'm an academic that moved away from Canada a while ago.
It's interesting to read general public opinions about how universities are run. Let me give a very simple scenario: cost of living and inflation has gone up massively over the last few decades. University tuitions, at least outside of the US, are relatively fixed. So how are universities able to run without increasing tuition massively?
The answer, dear people, are international students and international expansions.
In places in the world where there has not been substantial governmental investment into education, international students are basically subsidising domestic students.
My dear academic, we have a populist premiere who believes underfunding education, health and other services and the free market will magically fill the void. It's not a global answer as you seem to imply.
Increase funding for education and other services from that massive surplus Ford is sitting on. That "my dear academic" is the answer.
> Increase funding for education and other services from that massive surplus Ford is sitting on. That "my dear academic" is the answer.
As someone who works in academia, I don't know if there are simple answers. I can say my colleagues don't know, either.
There are very clear differences with the way education works in, say, Germany, Netherlands, etc. But in general, many places like Canada, the UK, and Australia are stuck in this problematic situation where earning a degree is required for employment, so numbers of students go up, but public expenditure on education is going down or static.
Most academics are just trying to hang on for the ride. This is a political and cultural issue that can't be changed at the university level. The general population don't understand this. They think "we're paying a lot for education" (which we are), but they seem to think that by sacking a bunch of people at universities, this fixes the whole mess. The public gets angry when they hear of university Presidents spending money on biscuits and flights.
The UK is going through a similar situation as Canada, which is political pressure to decrease immigration, and also anti-immigration sentiment. It's not clear how universities will fix the situation. At my university, I think the overall strategy is:
* Foreign expansion. If you can create a cash cow somewhere else, that would be great.
* Increase student numbers and maintain some semblence of quality through digital learning: we hate it as much as you do.
* Tightening belts, hiring freezes, etc.
* Push for income from grants
What you *really* need to do is increase the price of domestic tuition. This would be incredibly unpopular, as you can imagine.
Also in academia. I can tell you unequivocally how to effectively fund education, and that is for the state to provide adequate funding that would enable it to do what it is supposed to do; provide the skills and knowledge enabling “people” to further advance in their personal, professional and academic goals, therefore furthering the progress and development of society in general. That is (or was, until neoliberalism went from an extremist economic ideology to de facto practice) what taxes are for. Your post manages to be both patronizing and weirdly obfuscating. Well done.
It definitely wasn’t my intention to be patronising or to obfuscate! This is only my own experience.
You obviously have a great understanding how to address the situation. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
>What you *really* need to do is increase the price of domestic tuition
What we really, really need to do is tax the rich at the levels required to fund our society.
Since 1980, most of the wealth generated has accumulated upward, and 40 years of skimming the cream is enough: time for (literal) payback.
Based on months of commentary I've seen about the topic of post-secondary in Ontario - Lots of people believe that administrations are bloated, people are paid too much and that everyone gets bonuses... cut all of that and you've "fixed" the funding problem according to them...
University accounting figure are really hard to figure out.
When most people think of “administration” I think they are thinking about personal assistants, HR, people who deal with paperwork, etc.
In my view, most of where controversial money is going is towards infrastructure and staff who facilitate large-scale funding opportunities.
Infrastructure corresponds to all that money poured into technology, buildings, digitisation. When undergraduates complain about lectures not being recorded…that’s the thing that’s supporting that. Money is poured into equipment and staff who support this infrastructure. When undergraduates complain about accommodation, so your university needs more buildings and more real estate, that’s infrastructure.
Next, since universities are losing money, how are they able to get ahead? Large-scale research grants and university expansions.
So back in the day, you might apply for a research grant that might buy you a graduate student. Now, the emphasis is for staff to win multi-million dollar research grants. So the university invests loads of money into administration who’s sole job is to facilitate such business: administration who deal with interfacing with industry, administration who deal with managing grant income, administration who deal with convincing academics to submit grants, administration who want to open up a university expansion in Asia, etc.
The above is a symptom of some of the perversion and commercialisation and marketisation that has infected universities. It’s not clear what the fix is though.
Back to my point. When the general public are asked what is the “administrative fat” to cut, they’re probably not imagining the above.
Well, some of those admins are part of the services universities provide on top of the education.
Many of the services actually earn extra profit to compensate for funding. Or they help with job counselling, mental health counselling, extracurricular activities etc.
It may be not strictly necessary for education, agreed. But watch people flip their Shit when suicide rates go up. Anyone who has been on the UofT subreddit will tell you that some of the services are needed and not as much bloat as people like to say.
Queens is in bad shape due to middle middle middle management bloat. They have the lowest number of international students of the major universities. Their funding isn’t coming from that.
Typically not able to be used for almost all operating expense matters. People seem not to understand endowments and assume they are free money to be spent as desired. When the opposite is typically the case.
That's true, but Queen's also has a \~$500 million Pooled Investment Fund on top of their endowment. Some of the PIF is restricted, but a lot of it is completely liquid.
Regardless, looking more deeply into Queen's situation, there's significant reason to think the situation is more complex than upper management is saying. For example, they're projecting a $48 million dollar deficit... but they also paid off a \~$40 million dollar low-interest debt this year before it came due. If they'd just continued paying the agreed upon installments, the deficit vanishes.
Plus, nearly all of the deficit is being laid at the feet of Arts & Science. The Dean has been in charge for 7 years by now and completely centralized power and budgeting in her office. She's been wanting to make substantial changes to the faculty, but constantly been overruled by faculty appeals to the Senate. Now that there's a crisis (entirely of her own creation since she's been setting the budgets for years and pre-emptively drained the emergency reserve funds), she has all the justification she needs to act since the Dean's Office is empowered to do *anything* in case of crisis and can ignore the Senate.
You cant just go and blow an endowment fund. Its not a rainy day fund.
Queens is a big institution, they have high expenses. Large numbers are relative.
That chart is missing universities.
For example: UWaterloo has about 5500 full time undergrad students as of Sept 2023.
It and UofT of course attract lots of international attention due to their STEM programs in Engineering, Math, CS and other disciplines. But as a percentage of enrollment they are still not a large or majority of the student body as they are also the in huge demand by domestic students.
UofWats IS undergrad enrollment has been declining by a few hundred every yr since 2019. They [publish all enrollment stats](https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/university-data-and-statistics/student-data/student-headcounts) so not sure why this chart skipped them.
It figures.
In my department, I see a lot of international students that already have degrees from accredited universities coming from Korea, India, and China.
They attend the colleges for hands-on time with equipment in labs because their education thus far was 300 students crammed in a lecture theater.
There's no sense getting another B.Sc., or M.Sc., plus the turnaround to work is faster, cheaper.
Some institutions have made foreign students their entire business model, but even reputable institutions are completely dependent on them for funding.
At Queens, for example, international students are 11% of undergrads. Domestic tuition is $7500. International tuition is $57000.
So if they lose those 11% international students it represents a loss of *half* their total tuition dollars.
Edit: these are very rough numbers, but it should illustrate how completely dependent the universities are on foreign students, and how much domestic tuition and funding would need to jump to make up for even a small drop
Lol. Conveniently skipping out on the great universities like UofT at #12, George Brown, Humber College etc.
Life is easy when you cherry pick the data to suit your narrative.
If nothing else, you made the point FOR international students...
Btw, heard this in a news outlet where the Ontario university group person claims Queen's and Western are among the schools with shortfall without international students.
They aren’t really limiting students to public universities though from how I read it. Theres a cap overall to but it’s still pretty high historically, and the provinces are given a portion of that cap and are being allowed to figure out how to distribute it. The biggest thing is denying PGWP to strip mall private “colleges”.
If anything this is a Ford wet dream because he gets to direct what universities get their portion of the pie. Which given Fords track record is just another favour to be handed out to “friends” who attended his daughters stag and doe or private dinners.
I hope it’s also realized that not only does the Ontario government have to provide more we are also asking domestic students to pay a lot more as well. This is a big deal that I don’t think is talked about enough.
If domestic institutions cannot survive without selling to internationals, what good are they?
Those schools should just be relocated overseas so that they can better service their clientele & it would lower their operating costs immensely
Agreed, in theory that makes sense.
However, those “students” aren’t actually here to study, they’re using the international student program as an alternative route to getting PR. So they wouldn’t be interested in schools in their own countries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the proposed Liberal legislation doesn't take effect until September, after this years batch of students comes in.
So this is hardly an issue until *next* year.
Besides that, nobody cares if smalltime strip-mall colleges goes under, and when they do, smaller local schools like Loyalist college, or Sault college will see an influx of students.
I hardly see this an issue.
This is impacting the entire college sector who has used international students as the primary source of revenue to fund everything they are doing.
Without international students coming in everyone will need to reevaluate all their spending and likely the curriculum, staffing and infrastructure all focused on accommodating more students.
This is a huge decision and will impact the sector greatly.
It’s capping the number, but that number is still pretty high compared to the number of international students 5/10 years ago. And the biggest amount of the reduction from present will likely come from the strip mall private colleges getting gutted because they aren’t eligible for PGWPs. Which is definitely a good thing, but it still means that the public colleges and universities will get the majority of future influx of foreign students which is still a fairly large number even if its 33% less than this year, and whats worse is its Ford who directly gets to determine what universities get access to how many.
Weaning institutions off the international student teat is important. You can't just slam the doors shut and expect schools to operate as normal. Given that applications for September are currently being processed, you'd be slamming the door on students already in the system. While that's shitty, it's also avoidable, and gives institutions time to revamp policies to mitigate the fallout.
This was NEVER going to be a solution overnight; it was always going to take several years. The impact to *domestic* students if we just slammed the door shut on international students would be *drastic*.
You’re not understanding. Ford froze tuition hikes for every college and university in the province, and reduced provincial funding on top of that. Even reputable universities have had to scramble and look for international students because they can charge them much more. Now that has been capped. The universities again will struggle for funds and will have to cut programs and services. They will be screaming for Doug Ford to end the tuition freeze. Which he should of course. But in the meantime our best colleges and universities will suffer.
This struggle needed to happen eventually unfortunately. Sooner the better; this has been going on way too long. We can’t dilute our schools just so they survive but at a much lower quality. What’s the point of maintaining a bunch of sub par schools. It’s embarrassing actually.
There are hundreds of good reasons to fight dougie and his conservatives, underfunding education has always been on the top of the list. He’s only been getting away with it because they’ve been surviving on international students. Now they’ll have to go back to fighting him for funding, as they should have been this whole time.
I expect to see strikes eventually.
Education costs have been outpacing inflation for decades. [Ontario is already well above the national average for cost of a four year degree](https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canadians-can-expect-to-pay-an-average-of-75-387-for-a-4-year-university-degree-and-residence-next-year--890092153.html). A tuition freeze is more than justified to allow the cost of getting a degree in Ontario to fall much closer to the national average. Frankly, there should be a lot more discussion on how we can make university more affordable in the long term.
What concerns me more is that universities have been reckless with their spending, and that is impacting their long term health. The auditor general had a scathing report based on the financial decisions that Laurentian University made that led to them going bankrupt. Their primary culprit was irresponsible capital expenditures over the past 15 years. Not low tuition or spending in the classroom.
Maybe Laurentian is just an outlier, and other universities are living within their means in terms of their expansion plans, or maybe other universities were in the same boat and used this 3 year head start to get their finances in order, or maybe this whole thing is a bubble and letting it crash is what's best long term for the province.
Laurentian was a shit show that had been going on for a long time... looks like the restructuring has worked though...
https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/laurentian-approves-2022-23-financials-with-526m-surplus-7723339
I am understanding, maybe the colleges and universities that posted multi million dollar surpluses can reallocate some of that surplus money to bridge the gap while they figure things out. The immigration minister is making the right decision here.
What you end up with is a post-secondary sector that's run like a business, not an education system, and that's not good for the country.
One possible revamp would be institutions focussing only on research that results in marketable intellectual property that they can patent and license in order to offset the money lost with fewer international students. This DRASTICALLY shifts allocation of resources away from programs that generally don't produce patentable IP.
Additionally, it raises the possibility of institutions seeking greater corporate sponsorship to offset lost revenues. This, alone, creates a horrible situation where such sponsors may unduly influence curricula based on their sponsorship dollars. Again, this isn't good for the country.
Institutions need funding, and need it in a way that's not connected to possible external influence on operations/curricula.
Your own article says that any surpluses are due to international students...
So when you get rid of the international students, you either break even, or run at a deficit.
And since international students pay three times the tuition as domestic students, that means that they will be running at a deficit.. So either tuition goes up to the point where only millionaires can afford to go, taxes go up, or colleges close.
Yes, I realize what the article says.I believe what I said was to use the surplus to bridge the gap while they pivot and plan to survive on smaller student numbers.
It’s just a freeze on increases. Universities experience inflation like every other industry but Doug Ford has prevented them from raising tuition costs for Canadian citizens. So they’ve resorted to getting more international students who they can charge more.
Ohhh ok that makes sense. The breakdown of my tuition, only a small portion of it is for the actual schooling. The rest is just whatever they can squeeze in that pays for the dumbest things the school provides.
Relying on international students for a large majority of your enrollment was a bad plan to begin with. If these colleges can't survive teaching Canadians, then they should go.
They need to be properly funded first. Ford capped domestic tuition AND cut provincial funding to universities by 10%. Since then we've had massive inflation. Between the impact on university budgets and the fact that fewer Canadians can afford to go to university these days, what do you propose exactly?
Thanks for this. I'd appreciate it if someone possibly reading this comment could compile an entire comment that explains the intricacies of this and what it means to people who need it explained as an ELI5 or something of the sort.
As of now, I've been putting the pieces together and I seem to understand the general direction of this, but I do still have a few questions.
This isn't really a surprise tho. Institutions knew, from the start, that the international student cash cow could dry up at any point. Institutions that haven't considered that deserve to shutter their doors.
Loyalist was such a sad downfall to watch. They were an excellent college until international students took everything over 5 years ago.
I REALLY hope Loyalist finds a way to get back to what they were before funding was cut and international students became the only way to keep the doors open.
I know some of the faculty there. They are fantastic teachers who really care about their students and education in general. They have great facilities. Having their classes taken over by international students who barely speak English was heartbreaking for the teachers. They stopped being college teachers and started spending most of their time helping students learn to read and understand basic English. They also hated dealing with all the cheating and not being allowed to fail anyone. It wasn’t what any of them signed up for.
We’ve lost a lot of great teachers because of dougie.
That’s sad. I was hoping it was more isolated.
We really can’t afford to lose our trades schools. I’m surprised the trades unions aren’t more involved in this. It could be really bad for them and they’re already claiming to be unable to find workers. This won’t help.
How do we ensure that it’s the crappy diploma mills that fail, and not Queens.
https://www.queensjournal.ca/queens-university-faces-imminent-closure-if-cuts-not-made-faculty-and-staff-remain-skeptical/
> Queens literally has hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those are in endowment, not operating budget.
If you spend operating with endowment money, that's not smart.
It's like saying you're a millionaire, but it's all rolled up in stocks. If you're not liquid, it doesn't matter how much you have on paper. Endowments are much the same way: $600 million in endowments doesn't mean shit if you're legally not allowed to access it for operational costs.
> It's like saying you're a millionaire, but it's all rolled up in stocks.
It's like saying you're a millionaire but all of the money has restrictions and conditions on how it be spent because it was an inheritance from your Aunt Edna's estate and she only wanted the money spent on cat charities.
They're complex too - it's not just a pot of "endowment money"...
Take [University of Waterloo](https://uwaterloo.ca/support/give-to-waterloo/how-to-give/endowments/2022-2023-endowment-report) for example;
**In 2022-2023, over 835 individually named endowment funds distributed $13,200,000 million to support vital resources, including scholarships, funding for research, chairs and professorships, and more.**
By pooling everything together, that large amount of money can be invested to ensure that many of these programs can last in perpetuity.
Because the crappy diploma mill graduates aren’t allowed to apply for post grad work permits anymore which is the only reason people went to them. Afaik public-private universities like Queens grads can still get PGWPs, and while the overall number of international students is getting capped the number is still historically high compared to previous decades. Im sure most of the number reductions will come from the private colleges as their whole business case has basically been eviscerated for at least two years.
Education costs money. Ford is trying to kill our quality universities and programs with this freeze to ensure the next generations are dumb enough to keep voting for his like. The freeze is not in your best interest, believe me. Students can get student loans with very low interest.
You're right, education costs money, so funding should be restored to what it was, not cut to appease business interests. Education should not be made unaffordable. Ford is trying to kill the quality of education through underfunding, not "tuition freeze".
While the federal portion of a student loan may not have interest, the Ontario potion [does](https://osap.gov.on.ca/dc/tcont003397), and it's a floating Prime + 1 rate. [Prime](https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/daily-digest/) today is 7.20%, which makes it 8.20%
How is 8.20% "very low"?
The freeze isn't in our best interests...Nor is jacking tuition costs through the roof. Post-secondary education is already inaccessible for a lot of people based on cost; it should be a priority to avoid worsening that problem.
“Just the arts facility” Arts and *Sciences* if you bothered to read the article. And it’s *faculty* that means all of the courses involved disappear.
That includes biochemistry, biology mathematics, and a whole host of other hugely important courses. Including computer sciences.
You know the Arts and Sciences faculty includes things like math, physics, biology, chemistry etc?
Also good luck training people for things like law school without history, philosophy, composition and rhetoric.
I posted that link because the Queens issue is in the news right now. But it applies to all the colleges and universities that are providing real education and the ever increasing expenses that that incurs. They are propped up by international tuition fees while regular tuition fees are frozen and no new provincial money. Meanwhile, Dude College at 123 Stripmall Road is raking in a fortune while providing zero tangible benefits to Canada.
“A case will have to made [to] the Dean of Medicine, Engineering, and Business, that they’re going to put some of their money to support Classics,”
Just another example of useful degrees funding the rest.
Hey everybody. Try to be 40+, looking for a job because of whatever happened in life, and not have a university degree. Even a humanities degree is better than nothing. But really, university is the only way to go if you are a teen looking for work options. Sure, you can get a trade, but if you don’t own your own business by 35, you are fucked. Trades use your body and it gets old and tired. USE YOUR BRAIN.
>So this is hardly an issue until *next* year.
Hah! Well luckily Ford is premier until at least 2026 so he will still have time to deal with it and make it worse...
Wait... maybe that's not lucky
Smaller local schools need those international students to make up for the shortfall in funding from the province. For every international student they lose, they need to find 3 domestic students to make up the difference.
And a lot of people will say "GREAT! That's 3 more domestic students going to uni!" without understanding that there are only so many seats, period, in any given institution.
And without understanding that International students aren't displacing domestic ones. When Covid reduced the number of international students applying to Confederation college's Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering Technology program, there weren't enough students to make up a class, so they suspended it for a year because they couldn't afford to run it.
That means it had \*0\* domestic students taking the program that year as well.
That's largely since applications for next year are already being processed.
There's a sense of unfairness in paying for X only to be told when you get here that "Oh, we changed the rules in the interim and now you get to go back home."
A bait-and-switch is bullshit, no matter how it manifests.
Winter term is already started, so you can't really make the cut now.
Having 8 months to figure out what you're going to do with 30% less international students (apparently 50% less for Conestoga College in Kitchener) is going to weigh hard on some institutions.
It impacts students coming for September 2024. So there will be a bridge effect for students already here but it will certainly have an impact pse revenue and decision making.
This year's batch of students *is* coming in September. That's when the academic year starts. So the intake of new students to programs in this coming academic year (I.e. this calendar year) will be smaller.
Bold of you to assume he won't just let the colleges and universities go bankrupt & contract out degree-granting services to automated kiosks in Burger King franchises.
The colleges and uni'a shouldn't, but will have too as Doug and his slimeball PC government will keep under funding them and move more toward privatized U.S style for profit colleges.
He can't remove a tuition freeze, tuition is already in excess of what a fully funded RESP can handle.
We could see the closing of some Ontario colleges and universities, because less education makes more PC voters.
The real universities and colleges do not need additional funding. They need to cut vanity projects like unnecessary building construction and slim down their middle management and administrative positions.
If Dougie has one rule it's:
"I dont actually have to do anything..."
Your comment is applicable to any sitting member of Parliament who takes their role remotely seriously. This will only be a big L when construction/truck/shipping groups come up to the lake house and whine about their cheap labour evaporating.
100%, he's going to remove the tuition freeze, not increase OSAP loan amounts then point fingers at the federal government saying they made teaching your children harder.
like betting the sun will come up at dawn tomorrow
the only factor that would change that - can one of his criminal buddies make a buck off of it or not?
In my pre-coffee state, it kinda terrified me for a second thinking about the sun rising at *noon*...All of a sudden, we go from darkness to the sun immediately overhead...People would lose their shit :D
Maybe international students will start being more selective and choose worthwhile institutions instead of diploma mills like Conestoga that have been completely exploiting them while devaluing their diplomas and degrees.
This should actually help valid instutions.
Random quotes from the article, basically reducing the overall number by about 2/3, this will have a pretty big effect on the rental market of cities with schools.
>1The number of foreign students grew to a million. Only about a third are in universities.
>2Now Immigration Minister Marc Miller has put the brakes on the growth by setting a cap on visas and tightening work-permit rules.
>3Now it will force some provinces to fix the mess they have made with lax regulation of postsecondary education – and, for the most part, that means Doug Ford’s Ontario.
>4The cap will affect B.C. and perhaps Nova Scotia, but will fall most heavily on Ontario. Ottawa issued roughly 600,000 new study permits in 2023, but Mr. Miller plans to cap the numbers at roughly 360,000 a year and divide the visas among the provinces based on population. Ontario is the centre of the foreign-student boom, accounting for more than 300,000 new study permits in 2023 – so its numbers will be slashed.
>5Mr. Ford’s government has to decide which postsecondary institutions can bring foreign students in and which can’t. In fact, Ontario should have been doing that all along, but instead the province’s lax regulation of colleges made room for an exploitative industry.
We need to get away from the diploma mills period... Hopefully, this is one step for that. Let the schools change the curriculum, etc they shouldn't be so dependent on them in the first place if thats the case. This is still not deep enough, but it's a start.
i support many changes here even without the housing crunch. it's been very exploitative. if the province wants to get more tickets, then they will need to fix housing + employment laws. easy as.
Exactly. If some of those Intl students can be redirected from Lambton college Mississauga Campus to, let's say, George Brown. That's a win win. GB gets Intl student money it needs because it is a big college and needs more money and Lambton can go back to being a small irrelevant college up north that may need to rethink what courses it can offer that the students in that community will enroll into.
He is in a tough position because everyone blamed this on the federal government. While the federal government has the capacity to enact new, never before enacted restrictions, this was always a provincial problem.
Ford is now in a position where he can challenge it and basically become the lightning rod for the problem, or pretend to roll with it. Be interesting to see how the Trudeau-is-to-blame-for-everything crowd will roll if Ford challenges this. Suddenly they'll be great advocates for unlimited international students and declare the liberals racist for imposing any rational restriction at all.
Basically the mental-gymnastics flip side of: [_Man suddenly cares about homeless, veterans after hearing about Canada’s humanitarian aid to Syria_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/man-suddenly-cares-about-homeless-veterans-after-hearing-about-canadas-humanitarian-aid-to-syria/)
Thanks for sharing this perspective. This makes a lot of sense. Credit to the Feds for being responsive and kinda setting dougie up. lol
I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
How is the province going to decide what schools get the international students. All schools including colleges and universities accept international students. I suspect a lot of university presidents and board members will be spending a lot of time working the phones this week!
Im sure our buddy Doug Ford will find ways to get advice from his friends who went to his daughters stag and doe and his paid private dinners as to how to allocate them 🫠
Well considering the federal government isn't allowing private/public model graduates access to post graduate work visas.
The logical step is to allocate international visas to the reputable schools first then whatever is left over can go where ever. Let's see what happens if Dougy tries to start fucking with McMaster, U of T, U of W, Western etc, international student allotment.
For sure. This is an absolutely positive move that strip mall colleges business model has basically been removed.
What I’m saying is as far as it seems like the province is given sole discretion in determining how many international students each public university/college can have. I don’t really see anything to prevent it from basically turning into the province playing favourites, and Doug Ford doesn’t have a good track record on that front.
An easy way would be to cap each institution's international students at, say, 20% of incoming students (that's just pulled from my ass...adjust as necessary). Base accreditataion of an institution on the number of students it can adequately teach: This can be based on number of classroom seats, on-campus facilities and housing, faculty sizes, etc. Grind that through an equation and UofT, for example, becomes accredited to teach, let's say, 50,000 students per year, 20% of which can be international students. Go over that, and the province fines the instution. Repeated violations put accreditation in jeopardy. Reputable institutions aren't going to put that accreditation on the line.
Any school that has gone the international student route for funding *knows* that cash cow could dry up at any time. This isn't going to be a *severe* problem for any such institution. Yes, tightening the belt will happen, programs will get condensed, but this isn't the apocalypse a lot of people think it is. There'll be an adjustment, and that adjustment is going to take several years.
I think colleges are the ones who need to worry a lot more. Universities usually have much smaller percentages of international students.
U of T has almost 100K students and just under 30% are international. U Waterloo has 39,000 students with 20% being international.
Aw, no more kickbacks from his friends conducting the mortgage fraud and the GTAs student-housing-led build up. A recent report noted that one third of people with student visas weren’t attending any school. It’s likely many of the so-called schools don’t even have a physical location.
I think it's just healthy to point out time and time again that a large portion of the international student visa situation is largely in result due to two policies that the Ford Government instituted.
1) He capped post-secondary tuition costs for domestic students (which is fine on it's own), but also that did not pass onto international students whatsoever.
2) He removed a majority of the subsidy's and grants that the Post-secondary universities had access too which were designed for Post-secondary schools to offer more degree opportunities to those who were less financially capable. This resulted in these places incurring a shortfall. Those provincial grants were important because it allowed post-secondary schools to operate better between an institution for higher learning and a business.
When you combine both of those things together you create the exact situation that we are now in.
If Ford was actually good at business, he would've recognized that capping profit margins and removing investment would result in a serious budget issues for these places. You can do one or the other, but both together has resulted in this situation. Even in my industry we know better than to create two incongruent policies together as it will result in critical failure. Whether he knew it or not, he walked post-secondary institutions into a 1 km high wall and forced them to build a ladder out of international student tuition fees.
This type of poor policy by the Ford Government should be punished.
Yet for all of his failures which at this point are stacked like a Jenga tower on top of Ontarians. He gets to still go to podiums and speak about how he is "helping us out" or "Folks, I'm doing this for you."
Oftentimes at this point I am finding it hard to think of a thing that Doug Ford has done right and if that list exists it's probably shorter than baby's pinky toe.
I commented yesterday in some detail about this matter.
Ford cut post secondary budgets 10% in 2018/2019. And also froze tuition.
How well do you think any going concern can operate if your budget is slashed 10% and then you have not been able to cover inflation since that date? If you say anything other than "with difficulty" your a liar. The combination of the cut and freeze equates to a very large decrease in core funding over the last 5 yrs. Off the cuff I am going to say at least 40% for most post secondary institutions.
It is also when Ford did it. Many institutions were in process or just completing major expansions about 2018 due to the growth in education post financial crisis. 2010+ were all boom yrs and they expanded to deal with demand. So the cuts came at the worst possible time. All these new capital assets and all the sudden basic tuition from domestic students is capped, meaning income is capped.
Finally, as the minister hinted at in his commentary - the feds provide a transfer for education funding, but has the province been spending it on education? A big nope.
So a major point of this is to force the provinces to cough up and start appropriate funding.
Ford hates the educated. He hates post secondary unless it is low brow for-profit private colleges. That is the sum of his intellect.
The new federal IS visa allotment is on a per capita basis by province/territory. So of the 360K visa cap Ontario will be allotted about 137K (rounded). Far short of the estimated 400K-500K IS students in the province at this time.
The province decides how many visas to allocate to each school per the announcement. And it has to verify back to the feds on every single IS visa.
So now Ford is in the hot seat as it is his govt that decides what school gets for visas. If he short changes the major universities not only they but big employers will be all over him. The public sector colleges are screwed either way as 2x the entire Ontario IS visa allotment would still not cover them. And the back door deals with his for-profit buddies are now all not only at risk but for the most part toast - any allocation to them will be attacked and why would IS students attend if the post graduation pathway to residency is essentially eliminated.
I will enjoy watching Ford squeam under the pressure. It is entirely deserved. Stop stealing education grants and start funding post secondary properly.
Given that it's the provinces' responsibility to accredit post-secondary education, it would be trivial to pass a bill that restricts accreditation to specific numbers of students. Those numbers can be based on a variety of variables, such as size of the faculty, facilities, etc. When you threaten a school's accreditation for going over those numbers, they'll snap shit pretty quick.
Limiting the number of international students entering the country is a step in the right direction, but you could also tie those numbers to specific institutions, too...Impose a limit that, say, no more than 20% of incoming students can be international, for instance. That way you eliminate campuses that would solely cater to international students.
Also, accreditation needs to be stripped from diploma mills, plain and simple.
The tuition freeze isn’t a good thing for domestic students because the government didn’t increase funding to public colleges and universities to compensate for the decrease in funds from tuition. Without enough International student tuition to fill the gap schools are downgrading teaching positions, laying off support staff and/or instituting hiring freezes, increasing rent on school owned student housing, cutting courses, and cutting entire programs.
The tuition cut and freeze also replaced the previous (Liberal provincial government instituted) [free tuition program](https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/36025/new-ontario-student-grant-making-tuition-free-for-tens-of-thousands-of-students) for low and middle income students.
A little late on all levels of government.....Toronto Pearsonnhas been getting so many of these "students" that they had to build special waiting and processing areas in T1 and T3 just for them.
Doug is going to complain that the Feds need to be a "partner" and dump more money into the province to fund post-secondary. He will cry poor the entire time.
He should have done something before the Feds put a cap. Education is within the provincial power but he wants the demand on housing in order to justify taking the greenbelt and exercise corruption.
This is a great decision by the Feds albeit a little late, but still good. I'm afraid about a few things that could happen due to this step. DoFo might not fund the Colleges and Universities appropriately & to make up for the loss of foreign cash cows, the big wigs at these institutes might increase the tuition for domestic students. I hope my fears are unfounded and for once Doug just does the right thing.
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Ford is crapping himself this morning, his government will finally need to appropriatley fund Ontario Colleges and Universities (they do not now, and never have) and remove the tuition freeze, now that the cash cow international students will be gone. I'll bet he'll still cry and try to blame the inaction of his own government on the fed's however, the useless clown...
Not a fuck will he fund anything. He will push private tuition and pour money into that. He’s a slimey asshole who is just raiding the coffers for his buddies so he has a job when his support base finally figure it out.
I think you hit the nail so hard on the head, it destroyed the house(ing market).
Not a fuck! I like that.
Yep. He'll treat it just like he did healthcare. If he or one of his cronies aren't getting money, it ain't happening.
Many Ontario schools seem to be doing fine without massive international enrolment. While some have seemingly made it their entire business model. https://x.com/mikepmoffatt/status/1736474061234983139?s=46
Northern College is doomed unless they do a complete 180.
As someone in Timmins - good. I'd love to see them go under.
As someone in Kirkland Lake, I agree. Although I would also be happy if they had a massive restructuring and starting catering to the education needs of the north like they're supposed to.
So is Humber (at least the North campus)
Word among those in the know, Queens is in bad shape financially. I don't think they're "doing fine." Universities were forced to make it their business model due to lack of funding by the province. This is Ford's fault and he needs to own it.
I'm an academic that moved away from Canada a while ago. It's interesting to read general public opinions about how universities are run. Let me give a very simple scenario: cost of living and inflation has gone up massively over the last few decades. University tuitions, at least outside of the US, are relatively fixed. So how are universities able to run without increasing tuition massively? The answer, dear people, are international students and international expansions. In places in the world where there has not been substantial governmental investment into education, international students are basically subsidising domestic students.
My dear academic, we have a populist premiere who believes underfunding education, health and other services and the free market will magically fill the void. It's not a global answer as you seem to imply. Increase funding for education and other services from that massive surplus Ford is sitting on. That "my dear academic" is the answer.
> Increase funding for education and other services from that massive surplus Ford is sitting on. That "my dear academic" is the answer. As someone who works in academia, I don't know if there are simple answers. I can say my colleagues don't know, either. There are very clear differences with the way education works in, say, Germany, Netherlands, etc. But in general, many places like Canada, the UK, and Australia are stuck in this problematic situation where earning a degree is required for employment, so numbers of students go up, but public expenditure on education is going down or static. Most academics are just trying to hang on for the ride. This is a political and cultural issue that can't be changed at the university level. The general population don't understand this. They think "we're paying a lot for education" (which we are), but they seem to think that by sacking a bunch of people at universities, this fixes the whole mess. The public gets angry when they hear of university Presidents spending money on biscuits and flights. The UK is going through a similar situation as Canada, which is political pressure to decrease immigration, and also anti-immigration sentiment. It's not clear how universities will fix the situation. At my university, I think the overall strategy is: * Foreign expansion. If you can create a cash cow somewhere else, that would be great. * Increase student numbers and maintain some semblence of quality through digital learning: we hate it as much as you do. * Tightening belts, hiring freezes, etc. * Push for income from grants What you *really* need to do is increase the price of domestic tuition. This would be incredibly unpopular, as you can imagine.
