HESA: A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges

Useful explainer and a large part of the reason why numbers have increased more for immigration reasons than for education. Another dubious legacy of the Ford government given their policy changes in 2018. Not illegal, but bad public policy. And shameful shifting of blame to the private colleges by public colleges who are equally complicit:

Back around 2012, Ontario colleges were coming around to the idea that there might be a lot of money in recruiting international students. The Harper government had come up with the idea that we could attach a permanent residency/citizenship pathway to any credential of two years length or more. And why not? There was a lot of evidence at the time that the return to foreign credentials among immigrants was low: why not pair Canadian credentials to Canadian degrees and diplomas?

The problem was that it was widely believed that international students would only gravitate towards the big cities (Cape Breton University’s contrary experience was still in the future). So, from the perspective of colleges outside the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), this was a bonanza in which they could not participate. Until they hit on the idea of public-private partnerships.

Here’s the way these Ontario PPPs work. A public college from outside the GTA contracts with a private institution located in the GTA. Under this contract, the public institution admits students (thus making it possible for them to get a visa) and takes their tuition money. It then turns around and sends these students to the GTA-located private college. The private college is contracted to teach these students according to the public college’s curriculum and receives a fee-per-student. Because this fee is less that what colleges charge in tuition, what is effectively happening is that colleges are receiving a couple of thousand dollars per student simply for admitting the student: the bulk of the money is used by the private college to do the actual teaching.

(To be clear: if you feel like attacking PPP colleges for their “poor teaching standards” – a common line of attack – keep in mind that they are teaching a public-college curriculum, and that their instruction is vouched for by a public college. See what I mean by blurring lines?)

Back in 2017 or so, the provincial government started getting worried about these arrangements. It asked David Trick, a former ADM at the (then) Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities, to write a report on these colleges. His recommendation was unequivocal: existing quality assurance structures had no way of checking up on the quality of the education being delivered in these institutions (they still don’t). The reputational risk stemming from potential failure was too high, Trick said. Shut ‘em down.

To be clear: Trick was not making any claims about the quality of instruction in these institutions. Presumably, some of them are good, some are so-so and some are not so good. What he was saying was that we have no way to identify and remediate the not-so-good ones, and that was going to cause a problem.

The Wynne government acted on Trick’s suggestion: in 2017, they gave the four colleges which at the time operated such PPP arrangements two years to shut them down. But then an election happened, and Doug Ford replaced Kathleen Wynne. The Ford government reversed course, hard: more PPPs for everyone! Whether this was due more to an ideological preference for private education over public, or because enriching college coffers without touching the public purse appealed to them is unclear but ultimately immaterial. They did it. And then it was open season: by 2022 nearly all the non-GTA colleges had one.

It’s not that the Ford government refused to regulate the sector so much as they were determined to make regulations so lax that anyone could pass them. Here is there 2019 Binding Ministerial Policy on Public-Private Partnerships (removed from the Ministry website, but still available on the Wayback machine). In theory, this limited international enrolment at a PPP to twice what it is at the “home campus”; however, there was a grandfather clause where northern institutions with 4,000 students at its PPP in Toronto but only a couple of dozen international students in Sudbury or Timmins or North Bay (for example) just had to make vague suggestions about “coming into compliance over the long term” in order to avoid problems with the government.

In 2022, as housing pressures in the 905 became more palpable, the Ford Government intervened to mess things up still further. It repealed its 2019 Ministerial Policy with a new one, which put a hard cap on each institution’s PPP enrolment…at 7,500. Doesn’t matter how big the home campus is. Call it the David Bowie/Cat People approach to public policy management (i.e. Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline).  And since virtually all the anglophone non-GTA schools have schools, we’re talking about max enrolment in these PPPs of something on the order of 120,000 next year, or about twice what it was in 2021-22.

None of this is illegal. There is no “scam” here, unless you disagree with the consensus POV of both the Harper and Trudeau governments that Canadian postsecondary education is a legitimate pathway to permanent residency. Institutions are acting to monetize this route to citizenship, surely, but aren’t governments always asking them to behave more entrepreneurially? And while there is almost certainly some agent mis-selling going on, to which institutions both public and private have taken a see-no-evil/hear-no-evil approach, institutions have been actively abetted in this by a provincial government which has refused to take regulation seriously time and time again. 

Oh, and of course, the Ontario government funds FTE college students at just 44% of the rate that the other nine provinces do. Never forget that bit.

One thing I will say about that is that Ontario colleges have been wicked-smart about their comms game for the last couple of years. An unfortunate Canadian trait is that a lot of people simply lose their minds when they hear the words “private” and “education” in the same sentence. There’s simply no nuance here, no possibility that anything they do is good – or conversely public institutions cannot do anything bad. And so, when they hear about “bad” privates in PPP arrangements, the baseline assumption is to assume that whatever bad stuff is going on is the fault of the private partner. So, not only have colleges managed to find a set of partners who can bring them large sums of money, these partners also act as handy scapegoats that shield the public sector from too much scrutiny about their role in this whole thing. Win-win!

Source: A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges