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The federal and provincial governments have been underfunding universities for decades. Recently, universities were able to start recruiting foreign students to make up for the shortfall, but it looks like that money tap will be turned down. It doesn't look like there's a plan to make up for it.
At the same time, the feds want to
recruit more than 1,000 top international researchers to Canada, with the budget injecting up to $1.7-billion into a suite of recruitment measures.
That'll be tough if universities see their income crater.
It's funny that our college-like businesses are crutching on foreign students to stay afloat; and if they dry up a bit, people are pissed that they have to find a new way to keep education running as a for-profit business without the understanding that running as such is wrong.
Tax the rich. Run the schools. Go find a Viking nation and ask them how they managed since forever.
I don’t understand why you would blame universities (calling them college-like businesses), when foreign students were the only option for increased revenue (to even just match inflation) that has been allowed in the last decade. Before that, only tuition increases were allowed, since government funding has been consistently decreasing.
I completely agree that funding for education should be through taxes, but (especially in Ontario), this is the funding that dried up a very long time ago.
Universities are non-profit organizations in Canada (we are not the U.S.) and have been advocating for increasing government funding first and foremost for a long time. Sure, universities have pivoted to fund by whatever the best alternative has been, but otherwise they wouldn’t survive.
The reliance on foreign students was never the preferred option for anyone but the government, and that was only so they could stop funding education. Now that alternative (really a last resort) is being limited by the government as well, so yeah, being pissed about it is reasonable.
Of course a much better option would be, for example, for the provincial government to provide higher government grants for every domestic student and to also provide that grant for more domestic students (most don’t realize this, but there is something called “corridor”, and universities don’t get government funding for domestic students above that government-induced number). These are provincial decisions, btw.
So yes, universities would love to take on more domestic students, and would love for the government to pay for them (and pay more for each), but that’s instead been decreasing for decades. So what’s this magic “new way” that universities are supposed to be trying instead?
In this thread, I'm amazed coin operated lectures have not been suggested.
Exporting education IS taxing the rich. The rich just happen to be from a different country. The majority of those students are paying vast sums of money to these schools to get their education, then going back home after. That money was subsidizing education for Canadian citizens.
Yeah. There’s no way you’re going to get older, wealthier Canadian taxpayers to make up the shortfall by cutting back on international students.
We’re having a hard enough time as it is getting elementary school teachers paid. Universities cost FAR MORE per student than elementary schools. Tuition costs have skyrocketed way faster than inflation.
Making taxpayers pay all tuition costs is the surest way to get universities defunded completely.
Tuition costs have been capped for the last 8 years in Ontario. Is everyone just pulling numbers out of their asses?
I don't think you're talking about the same thing. There's tuition cost in the sense of what students pay to get an education, and there's what it costs the university to provide that education. You can cap the former. You can't cap the latter.
It used to be. Now it's bringing in people from India who have taken a loan or borrowed from family in order to get into a diploma mill, whilst actually working for an abusive boss in the "service industry"
It would have been trivially easy to kill diploma mills off without affecting public universities and colleges. There's only around 200 of those across the whole country and they're heavily regulated/monitored/audited, and they could have just given them an exception on the quotas to keep them fully functional.
I'd mostly agree, although there are a number of institutions that were previously providing more balanced services and "saw green" to focus more on international revenue and might need to scale back as well.
Best thing is just to remove the changes that allowed international students to work off campus (and increase policing of those hiring illegally). That particular change really seems to have been a tipping point for the system
Yea, this is stupid. One of my clients is a public college, and they're already hurting. They already cut a bunch of programs to save the rest. A new round of international student cuts is going to gut so many more that they just worked so hard to save.
Our politicians are incredibly short sighted. It's amazing that the same budget both defunds universities and says we want to attract the "best and the brightest" to those same universities.
It’s annoying the only real choices are business daddy, or business daddy that’s deiniftely a bigoted racist.
Yup, Neo-liberal or full blown Nuremberg. Easy choice but we're still getting fucked. We need ranked choice voting and proportional representation but how do you get our parliament to vote through a resolution that endangers a lot of their safe seats.