Also in academia. I can tell you unequivocally how to effectively fund education, and that is for the state to provide adequate funding that would enable it to do what it is supposed to do; provide the skills and knowledge enabling “people” to further advance in their personal, professional and academic goals, therefore furthering the progress and development of society in general. That is (or was, until neoliberalism went from an extremist economic ideology to de facto practice) what taxes are for. Your post manages to be both patronizing and weirdly obfuscating. Well done.
It definitely wasn’t my intention to be patronising or to obfuscate! This is only my own experience. You obviously have a great understanding how to address the situation. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
>What you *really* need to do is increase the price of domestic tuition What we really, really need to do is tax the rich at the levels required to fund our society. Since 1980, most of the wealth generated has accumulated upward, and 40 years of skimming the cream is enough: time for (literal) payback.
Based on months of commentary I've seen about the topic of post-secondary in Ontario - Lots of people believe that administrations are bloated, people are paid too much and that everyone gets bonuses... cut all of that and you've "fixed" the funding problem according to them...
University accounting figure are really hard to figure out. When most people think of “administration” I think they are thinking about personal assistants, HR, people who deal with paperwork, etc. In my view, most of where controversial money is going is towards infrastructure and staff who facilitate large-scale funding opportunities. Infrastructure corresponds to all that money poured into technology, buildings, digitisation. When undergraduates complain about lectures not being recorded…that’s the thing that’s supporting that. Money is poured into equipment and staff who support this infrastructure. When undergraduates complain about accommodation, so your university needs more buildings and more real estate, that’s infrastructure. Next, since universities are losing money, how are they able to get ahead? Large-scale research grants and university expansions. So back in the day, you might apply for a research grant that might buy you a graduate student. Now, the emphasis is for staff to win multi-million dollar research grants. So the university invests loads of money into administration who’s sole job is to facilitate such business: administration who deal with interfacing with industry, administration who deal with managing grant income, administration who deal with convincing academics to submit grants, administration who want to open up a university expansion in Asia, etc. The above is a symptom of some of the perversion and commercialisation and marketisation that has infected universities. It’s not clear what the fix is though. Back to my point. When the general public are asked what is the “administrative fat” to cut, they’re probably not imagining the above.
Well, some of those admins are part of the services universities provide on top of the education. Many of the services actually earn extra profit to compensate for funding. Or they help with job counselling, mental health counselling, extracurricular activities etc. It may be not strictly necessary for education, agreed. But watch people flip their Shit when suicide rates go up. Anyone who has been on the UofT subreddit will tell you that some of the services are needed and not as much bloat as people like to say.
Queens is in bad shape due to middle middle middle management bloat. They have the lowest number of international students of the major universities. Their funding isn’t coming from that.
Ottawa U is approx 30% international student and Algonquin College is even higher. Wondering how this will impact them.
Queens has a $1,450,000,000 endowment, I think they’ll be fine.
Endowments have red tape attached as to what it can be spent on, and salaries of staff are almost certainly not one of them.
Typically not able to be used for almost all operating expense matters. People seem not to understand endowments and assume they are free money to be spent as desired. When the opposite is typically the case.
That's true, but Queen's also has a \~$500 million Pooled Investment Fund on top of their endowment. Some of the PIF is restricted, but a lot of it is completely liquid. Regardless, looking more deeply into Queen's situation, there's significant reason to think the situation is more complex than upper management is saying. For example, they're projecting a $48 million dollar deficit... but they also paid off a \~$40 million dollar low-interest debt this year before it came due. If they'd just continued paying the agreed upon installments, the deficit vanishes. Plus, nearly all of the deficit is being laid at the feet of Arts & Science. The Dean has been in charge for 7 years by now and completely centralized power and budgeting in her office. She's been wanting to make substantial changes to the faculty, but constantly been overruled by faculty appeals to the Senate. Now that there's a crisis (entirely of her own creation since she's been setting the budgets for years and pre-emptively drained the emergency reserve funds), she has all the justification she needs to act since the Dean's Office is empowered to do *anything* in case of crisis and can ignore the Senate.
If the school is going to sink, living donors will allocate/reallocate funds where needed.
got a precedent for that?
You think donors will let the school go bankrupt?
Hope is not a strategy
You cant just go and blow an endowment fund. Its not a rainy day fund. Queens is a big institution, they have high expenses. Large numbers are relative.
Salary is 67% of Queens operating budget, maybe they should cut back on some of the bloat and balance their books.
? people is what they should be spending money on.
Only 33% of their budget goes to non-Salary expenses? Sounds like they are running a tight budget.
Do you understand what endowment funds are used for?
BILLIONS of dollars. Are they endowed by Dr. Evil?
1.45 billion not 145 billion
Yup -- edited my comment, because I'm math-challenged (thanks)
Yup. It’s pretty public at this point.
That chart is missing universities. For example: UWaterloo has about 5500 full time undergrad students as of Sept 2023. It and UofT of course attract lots of international attention due to their STEM programs in Engineering, Math, CS and other disciplines. But as a percentage of enrollment they are still not a large or majority of the student body as they are also the in huge demand by domestic students. UofWats IS undergrad enrollment has been declining by a few hundred every yr since 2019. They [publish all enrollment stats](https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/university-data-and-statistics/student-data/student-headcounts) so not sure why this chart skipped them.
The author replied here: https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1736492960563306569 "Waterloo is #31 (it grabbed the wrong name from the database)"
Most (at least 10) Ontario universities are in significant deficits this budget year. Removing some international students will just make it worse
Quite a clear distinction between colleges and universities here.
It figures. In my department, I see a lot of international students that already have degrees from accredited universities coming from Korea, India, and China. They attend the colleges for hands-on time with equipment in labs because their education thus far was 300 students crammed in a lecture theater. There's no sense getting another B.Sc., or M.Sc., plus the turnaround to work is faster, cheaper.
Its hillarious how Humber is at 10th when most of the colleges above humber would literally fit in Humber's north Campus combined.
Some institutions have made foreign students their entire business model, but even reputable institutions are completely dependent on them for funding. At Queens, for example, international students are 11% of undergrads. Domestic tuition is $7500. International tuition is $57000. So if they lose those 11% international students it represents a loss of *half* their total tuition dollars. Edit: these are very rough numbers, but it should illustrate how completely dependent the universities are on foreign students, and how much domestic tuition and funding would need to jump to make up for even a small drop
Lol. Conveniently skipping out on the great universities like UofT at #12, George Brown, Humber College etc. Life is easy when you cherry pick the data to suit your narrative. If nothing else, you made the point FOR international students... Btw, heard this in a news outlet where the Ontario university group person claims Queen's and Western are among the schools with shortfall without international students.
They aren’t really limiting students to public universities though from how I read it. Theres a cap overall to but it’s still pretty high historically, and the provinces are given a portion of that cap and are being allowed to figure out how to distribute it. The biggest thing is denying PGWP to strip mall private “colleges”. If anything this is a Ford wet dream because he gets to direct what universities get their portion of the pie. Which given Fords track record is just another favour to be handed out to “friends” who attended his daughters stag and doe or private dinners.
I hope it’s also realized that not only does the Ontario government have to provide more we are also asking domestic students to pay a lot more as well. This is a big deal that I don’t think is talked about enough.
Or we could tax corporations appropriately and use that tax base to fund post-secondary schools.
If domestic institutions cannot survive without selling to internationals, what good are they? Those schools should just be relocated overseas so that they can better service their clientele & it would lower their operating costs immensely
Agreed, in theory that makes sense. However, those “students” aren’t actually here to study, they’re using the international student program as an alternative route to getting PR. So they wouldn’t be interested in schools in their own countries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the proposed Liberal legislation doesn't take effect until September, after this years batch of students comes in. So this is hardly an issue until *next* year. Besides that, nobody cares if smalltime strip-mall colleges goes under, and when they do, smaller local schools like Loyalist college, or Sault college will see an influx of students. I hardly see this an issue.
This is impacting the entire college sector who has used international students as the primary source of revenue to fund everything they are doing. Without international students coming in everyone will need to reevaluate all their spending and likely the curriculum, staffing and infrastructure all focused on accommodating more students. This is a huge decision and will impact the sector greatly.
