HESA: What Comes Next: Ontario (the hugely problematic provinces) [international student caps]

The insightful Alex Usher on the impact of provinces, with Ontario the focus:

Ontario is, not to put too fine a point on it, a shit show. My impression is that the Ford government, which has been throwing gasoline on the international student fire ever since it got into the office, mainly so it could avoid having to actually spend over its own money on post-secondary education, is in no way equipped policy-wise to deal with the mess it has just been handed.

The first policy question to be answered before getting to the issue of caps is: what the heck to do about the public-private partnership colleges currently strewn around the GTA? As it is, with the graduates denied access to the post-graduate work visa program, it will be difficult for any of them to stay in business, since satisfying this demand is largely their reason for being. That would be brutal on a couple of levels: first on the colleges themselves who would have to teach out their existing students with essentially no money coming in, and second on their parent public colleges who rely on the margin between per-student tuition and per-student payments to the PPPs in order to keep operating under a system in which per-student funding is just 44% of what it is in the other nine provinces.

At least conceptually, there’s another option: What if the public colleges bought out their private partners and operated these institutions directly? The province might well say no—college catchment areas in theory have meaning, and this kind of arrangement would undermine those catchment areas (which is precisely why they all went in the PPP direction in the first place). And net surpluses would be lower if all the staff at these colleges suddenly joined the college unions. It might not be a super-lucrative prospect, but it might be better than the alternative. I could see some institutions trying it.

But being able to make that decision requires you to know what provincial funding is going to look like. If the province comes in with a bailout package—particularly for northern colleges—then the need to keep pushing on those GTA campuses might be lessened. Alternatively, many of those PPP colleges may now move more quickly towards seeking their own degree-granting status through the Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) and start offering their own degree-level programs, escaping the problems created by Monday’s announcement.

(You see how many moving pieces there are here? It’s going to be wild to watch this all work out.).

Only once you work out the PPP piece can you sensibly make decisions about the rest of the system. If the baseline numbers include the PPPs, then everyone is going to take a big hit on their numbers. If the baseline excludes the PPPs, then the hit to the rest of the system will be greatly alleviated. How that gets distributed across the system is still the big unknown. Will it be done equally across all institutions? Will there be a steer to the colleges rather than universities, or vice-versa? How will stand-alone private institutions be treated (Northeastern is the big one to think about in this category). We have no idea. It’s all an enormous mystery. And with a moratorium on visa processing until the provinces figure all this stuff out, there are a lot of very anxious international student divisions out there.

Source: What Comes Next

Reading this article in the Globe, appears British Columbia more advanced in its thinking and planing.

British Columbia and Ontario are planning to crack down on “bad actor” private colleges that they say take advantage of international students, after Ottawa announced a plan to cap foreign study visas for two years.

Source: B.C., Ontario planning crackdown on ‘bad actor’ colleges preying on international students