We were so close with Trudeau. He was elected entirely on the back of that promise and everyone knew it. All we had to do was hold his feet to the fire when he tried to weasel out of it after getting the majority that left him no reasonable excuse for not following through. But we all know what happened. He later even said his biggest regret was not following through on electoral reform. Well, yeah. I'm not sure I believe him, but if he's telling the truth I hope it fucking haunts him. It should. I'll certainly never forgive him.
O boo hoo, Universities don't need unlimited growth. So what if they make less this year than they did last year. They are not hurting, only their unrestricted growth is threatened.
Universities are non-profit organizations in Canada. I agree that they don’t need unlimited growth, but the consequence of not funding them is a decrease in the quality of education and the country’s ability to be at the forefront of research.
They are absolutely hurting right now, btw. One consequence of this is some (small) amount of improved efficiency, but the reality if this continues is a degradation of post-secondary education.
For example, more and more high school students will struggle to get into good programs, and then eventually, we just won’t have good programs.
They’re hurting because they got addicted to international student funding and grew to ridiculous size, then that funding dried up and they don’t want to shrink back down to normal size.
It’s like a person being fed all-you-can-eat fried chicken and milkshakes, gaining 300 lbs, then being put on a healthy diet and complaining they’re hungry all the time.
The didn't get "addicted", they had their funding model fucked with by various levels of government. They don't choose their fucking revenue models! The state clawed back a bunch of funding and replaced it with international students, and now they're taking that away. So the result is massive hardship.
They got fucked by a model forced on them by McGuinty, then yanked out from them by Ford. In 4 years, there will not be room to train students as programs retract.
Ontario's university system has been the only driver of the economy since the 60s producing thousands of engineers and scientists. But does a high school diploma Premiere understand that? Or does he have a personal problem with post secondary education he flunked out of in 1984?
It's a good thing that university funding is provincial. Maybe they should stop cutting the funding and giving it to rich people, I'm looking at you Doug Ford.
As clearly this thread has no clue what goes on at universities, or even knows the difference between universities and colleges, I'll explain the OPs point.
$1.7B for 1000 scientist is $1.7M each, for 5 years in total. For senior scientists, this covers salary. But now we have 1000 extra grant applications in a system that is funded at 20% the level of the US per capita. This means we will try and recruit Americans, but tell them they will have an under 10% chance of getting any grant money, and that grant size is half a typical NIH or NSF grant. Large projects? Zero. This research has to be done somewhere, which costs universities money. The same universities getting squeezed by frozen tuitions the last 6 years.
So it is a designed bullshit line item. No one will access this because by the time it rolls out to real funds, the US will have reverted funding and going back to trouncing this banana republic. Excellence, why would an established scientists move to a poorly funded system? They will get more done of they just ride the storm in US.
This money goes to cancer and disease research, like lipid nanoparticles that saved millions of lives with COVID vaccines (yes, that came from Canada), or neural network algorithms driving trillions in investment, also from Canada, but we just pissed away that IP to the US for a handful of shiny rocks.
If Carney is serious about CDN productivity, he needs to fund R&D at per capita levels closer to US or China and make sure the result of this research is developed in Canada, not just sold off cheap to the US as per the last 60 years. A decent economist would realize there is tremendous potential return on investment, far higher than subsidies for pickup truck production to US corporations, and certainly more than the 100-150x more we waste on military spending which does nothing for the CDN economy.
This does not affect colleges. They don't do research and are for vocational training.
Most collegiate institutions in Canada have been going gangbusters for 20 years building new facilities and just generally being stupid with money, cutting down on tenured professors, loading up on administrators.
Like. Maybe some very poor decisions have been made for which there are consequences.
If they were underfunded and hurting for money then why would we do this? If they're underfunded and hurting for money now then why would we provide it when they were so irresponsible with it?
There could be nuance to this situation i don't understand but from my POV our higher educational institutions need to get their fucking shit together.
The one I have as a client has only built a new trades building and a new nursing building in the last 10 years, both for super in-demand programs. As far as I can tell they're not overly top heavy in any way.
Maybe certain institutions were being stupid, but it's definitely not all of them.
People who complain about universities have never stepped foot in one, like Doug Ford.
Because withholding the money doesn't punish the irresponsible parties, it punishes the students and (consequentially) all of society.