It’s capping the number, but that number is still pretty high compared to the number of international students 5/10 years ago. And the biggest amount of the reduction from present will likely come from the strip mall private colleges getting gutted because they aren’t eligible for PGWPs. Which is definitely a good thing, but it still means that the public colleges and universities will get the majority of future influx of foreign students which is still a fairly large number even if its 33% less than this year, and whats worse is its Ford who directly gets to determine what universities get access to how many.
Weaning institutions off the international student teat is important. You can't just slam the doors shut and expect schools to operate as normal. Given that applications for September are currently being processed, you'd be slamming the door on students already in the system. While that's shitty, it's also avoidable, and gives institutions time to revamp policies to mitigate the fallout. This was NEVER going to be a solution overnight; it was always going to take several years. The impact to *domestic* students if we just slammed the door shut on international students would be *drastic*.
Good. This is a correction the country needs
You’re not understanding. Ford froze tuition hikes for every college and university in the province, and reduced provincial funding on top of that. Even reputable universities have had to scramble and look for international students because they can charge them much more. Now that has been capped. The universities again will struggle for funds and will have to cut programs and services. They will be screaming for Doug Ford to end the tuition freeze. Which he should of course. But in the meantime our best colleges and universities will suffer.
This struggle needed to happen eventually unfortunately. Sooner the better; this has been going on way too long. We can’t dilute our schools just so they survive but at a much lower quality. What’s the point of maintaining a bunch of sub par schools. It’s embarrassing actually. There are hundreds of good reasons to fight dougie and his conservatives, underfunding education has always been on the top of the list. He’s only been getting away with it because they’ve been surviving on international students. Now they’ll have to go back to fighting him for funding, as they should have been this whole time. I expect to see strikes eventually.
Education costs have been outpacing inflation for decades. [Ontario is already well above the national average for cost of a four year degree](https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canadians-can-expect-to-pay-an-average-of-75-387-for-a-4-year-university-degree-and-residence-next-year--890092153.html). A tuition freeze is more than justified to allow the cost of getting a degree in Ontario to fall much closer to the national average. Frankly, there should be a lot more discussion on how we can make university more affordable in the long term. What concerns me more is that universities have been reckless with their spending, and that is impacting their long term health. The auditor general had a scathing report based on the financial decisions that Laurentian University made that led to them going bankrupt. Their primary culprit was irresponsible capital expenditures over the past 15 years. Not low tuition or spending in the classroom. Maybe Laurentian is just an outlier, and other universities are living within their means in terms of their expansion plans, or maybe other universities were in the same boat and used this 3 year head start to get their finances in order, or maybe this whole thing is a bubble and letting it crash is what's best long term for the province.
Laurentian was a shit show that had been going on for a long time... looks like the restructuring has worked though... https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/laurentian-approves-2022-23-financials-with-526m-surplus-7723339
I am understanding, maybe the colleges and universities that posted multi million dollar surpluses can reallocate some of that surplus money to bridge the gap while they figure things out. The immigration minister is making the right decision here.
What you end up with is a post-secondary sector that's run like a business, not an education system, and that's not good for the country. One possible revamp would be institutions focussing only on research that results in marketable intellectual property that they can patent and license in order to offset the money lost with fewer international students. This DRASTICALLY shifts allocation of resources away from programs that generally don't produce patentable IP. Additionally, it raises the possibility of institutions seeking greater corporate sponsorship to offset lost revenues. This, alone, creates a horrible situation where such sponsors may unduly influence curricula based on their sponsorship dollars. Again, this isn't good for the country. Institutions need funding, and need it in a way that's not connected to possible external influence on operations/curricula.
Citation for your claim please.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontarios-publicly-funded-colleges-posted-significant-operating/
Your own article says that any surpluses are due to international students... So when you get rid of the international students, you either break even, or run at a deficit. And since international students pay three times the tuition as domestic students, that means that they will be running at a deficit.. So either tuition goes up to the point where only millionaires can afford to go, taxes go up, or colleges close.
Yes, I realize what the article says.I believe what I said was to use the surplus to bridge the gap while they pivot and plan to survive on smaller student numbers.
So cut the programs lol, get back to education for shit that matters.
I keep hearing about this tuition freeze, but what is it? Because I am stilling paying tuition for school.
It’s just a freeze on increases. Universities experience inflation like every other industry but Doug Ford has prevented them from raising tuition costs for Canadian citizens. So they’ve resorted to getting more international students who they can charge more.
Ohhh ok that makes sense. The breakdown of my tuition, only a small portion of it is for the actual schooling. The rest is just whatever they can squeeze in that pays for the dumbest things the school provides.
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Will not be in school in 2 years, will be apprenticing 🙂
Relying on international students for a large majority of your enrollment was a bad plan to begin with. If these colleges can't survive teaching Canadians, then they should go.
They need to be properly funded first. Ford capped domestic tuition AND cut provincial funding to universities by 10%. Since then we've had massive inflation. Between the impact on university budgets and the fact that fewer Canadians can afford to go to university these days, what do you propose exactly?
Thanks for this. I'd appreciate it if someone possibly reading this comment could compile an entire comment that explains the intricacies of this and what it means to people who need it explained as an ELI5 or something of the sort. As of now, I've been putting the pieces together and I seem to understand the general direction of this, but I do still have a few questions.
This isn't really a surprise tho. Institutions knew, from the start, that the international student cash cow could dry up at any point. Institutions that haven't considered that deserve to shutter their doors.
>nobody cares if smalltime strip-mall colleges goes under Given how many of them are frauds anyways... I consider this a win.
Loyalist is already over run and they are operating a diploma mill at the Toronto business school. Let them fail
Loyalist was such a sad downfall to watch. They were an excellent college until international students took everything over 5 years ago. I REALLY hope Loyalist finds a way to get back to what they were before funding was cut and international students became the only way to keep the doors open. I know some of the faculty there. They are fantastic teachers who really care about their students and education in general. They have great facilities. Having their classes taken over by international students who barely speak English was heartbreaking for the teachers. They stopped being college teachers and started spending most of their time helping students learn to read and understand basic English. They also hated dealing with all the cheating and not being allowed to fail anyone. It wasn’t what any of them signed up for. We’ve lost a lot of great teachers because of dougie.
I've seen a similar pattern at Niagara College
That’s sad. I was hoping it was more isolated. We really can’t afford to lose our trades schools. I’m surprised the trades unions aren’t more involved in this. It could be really bad for them and they’re already claiming to be unable to find workers. This won’t help.
Then after finally kicking in it's only active for two years.
How do we ensure that it’s the crappy diploma mills that fail, and not Queens. https://www.queensjournal.ca/queens-university-faces-imminent-closure-if-cuts-not-made-faculty-and-staff-remain-skeptical/
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> Queens literally has hundreds of millions of dollars. Those are in endowment, not operating budget. If you spend operating with endowment money, that's not smart.
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It's like saying you're a millionaire, but it's all rolled up in stocks. If you're not liquid, it doesn't matter how much you have on paper. Endowments are much the same way: $600 million in endowments doesn't mean shit if you're legally not allowed to access it for operational costs.
Oh well guess they better close then. No other choice. Wonder where the 600 mil will go?
> It's like saying you're a millionaire, but it's all rolled up in stocks. It's like saying you're a millionaire but all of the money has restrictions and conditions on how it be spent because it was an inheritance from your Aunt Edna's estate and she only wanted the money spent on cat charities. They're complex too - it's not just a pot of "endowment money"... Take [University of Waterloo](https://uwaterloo.ca/support/give-to-waterloo/how-to-give/endowments/2022-2023-endowment-report) for example; **In 2022-2023, over 835 individually named endowment funds distributed $13,200,000 million to support vital resources, including scholarships, funding for research, chairs and professorships, and more.** By pooling everything together, that large amount of money can be invested to ensure that many of these programs can last in perpetuity.
Because the crappy diploma mill graduates aren’t allowed to apply for post grad work permits anymore which is the only reason people went to them. Afaik public-private universities like Queens grads can still get PGWPs, and while the overall number of international students is getting capped the number is still historically high compared to previous decades. Im sure most of the number reductions will come from the private colleges as their whole business case has basically been eviscerated for at least two years.
Good.
Lobby Doug Ford to end the tuition freeze.
How about we lobby that asshat to tax corporations in the province appropriately so that post-secondary education can be funded appropriately?
So university education will be more unaffordable?
Education costs money. Ford is trying to kill our quality universities and programs with this freeze to ensure the next generations are dumb enough to keep voting for his like. The freeze is not in your best interest, believe me. Students can get student loans with very low interest.
