Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Nails it:

The federal government’s decision this week to substantially reduce the number of foreign student visas is the right thing to do, but it undermines the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities and will hamper their ability to serve the province’s students.

Making Ontario’s post-secondary sector significantly reliant on foreign student tuition was an unsustainable, unwise decision that was sure to end badly. Now it has, and Premier Doug Ford’s government seems unready to respond.

It’s not like federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s move to cut the country’s foreign student visas from 600,000 to 360,000 came out of the blue. The government has been telegraphing it for months.

That wasn’t the first warning the Ford government had. Ontario’s auditor general criticized overreliance on international tuition in both 2021 and 2022. Late last year, an expert panel appointed by the Ford government warned that “Many colleges and universities have passed the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students.”

So far, all the Ford government has done is repeat a second-rate federal Liberal talking point about cracking down on “bad actors,” those being strip mall campuses that licence the curriculum of public community colleges. All with the full knowledge of the provincial government, of course.

There are three bad actors in this story, but none of them operate out of a strip mall.

First, the federal government. It turned foreign student training into a back door immigration system with no limits. Students could work for three years while they studied, then for two or three additional years after that. In all, there are about one million students here on visas now. Only belatedly has the federal government come to admit that flooding the country with unofficial immigrants might contribute to Canada’s housing shortage.

The surge of foreign students worked remarkably well for the Ontario government. Foreign students pay absurd tuitions, as much as $14,300 a year for a college student and $46,443 a year for a university student. According to the Ontario AG, foreign students accounted for 45 per cent of university tuition revenue and 68 per cent of college tuition fees.

The influx of foreign student money papered over the government’s own neglect of the post-secondary sector. In 2019, Ford cut tuition, then froze it. The government’s direct support for the sector has been meagre. The province’s funding per university student is only 57 per cent of what the rest of the country spends, and it’s even worse for college students at 44 per cent.

Finally, there are the universities and colleges themselves. They have overcome inadequate tuition and government funding by milking foreign students for all they are worth, becoming dependent on their tuition fees in the process.

The absurdity of the situation was illustrated earlier this month when international students at Algoma University’s Brampton campus conducted protests after receiving failing marks. One student got right to the heart of the transaction with a sign saying “CAD 26000 are not enough?” One of his compatriots missed the point altogether with his sign, which read “Education is not for sale.” Of course it is, and these students have the receipts to prove it. The university, an obscure Sudbury institution that has set up shop in Brampton to grab some cash, fixed the issue by putting the students’ marks on a bell curve. Smart move. In 2021-22, the Brampton campus generated 65 per cent of the university’s revenue. You have to keep the customers happy.

Unfortunately for the Ford government, the years of pretending none of this was happening are coming to an end. The federal government hasn’t shut off the student tap entirely, but it’s time for Ontario to figure out how to pay for universities and colleges without an ever-increasing flow of foreign student tuition.

The first challenge will be distributing visa quotas, something the province has not done previously. The new visas are based on population, implying that Ontario might get about 130,000 study visas compared to 300,000 in 2023.

Private colleges that were given a veneer of credibility by licensing curriculum from real community colleges should be cut off. Colleges overall will require a significant trim and a return to their mandate of job training for people in their own communities. They can afford it, for now. Foreign student training has been lucrative. In 2022, all but one Ontario college posted a surplus, with the average being $27 million across the system.

Universities are in a different situation. The Council of Ontario Universities says at least 10 Ontario universities are forecasting deficits this year, amounting to $175 million. Next year, the total is expected to be $273 million. A reduction in foreign student tuition will exacerbate that.

This is all a worrisome situation for Ontario students and their parents. The Ford government needs to put a credible fix in place, quickly.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

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Randall Denley: Time for Ford to act on Ontario’s reliance on international students for post-secondary funding

2023/08/26 Leave a comment

Good and needed reminder that the provinces and their education institutions are largely responsible for the rapid increase in international students, with the federal government largely automatically facilitating visas:

A light bulb has finally come on in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. Dim thought that bulb may be, it has sufficient power to illuminate a glaring weakness in how Ontario funds post-secondary education.

Sean Fraser, the new federal housing minister, offered the opinion this week that the 807,260 international students in Canada are putting pressure on the Canadian housing market. That’s not terribly surprising, since the number of international students has more than doubled since the Liberals took power. It’s also a problem that Fraser failed to address when he was immigration minister.

