Ontario lifts tuition freeze, unveils OSAP reforms as it boosts university and college funding. Here’s what it will mean for schools and students

2026/02/14 Leave a comment

Partially correcting a problem that they created and was forced by federal government correctly cutting back on the excessive growth in international students, particularly in colleges:

Colleges and universities are getting more funding — an additional $6.4 billion over the next four years — and will be able to charge students slightly higher tuition rates, as the province’s longstanding fee freeze comes to an end. 

The government’s Thursday announcement was based on months of consultations and warnings from the post-secondary sector that stagnant funding from the province — combined with the seven-year ban on tuition hikes and massive cuts to international students imposed by Ottawa — left them on the financial brink.

Schools will now be able to raise fees by two per cent each year for the next three years, with future increases tied to inflation or two per cent, whichever is less. That means university students will pay roughly $170 more a year and college students $66 — which, combined with a move away from non-repayable student aid grants, has critics raising concerns about affordability. …

Source: Ontario lifts tuition freeze, unveils OSAP reforms as it boosts university and college funding. Here’s what it will mean for schools and students

Good commentary by Regg Cohn:

…Belatedly — better late than never — Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is stepping up to shore up postsecondary education. On Thursday it announced a $6.4-billion cash infusion over the next four years to make up for the last seven years of cuts, freezes and shortfalls since Ford took power.

Back in 2019, the premier played Santa Claus by imposing a 10-per-cent tuition cut, but then played Scrooge by freezing those rates in place without making up for the lost cash flow. Instead, the government urged postsecondary institutions to recruit and rely on high-paying foreign students to shore up their balance sheets, which stoked immigration imbalances that ultimately forced Ottawa to scale back student visas.

Those political and fiscal miscalculations created a perfect storm in postsecondary education: Funding shortfalls; tuition cuts frozen in time despite an inflationary spiral; and the sudden loss of foreign windfalls that kept campuses afloat.

None of it added up, least of all the tuition freeze enacted by a populist premier who wouldn’t pony up his share of the funding pie.

Regg Cohn | Doug Ford has learned a hard lesson after starving Ontario’s colleges and universities


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International students in Canada face vastly different health-care access depending on where they live. Here’s what researchers found

2026/01/30 Leave a comment

Useful comparison (I had to generate a similar analysis to separate out non-resident self-pay international students from those covered under provincial health plans for my birth tourism analysis:

…Of all provinces and territories, Alberta, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island have the greatest access to free public health care for international students, while those studying in Ontario, Manitoba and Yukon only have private options.

B.C. requires a three-month waiting period and a monthly $75 fee to get on the provincial health insurance plan. In Quebec, public free health-care services are only available for students from one of the countries that have signed a social security agreement with the province; others must buy private insurance offered at their university or other private health insurance.

In Newfoundland and Labrador all international students enrolled full time for at least 12 months are automatically registered for the Foreign Health Insurance plan — $261.59 per semester — while Nova Scotia only offers free public health care after one year of study.

Those in Ontario post-secondary education must enrol in the private insurance plans provided by their institutions. Most universities use the University Health Insurance Plan (UHIP) at an annual premium of $792, while colleges use other providers with varying fees.

In Manitoba, international students pay an annual fee of $1,200 for private health insurance. The mandatory group insurance plan for students in Yukon cost $565 a year.

“The students I talked to didn’t know that these disparities existed across Canada,” said report author Tracy Glynn, a director of the Canadian Health Coalition, a national advocacy group supporting public health care. “It’s just by luck if somebody ends up in, say, New Brunswick, where there’s public care available immediately.”…

Source: International students in Canada face vastly different health-care access depending on where they live. Here’s what researchers found

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ICYMI – Revealed: How international student spots are being distributed — unevenly — across Ontario

2026/01/13 Leave a comment

Good and useful data:

…Previous efforts to understand how PALs were distributed across the province were hindered by confidentiality claims and concerns about the impact on competitive advantage, but data obtained through an FOI request provides a detailed breakdown of 2024 allocations and usage, as well as this year’s allocations. Usage data for 2025 is not yet available.

In 2024, Ontario was allocated a total of 235,000 PALs, with a target of 141,000 permits.

Ontario’s public colleges were given 189,416 PALs but used only 55 per cent of them. Public universities, by contrast, used 82 per cent of their 35,460 allocation.

Ontario determined its first year of PAL allocations based on 2023 study permit levels, with exceptions for Algoma University and 13 colleges, including Conestoga, which received fewer permits.

Within the college sector, usage varied widely, with Humber distributing nearly all of its PALs, while Northern College used just 28 per cent. Northern, which had to shutter a private partnership as part of the federal policy changes, has since experienced layoffs, but the loss of international student has been broadly felt across Ontario’s college communities, with more than 10,000 faculty and staff let go and more than 600 college programs suspended or cancelled.

Among public universities, the University of Toronto handed out the largest number of PALs (6,165) in 2024, while the likes of Trent, Guelph, Ottawa and Waterloo universities used nearly all of their allocation. An outlier was Nipissing University, which used only 11 per cent of its PALs.

… What about this year?

In 2025, Ontario’s PAL allocation took a deep cut, falling to 181,590, which had to include, for the first time, graduate students.

Reflecting that, as well as the overall decrease, the province’s public colleges received 113,793 PALs while 57,685 went to universities.

The inclusion of PhD and master’s applicants meant, in some cases, individual numbers rose: U of T, which had 6,395 PALs the year before, received 12,338 this year.

Going into 2026, graduate students attending public institutions will be exempt from the PAL requirement but will be included in the overall cap allocation. So once again, the numbers for individual schools in 2026 will look different….

Source: Revealed: How international student spots are being distributed — unevenly — across Ontario

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These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

2026/01/07 1 Comment

Significant oversight in the online app. Lack of user testing or feedback? Students have a case for reconsideration:

…Over the last few months, immigration experts are seeing a growing number of international graduates like Xu being refused postgraduation work permits for failing to upload language test results, losing their legal status in Canada. They have to stop working immediately and face possible removal.

While many have asked officials for reconsideration, others have reapplied with the faint hope that they would get a second chance. 

“It may sound stupid, but I trusted the system, because I’ve been doing my own study permit and visa applications many times over the years,” said Xu. The Chinese student came here in 2016, first to improve her English before pursuing her master’s degree and PhD.

“There’s no reminder or alert in the system to tell you where to upload the language scores. It should not allow applicants to submit an application when a required document is missing.”

Only now did the 34-year-old woman learn, after the refusal, that the instruction on how to upload the test result had been buried on the Immigration Department website on a separate page that few would have spotted.

Students urge Minister Diab to intervene

An online petition has been launched to urge Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab to reinstate students’ refused applications.

Although the language requirement took effect in late 2024, Vancouver immigration lawyer Will Tao said the issue only emerged this fall due to excessive processing delays. It currently takes more than 210 days for work permit applications submitted inside Canada.

Despite what the Immigration Department called the “technical limitations” that prevent the application portal from installing a new direct upload field for language test proof, Tao is baffled as to why officials can’t just put a simple note there to inform applicants where to upload it.

“That appears only in a separate policy document that does require a lot of searching and digging to find,” he noted. “It’s all automated and now people are getting refused en masse for not uploading a document that you didn’t ask me to upload.”

(Soon after the Star’s inquiry to the Immigration Department about these refusals based on missing language proficiency proofs, Tao noted that officials had placed the upload information on three other webpages, but still not on the application portal.) 

Hundreds of permit applications refused

The department said it has received 162,000 postgraduation work permit applications since the inception of the mandatory language requirement; 815 had been refused up to September due to missing documents that may include the language proficiency proof…

Source: These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

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Federal government issued billions to students at private schools, data reveal

2025/12/10 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

The Canadian government gave billions in grants to students at private, for-profit schools, a practice some critics argue has rewarded some institutions with less-than-rigorous academic standards.

Since 2017, the federal government has granted $2.7 billion to students at those schools, according to data from Employment and Social Development Can­ada (ESDC). 

The amount awarded to the students has risen dramatically in recent years, meaning a growing share of taxpayer money is indirectly flowing to for-profit institutions. 

Last month’s federal budget announced the government will no longer offer grants to students at such schools, citing unspecified “integrity issues.”…

Source: Federal government issued billions to students at private schools, data reveal

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HESA: New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

2025/12/09 Leave a comment

Of interest. College sector and business programs were the main abusers:

The student data is the slightly more interesting of the two, because it (finally) shows the system essentially at the height of the international student boom in the late fall of 2023 (Statscan student data is based on an October/November snapshot and therefore does not quite capture the full craziness of what went on in Ontario colleges, where most all international students were on an 8-month schedule with starts happening every four months and so therefore did not necessarily show up on Statscan scans). 

Unsurprisingly, total enrolments in Canadian postsecondary went up. A lot. 140,000 or so, which in absolute terms is the biggest single-year increase in post-secondary enrolments in Canadian history. But as figure 1 shows, that increase was a) highly concentrated in the college sector and b) largely due to international students.

Figure 1: Increase in Post-Secondary Enrolments by Sector and Source, Canada, 2023-24

Figure 2 breaks down the college increase by field of study.  Again, not a huge surprise: the biggest source of increase was business programs (cheap to deliver, required level of English not all that high); if anything, though I am surprised that so many programs saw an increase in enrolments: this result is actually substantially less business-centric than I would have expected.

Figure 2: Increase in College Enrolments by Field of Study, 2023-24

Source: New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

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Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

2025/11/28 Leave a comment

Starting to get a better sense of the numbers and how governments created this problem through a mixture of underfunding of post-secondary education and over-reliance on international students:

Ontario colleges and universities have been hit with more than $4.6 billion in lost revenues amid the drastic cuts to international students, new post-secondary figures obtained by the Star show.

And with Ottawa just announcing even fewer foreign students for 2026, for universities alone the impact is expected to increase from the $2.1 billion blow they are already dealing with.

The new numbers have the province’s universities now warning they “cannot cut their way out of these growing fiscal challenges.”

…Universities have already cut $550 million in the last few years, mainly through program loss, fewer services and staff cuts, and many schools are staring down deficits this school year. 

Colleges have cut $1.8 billion in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, by cutting up to 10,000 jobs, and 600 programs as well as shuttering a number of campuses. …

Source: Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

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Thousands of former international students’ visas will expire soon. What happens next is murky

2025/11/28 Leave a comment

Would be nice if we had reliable exit data to know:

Tens of thousands of international students who were granted postgraduate work permits will see their visas expire this year, casting doubt on their futures in Canada and leading economists to wonder if some will stay in the country as undocumented residents.

There were 31,610 people with valid postgraduate work permits in the country as of Sept. 30, and those visas will expire by Dec. 31, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) provided to The Globe and Mail.

Those numbers have recently come under scrutiny by economists and immigration experts because it’s unclear how many temporary residents remain in the country after their visas expire, adding to the undocumented population….

In a statement to The Globe, the federal Immigration Department said it did not have an estimate of the number of people in Canada on expired postgraduate work permits. 

“Once someone receives a permit, they must abide by the condition of their permit, including the legal requirement to leave Canada at the end of the authorized period of stay,” the IRCC said in the e-mailed statement. 

Last year, the Canada Border Services Agency deported approximately 18,000 people, but the agency does not publicly break that number down by type of study or work permit. 

The latest IRCC data show that the number of expiring postgraduate work permits is down sharply from the same period last year, when approximately 70,000 were due to expire. …

Source: Thousands of former international students’ visas will expire soon. What happens next is murky

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UK minister flags visa ‘abuse’ as student asylum claims surge

2025/11/26 Leave a comment

Similar dynamics as Canada:

…UK’s Indo-Pacific Minister Seema Malhotra has defended her government’s immigration proposals during a visit to India, while expressing concern about a rise in foreign students seeking asylum at the end of their studies.

Under the new plans, some migrants could have to wait up to 20 years before they can settle permanently in the UK and the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain will be extended from five to 10 years.

The proposals will apply to an estimated 2.6 million people who arrived in the country since 2021. They have drawn criticism from some quarters, including a few Labour MPs, even though the Conservatives gave the measures a cautious welcome.

The reforms are “in line with what countries around the world do” to stop the abuse of their immigration systems, Malhotra told the BBC in the southern Indian city of Chennai, adding that there was a “very strong message we also send, which is that we welcome those coming legally”.

According to Malhotra some16,000 international students from across the world had applied for asylum in the UK last year after completing their courses, which she said was evidence of abuse of legal migration routes.

A further 14,800 students sought asylum this year to June 2025, latest Home Office figures show. It is unclear how many of them are Indian nationals.

“We’ve seen visa abuse in the case of legal routes, where people have gone legally and then sought to overstay when their visas weren’t extended,” Malhotra said.

“If you see that level of abuse, it undermines your immigration system. It undermines public confidence, and the fairness and control people expect.”…

Source: UK minister flags visa ‘abuse’ as student asylum claims surge

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Canada’s cap on international students helped lower rents. But will it bring colleges and universities down as well?

2025/11/17 Leave a comment

Some good quotes:

..André Côté, interim executive director of the DAIS think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, told a Parliamentary committee this fall that it’s clear the international student program had grown “a little out of control.”

There had been a huge increase in the number of foreign students, mainly in college programs, who were unlikely to go on to well-paying jobs, Mr. Côté said. And there was never going to be enough spots for all those who wanted to stay in Canada long-term, he added.

“As much as it stinks to close campuses and to lay off staff, I look at all this and say we had a system that grew far too big for its britches,” he said to the committee. “It was a bit of a reckoning that had to happen.” …

Amir Khajepour, a professor of engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says he typically has 40 to 50 graduate students and postdocs working in his lab. His research has attracted grants and industry partnerships focused on autonomous vehicles, underground mining, robotics and health care. But he’s struggling to fill available positions.

“We are not looking for just anyone. We are looking for the best students from the best universities with the best credentials,” he said.

In the last year he has accepted about 20 to 30 international applicants, but only four have been able to obtain study permits, as processing times have increased, he said, adding his lab is down to about 30 students.

Prof. Khajepour said he doesn’t understand why the government was previously unable to distinguish between top students coming to attend prestigious universities and people whose primary purpose is immigration.

“You are damaging research. In Canada, you are in a good position to attract the best. You are not even using this opportunity,” he said.

Source: Canada’s cap on international students helped lower rents. But will it bring colleges and universities down as well?

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