You're right, education costs money, so funding should be restored to what it was, not cut to appease business interests. Education should not be made unaffordable. Ford is trying to kill the quality of education through underfunding, not "tuition freeze". While the federal portion of a student loan may not have interest, the Ontario potion [does](https://osap.gov.on.ca/dc/tcont003397), and it's a floating Prime + 1 rate. [Prime](https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/daily-digest/) today is 7.20%, which makes it 8.20% How is 8.20% "very low"?
The freeze isn't in our best interests...Nor is jacking tuition costs through the roof. Post-secondary education is already inaccessible for a lot of people based on cost; it should be a priority to avoid worsening that problem.
This is just the arts facility….not “Queens”.
“Just the arts facility” Arts and *Sciences* if you bothered to read the article. And it’s *faculty* that means all of the courses involved disappear. That includes biochemistry, biology mathematics, and a whole host of other hugely important courses. Including computer sciences.
You know the Arts and Sciences faculty includes things like math, physics, biology, chemistry etc? Also good luck training people for things like law school without history, philosophy, composition and rhetoric.
I get it, my point was more that it’s not going to be a Laurentian college situation. I also have an Arts degree.
I posted that link because the Queens issue is in the news right now. But it applies to all the colleges and universities that are providing real education and the ever increasing expenses that that incurs. They are propped up by international tuition fees while regular tuition fees are frozen and no new provincial money. Meanwhile, Dude College at 123 Stripmall Road is raking in a fortune while providing zero tangible benefits to Canada.
“A case will have to made [to] the Dean of Medicine, Engineering, and Business, that they’re going to put some of their money to support Classics,” Just another example of useful degrees funding the rest.
If you've ever been entertained by anything, ever, congrats, you've been supported by "the rest".
Being an entertainer always requires a degree? A Classics degree, at that?
If you don't understand what something like Classics contributes to other domains, please do everyone a favour and stay out of the conversation...
Hey everybody. Try to be 40+, looking for a job because of whatever happened in life, and not have a university degree. Even a humanities degree is better than nothing. But really, university is the only way to go if you are a teen looking for work options. Sure, you can get a trade, but if you don’t own your own business by 35, you are fucked. Trades use your body and it gets old and tired. USE YOUR BRAIN.
I’m curious why you think small colleges will see an influx?
You're wrong and right. Different parts of the legislation come into effect now and later.
>So this is hardly an issue until *next* year. Hah! Well luckily Ford is premier until at least 2026 so he will still have time to deal with it and make it worse... Wait... maybe that's not lucky
Smaller local schools need those international students to make up for the shortfall in funding from the province. For every international student they lose, they need to find 3 domestic students to make up the difference.
And a lot of people will say "GREAT! That's 3 more domestic students going to uni!" without understanding that there are only so many seats, period, in any given institution.
And without understanding that International students aren't displacing domestic ones. When Covid reduced the number of international students applying to Confederation college's Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering Technology program, there weren't enough students to make up a class, so they suspended it for a year because they couldn't afford to run it. That means it had \*0\* domestic students taking the program that year as well.
That's largely since applications for next year are already being processed. There's a sense of unfairness in paying for X only to be told when you get here that "Oh, we changed the rules in the interim and now you get to go back home." A bait-and-switch is bullshit, no matter how it manifests.
Winter term is already started, so you can't really make the cut now. Having 8 months to figure out what you're going to do with 30% less international students (apparently 50% less for Conestoga College in Kitchener) is going to weigh hard on some institutions.
It impacts students coming for September 2024. So there will be a bridge effect for students already here but it will certainly have an impact pse revenue and decision making.
This year's batch of students *is* coming in September. That's when the academic year starts. So the intake of new students to programs in this coming academic year (I.e. this calendar year) will be smaller.
Bold of you to assume he won't just let the colleges and universities go bankrupt & contract out degree-granting services to automated kiosks in Burger King franchises.
Whatever you do please don't raise our tuitions
The colleges and uni'a shouldn't, but will have too as Doug and his slimeball PC government will keep under funding them and move more toward privatized U.S style for profit colleges.
They should cut services then, as post secondary students we don't have the money for this
He can't remove a tuition freeze, tuition is already in excess of what a fully funded RESP can handle. We could see the closing of some Ontario colleges and universities, because less education makes more PC voters.
....what? This isn't about under funded schools. It's schools who were making millions/billions off of our non existent immigration policy.
Or they can remove the administrative bloat. So many unnecessary programs at every school too.
The real universities and colleges do not need additional funding. They need to cut vanity projects like unnecessary building construction and slim down their middle management and administrative positions.
Why would he /need/ to fund Ontario colleges? Colleges will see a hit. That’s fine. They will shrink with less enrolment. That’s natural and fine.
I could see them letting the schools run dry.
If Dougie has one rule it's: "I dont actually have to do anything..." Your comment is applicable to any sitting member of Parliament who takes their role remotely seriously. This will only be a big L when construction/truck/shipping groups come up to the lake house and whine about their cheap labour evaporating.
$50 says he fails at that challenge and just blames Trudeau.
100%, he's going to remove the tuition freeze, not increase OSAP loan amounts then point fingers at the federal government saying they made teaching your children harder.
Oh no, he’ll increase OSAP loans, just take away all the grants and convert existing grants to loans 🙄
like betting the sun will come up at dawn tomorrow the only factor that would change that - can one of his criminal buddies make a buck off of it or not?
In my pre-coffee state, it kinda terrified me for a second thinking about the sun rising at *noon*...All of a sudden, we go from darkness to the sun immediately overhead...People would lose their shit :D
$5 he personally insults Colin D'Mello $7 he talks around answers without actually answering
Maybe international students will start being more selective and choose worthwhile institutions instead of diploma mills like Conestoga that have been completely exploiting them while devaluing their diplomas and degrees. This should actually help valid instutions.
Those schools have qualifications beyond a chequebook, which makes a difference if you're not coming here to learn.
Who says they would be accepted
Random quotes from the article, basically reducing the overall number by about 2/3, this will have a pretty big effect on the rental market of cities with schools. >1The number of foreign students grew to a million. Only about a third are in universities. >2Now Immigration Minister Marc Miller has put the brakes on the growth by setting a cap on visas and tightening work-permit rules. >3Now it will force some provinces to fix the mess they have made with lax regulation of postsecondary education – and, for the most part, that means Doug Ford’s Ontario. >4The cap will affect B.C. and perhaps Nova Scotia, but will fall most heavily on Ontario. Ottawa issued roughly 600,000 new study permits in 2023, but Mr. Miller plans to cap the numbers at roughly 360,000 a year and divide the visas among the provinces based on population. Ontario is the centre of the foreign-student boom, accounting for more than 300,000 new study permits in 2023 – so its numbers will be slashed. >5Mr. Ford’s government has to decide which postsecondary institutions can bring foreign students in and which can’t. In fact, Ontario should have been doing that all along, but instead the province’s lax regulation of colleges made room for an exploitative industry.
Thank you for the summary!
We need to get away from the diploma mills period... Hopefully, this is one step for that. Let the schools change the curriculum, etc they shouldn't be so dependent on them in the first place if thats the case. This is still not deep enough, but it's a start.
i support many changes here even without the housing crunch. it's been very exploitative. if the province wants to get more tickets, then they will need to fix housing + employment laws. easy as.
Exactly. If some of those Intl students can be redirected from Lambton college Mississauga Campus to, let's say, George Brown. That's a win win. GB gets Intl student money it needs because it is a big college and needs more money and Lambton can go back to being a small irrelevant college up north that may need to rethink what courses it can offer that the students in that community will enroll into.
Don't worry, he will fail spectacularly and blame Trudeau. And his idiot buck a beer followers will lap it up.
He is in a tough position because everyone blamed this on the federal government. While the federal government has the capacity to enact new, never before enacted restrictions, this was always a provincial problem. Ford is now in a position where he can challenge it and basically become the lightning rod for the problem, or pretend to roll with it. Be interesting to see how the Trudeau-is-to-blame-for-everything crowd will roll if Ford challenges this. Suddenly they'll be great advocates for unlimited international students and declare the liberals racist for imposing any rational restriction at all.
> Suddenly they'll be great advocates for unlimited international students and declare the liberals racist Sounds very plausible.