While it’s gratifying to see the federal Liberals tentatively identifying a link between the number of people flowing into the country and the shortage of housing, it’s Ontario Premier Doug Ford who really has to wake up.

Ford talks non-stop about the housing crisis and is willing to do anything to build more housing, but his own government’s policies have made the problem worse. Its failure to properly fund post-secondary is the root cause of the burgeoning international student population in Ontario, where about half the national total resides.

This is a problem Ford inherited, then made worse. Under the previous Liberal government tuition fees rose steadily as universities scrambled to cover costs not met by provincial funding. When first elected, Ford cut tuition fees by 10 per cent and his government has frozen them ever since.

That was great for students, not so great for universities and colleges. To make up the public funding shortfall, universities and colleges turned increasingly to international students, who pay much higher fees than Canadians, up to four times as much.

In effect, the Ford government and the universities and colleges reached a tacit agreement. The post-secondary institutions would stop fussing about underfunding in exchange for the government supporting an unlimited flow of international students.

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has highlighted the overreliance on international student fees in two reports. In December 2021, Lysyk found that Ontario’s colleges received 68 per cent of their tuition fees from international students. That’s what happens when a Canadian student pays $3,228 and an international student $14,306 for the same education. In 2022, she determined that international students, about 14 per cent of the student body, were paying 45 per cent of university tuition fees.

Some differential for international students is justified, but only enough to make up what the province covers for homegrown students. Ontario’s fees are exorbitant.

In effect, Ontario has turned its post-secondary sector into an international training business. As a result, the sector has expanded in its search for revenue, flooding the province with students who require housing.

Despite the obvious pressure this creates on housing, the Ontario government has been enthusiastic about the burgeoning Ontario student population. Not only do the international students subsidize the education of students from Ontario, they provide a source of cheap labour while they study here. Even better, the government hopes that many of them will stay in Ontario after they graduate.

Ford is caught between conflicting problems. There is a labour shortage and immigration seems like an obvious way to solve it, but a larger population increases demand for housing and health care beyond the province’s capacity to provide it. Ford has struggled to connect those two dots, championing population growth while pretending the province can handle it.

Whatever the perceived benefits, Ontario’s heavy reliance on international students’ tuition dollars to support its colleges and universities is unwise, a point made compellingly in an analysis by the Canadian Federation of Students.

It is also a problem that will be expensive to fix. The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations says that provincial funding covers only 33 per cent of university costs. Bringing Ontario per-student funding up to the average of the rest of Canada would cost $12.9 billion over five years, the professors estimate. For context, Ontario’s base program spending for the entire post-secondary sector this year is $12.1 billion.

Ontario has taken one small step toward rationality. Earlier this year, it appointed a “blue-ribbon panel” of academic and business leaders to provide the government with advice on making the post-secondary sector financially stable. Raising government support and cutting reliance on international students would be two obvious recommendations. The panel is expected to report within the next four weeks.

The Ontario government is certainly not going to stop the flow of international students, nor should it. What it needs to do is reduce the system’s reliance on those students’ fees by reducing their numbers and making up the difference itself. That would help both the housing market and the stability of post-secondary education.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Time for Ford to act on Ontario’s reliance on international students for post-secondary funding

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ICYMI – Denley: Shifting gender pronouns, racial terminology aren’t doing much to unite Canadians

2022/09/15 Leave a comment

Interesting results from the ACS poll, suggesting that academic and bureaucratic terminology may not be resonating with people (not a surprise).
Personally, find terminology debates and discussions far less interesting than looking at what disaggregated data (categories) can tell us regarding socioeconomic outcomes of particular groups, recognizing variation within groups as well as between them.
The particular not necessity be at the expense of the commonality, but it is important to have both. Not for “defining” people but understanding them: 
Anyone who follows traditional or social media can be forgiven for thinking that Canadians are divided as never before. Perhaps the better term is “categorized.” There is enormous enthusiasm in government and academe to define people by race, gender and sexual preference.
It has become the norm in the media to refer to people as “racialized” and bend over backwards to make sure that everyone’s personal pronouns are respected. The latter leads to the grammatically puzzling situation where an individual whose name we know is referred to as “them.”

Source: Denley: Shifting gender pronouns, racial terminology aren’t doing much to unite Canadians

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