The ignorance here is incredible, and reeks of failed students, or people who drank through a 3 year BA in art history. The Canadian Foundation Institute was established 20 years ago to partner with provinces to build badly needed infrastructure for research.
Those "facilities" you are whining about are for research on disease or new technology that is the driving force of the economy. These insitutions are a great net stimulus of billions for new technology and business. New fried chicken franchises are not the future economy.
At the same time, the feds want to
recruit more than 1,000 top international researchers to Canada, with the budget injecting up to $1.7-billion into a suite of recruitment measures.
That'll be tough if universities see their income crater.
What do you think the $1.7B is supposed to cover?
They're trying to end low tier colleges just pumping through international students to inflate their financials, and instead trying to poach all the H1-B researchers in the US that are being scared away.
Somehow I doubt their budgets shortfall and spending choices are only because government wont give these private for profit institutions enough free money.
What institutions are you talking about, specifically. Name a couple.
Almost all Canadian Universities (and the ones we are really talking about here) are all non-profit. They reinvest any profits back into the institution to improve their capacity for research. This is why Canada has some of the world's leading research universities. They are not profiting to make individual people richer, they are profiting to make society and our future richer.
This is starting to change though. There are unfortunately a growing number of for-profit "universities" in the country but most of them are transparently low quality diploma-mills (which is a whole different problem that needs dealing with) and aside from misleading naive domestic and mostly international students and separating them from their money, they remain of very marginal educational or research significance. That may not continue though unless we do something to support our large majority of non-profit universities.
Are we now acting like universities are poor and aren’t gouging the fuck out of everyone?
How much do they charge in your province? Tuition is very affordable here in Quebec
Right? Its more like correcting an income that was taken advantage of in the first place.
I watched my local college lose all its credibility as a result of running borderline scams for foreign students. My old university otoh has been rather smart about not becoming too dependent on foriegn student tuition. I love immigration, and especially think exporting our education is a good thing, but the way these programs have been run in recent years is a cancer on these institutions and pure short term thinking. I'd rather see reform, but this is almost as good.
It's the perfect crime! The feds create a problem with a solution that's under provincial jurisdiction...
I don't know about other provinces, but here in Ontario, the provincial government created the problem. Tuition has been frozen to 2019 levels and they reduced direct funding to universities and colleges. The "solution" was to massively ramp up international student enrollment, which came with a lot of other issues.
A pleasant reversal from the usual situation. Like, all the regulations that sandbag against housing are municipal, which can only be overridden by the provinces.
The problem was created by Provinces cutting funds to universities and education in general... Universities made up the shortfall by using International Students which was a Federally enabled escape valve.
This has been the game of mostly conservative Provincial Premiers; cut everything and blame it on the Feds.
I do feel for some of the legit universities but from what I see, the vast majority of the money milked from International Students did not go to improve the level of education (barely has moved in the last few years) and mostly went to "Mall universities" which are borderline a scam, all stamped and approved by the Provincial gov.
There is too much bloat. I've seen first hand essentially glorified admins being paid $130k + full pension. They need to trim the fat at these places and restructure operations to get rid of all the waste.
No public institutions in Canada pay the pensions of people employed there. The pension funds are user contributed and the mandatory contributions allow no RESP savings.
Many departments between education and research have budgets exceeding $100M/yr...you want to put that in the hands of anyone making under $250K? Good luck.
Back to the National Post comment section with you.
Both for this and for healthcare.
The nurses are struggling to get a fair deal while somehow the billions a year put into healthcare goes where exactly?
Not to the front line staff, I'll tell you that much.
And I get it, materials and equipment isn't cheap but between nurses salaries and material costs, and the occasional multi-million dollar piece of equipment.... I just don't see where it's all being spent. Between the middle and upper management, there needs to be an overhaul.
Education on every level isn't dissimilar.
Hell, most government services need a review, at the very least.
Got that right. The head of our local college was making $400,000 a year before he retired. This is a small town college not a university, and that kind of income is ridiculously high for a college president in a town of 60,000. Thats double what our premier makes.
On the other hand, I did a little digging and compared to other English speaking nation universities, Canada is actually bottom of the list for paying our university presidents: https://higheredstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Figure-6.png