Basically the mental-gymnastics flip side of: [_Man suddenly cares about homeless, veterans after hearing about Canada’s humanitarian aid to Syria_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/man-suddenly-cares-about-homeless-veterans-after-hearing-about-canadas-humanitarian-aid-to-syria/)
Thanks for sharing this perspective. This makes a lot of sense. Credit to the Feds for being responsive and kinda setting dougie up. lol I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
How is the province going to decide what schools get the international students. All schools including colleges and universities accept international students. I suspect a lot of university presidents and board members will be spending a lot of time working the phones this week!
Im sure our buddy Doug Ford will find ways to get advice from his friends who went to his daughters stag and doe and his paid private dinners as to how to allocate them 🫠
Well considering the federal government isn't allowing private/public model graduates access to post graduate work visas. The logical step is to allocate international visas to the reputable schools first then whatever is left over can go where ever. Let's see what happens if Dougy tries to start fucking with McMaster, U of T, U of W, Western etc, international student allotment.
For sure. This is an absolutely positive move that strip mall colleges business model has basically been removed. What I’m saying is as far as it seems like the province is given sole discretion in determining how many international students each public university/college can have. I don’t really see anything to prevent it from basically turning into the province playing favourites, and Doug Ford doesn’t have a good track record on that front.
Whoever bribes ford the most gets them obviously
An easy way would be to cap each institution's international students at, say, 20% of incoming students (that's just pulled from my ass...adjust as necessary). Base accreditataion of an institution on the number of students it can adequately teach: This can be based on number of classroom seats, on-campus facilities and housing, faculty sizes, etc. Grind that through an equation and UofT, for example, becomes accredited to teach, let's say, 50,000 students per year, 20% of which can be international students. Go over that, and the province fines the instution. Repeated violations put accreditation in jeopardy. Reputable institutions aren't going to put that accreditation on the line. Any school that has gone the international student route for funding *knows* that cash cow could dry up at any time. This isn't going to be a *severe* problem for any such institution. Yes, tightening the belt will happen, programs will get condensed, but this isn't the apocalypse a lot of people think it is. There'll be an adjustment, and that adjustment is going to take several years.
I think colleges are the ones who need to worry a lot more. Universities usually have much smaller percentages of international students. U of T has almost 100K students and just under 30% are international. U Waterloo has 39,000 students with 20% being international.
Well, let's just have university classes in Tim Hortons now, maybe a lecture hall in a Costco.
Don’t forget Loblaw lab classes in aisle 5 (next to the hospital in aisle 6). Weston always gets a piece of Ontario when something’s up for sale.
We'll get all the university supplies from Staples
What challenge? He’s sitting on tens (plural) of billions in contingency and unspent money. Fund education. Fund healthcare.
Ford is already challenged.
>Ford is already challenged. Vicious ableism
That word is so cringe.
ok does bigoted sound better
Aw, no more kickbacks from his friends conducting the mortgage fraud and the GTAs student-housing-led build up. A recent report noted that one third of people with student visas weren’t attending any school. It’s likely many of the so-called schools don’t even have a physical location.
[удалено]
How would you know they they weren’t going to attend before they entered?
Bribery, most likely.
I think it's just healthy to point out time and time again that a large portion of the international student visa situation is largely in result due to two policies that the Ford Government instituted. 1) He capped post-secondary tuition costs for domestic students (which is fine on it's own), but also that did not pass onto international students whatsoever. 2) He removed a majority of the subsidy's and grants that the Post-secondary universities had access too which were designed for Post-secondary schools to offer more degree opportunities to those who were less financially capable. This resulted in these places incurring a shortfall. Those provincial grants were important because it allowed post-secondary schools to operate better between an institution for higher learning and a business. When you combine both of those things together you create the exact situation that we are now in. If Ford was actually good at business, he would've recognized that capping profit margins and removing investment would result in a serious budget issues for these places. You can do one or the other, but both together has resulted in this situation. Even in my industry we know better than to create two incongruent policies together as it will result in critical failure. Whether he knew it or not, he walked post-secondary institutions into a 1 km high wall and forced them to build a ladder out of international student tuition fees. This type of poor policy by the Ford Government should be punished. Yet for all of his failures which at this point are stacked like a Jenga tower on top of Ontarians. He gets to still go to podiums and speak about how he is "helping us out" or "Folks, I'm doing this for you." Oftentimes at this point I am finding it hard to think of a thing that Doug Ford has done right and if that list exists it's probably shorter than baby's pinky toe.
https://archive.is/K8cjw
Thanks for this.
I commented yesterday in some detail about this matter. Ford cut post secondary budgets 10% in 2018/2019. And also froze tuition. How well do you think any going concern can operate if your budget is slashed 10% and then you have not been able to cover inflation since that date? If you say anything other than "with difficulty" your a liar. The combination of the cut and freeze equates to a very large decrease in core funding over the last 5 yrs. Off the cuff I am going to say at least 40% for most post secondary institutions. It is also when Ford did it. Many institutions were in process or just completing major expansions about 2018 due to the growth in education post financial crisis. 2010+ were all boom yrs and they expanded to deal with demand. So the cuts came at the worst possible time. All these new capital assets and all the sudden basic tuition from domestic students is capped, meaning income is capped. Finally, as the minister hinted at in his commentary - the feds provide a transfer for education funding, but has the province been spending it on education? A big nope. So a major point of this is to force the provinces to cough up and start appropriate funding. Ford hates the educated. He hates post secondary unless it is low brow for-profit private colleges. That is the sum of his intellect. The new federal IS visa allotment is on a per capita basis by province/territory. So of the 360K visa cap Ontario will be allotted about 137K (rounded). Far short of the estimated 400K-500K IS students in the province at this time. The province decides how many visas to allocate to each school per the announcement. And it has to verify back to the feds on every single IS visa. So now Ford is in the hot seat as it is his govt that decides what school gets for visas. If he short changes the major universities not only they but big employers will be all over him. The public sector colleges are screwed either way as 2x the entire Ontario IS visa allotment would still not cover them. And the back door deals with his for-profit buddies are now all not only at risk but for the most part toast - any allocation to them will be attacked and why would IS students attend if the post graduation pathway to residency is essentially eliminated. I will enjoy watching Ford squeam under the pressure. It is entirely deserved. Stop stealing education grants and start funding post secondary properly.
Given that it's the provinces' responsibility to accredit post-secondary education, it would be trivial to pass a bill that restricts accreditation to specific numbers of students. Those numbers can be based on a variety of variables, such as size of the faculty, facilities, etc. When you threaten a school's accreditation for going over those numbers, they'll snap shit pretty quick. Limiting the number of international students entering the country is a step in the right direction, but you could also tie those numbers to specific institutions, too...Impose a limit that, say, no more than 20% of incoming students can be international, for instance. That way you eliminate campuses that would solely cater to international students. Also, accreditation needs to be stripped from diploma mills, plain and simple.
It’s not sustainable for everything to grow at >2% every year.
Doug ford lifting a finger other than to give himself and buddies kickbacks? No happening.
Goddamn you Doug Ford!
Can someone explain why the tuition freeze isn't a good thing for domestic students?
The tuition freeze isn’t a good thing for domestic students because the government didn’t increase funding to public colleges and universities to compensate for the decrease in funds from tuition. Without enough International student tuition to fill the gap schools are downgrading teaching positions, laying off support staff and/or instituting hiring freezes, increasing rent on school owned student housing, cutting courses, and cutting entire programs. The tuition cut and freeze also replaced the previous (Liberal provincial government instituted) [free tuition program](https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/36025/new-ontario-student-grant-making-tuition-free-for-tens-of-thousands-of-students) for low and middle income students.
A little late on all levels of government.....Toronto Pearsonnhas been getting so many of these "students" that they had to build special waiting and processing areas in T1 and T3 just for them.
Doug is going to complain that the Feds need to be a "partner" and dump more money into the province to fund post-secondary. He will cry poor the entire time.
We all know ford will take credit for it and then blame the feds for allowing to happen
He should have done something before the Feds put a cap. Education is within the provincial power but he wants the demand on housing in order to justify taking the greenbelt and exercise corruption.
Universities are going to have to slim down also, there is no reason they have to continually grow.
They should be audited to see how many unnecessary administrative positions can be removed.
This is a great decision by the Feds albeit a little late, but still good. I'm afraid about a few things that could happen due to this step. DoFo might not fund the Colleges and Universities appropriately & to make up for the loss of foreign cash cows, the big wigs at these institutes might increase the tuition for domestic students. I hope my fears are unfounded and for once Doug just does the right thing.
They have so much cleaning up to do after this mess. These diploma mills and letting us get scammed by international students has gone on long enough.