Colleges on the brink forced to make drastic cuts
Colleges slashing budgets, cutting programs and laying off staff
From diplomas in business to broadcasting, and tourism to technology, public colleges across Ontario have made headlines over the past several weeks as they move quickly to slash dozens of programs before budget time.
The financial situation for most of Ontario's 24 public colleges is untenable, they say.
The college system is on the brink after decades of provincial underfunding that sees them lose money on most domestic students who enrol, many people in the sector say. Colleges had turned to tuition from international students to make up the difference — and they boosted revenues significantly — but the federal government has been closing the taps on those study and work permits.
So now, colleges across Ontario are reducing their offerings with great speed and many of the programs being cut are similar from college to college. That raises concerns about what's being lost or if students will have access to programs close to home.
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St. Lawrence, Mohawk, Algonquin, Centennial, Loyalist, Seneca, Northern and George Brown have all taken steps to rein in staffing costs or suspend programs in recent weeks.
"We will absolutely see more announcements of program closures," said Iain Wilson, a manager at the consulting firm, Higher Education Strategy Associates, which speaks regularly with people in the sector.
"I'm 100 per cent sure that the trend is going to continue."
Popular programs for domestic students affected
At a board meeting at Algonquin College on Feb. 24, governors spent an hour deciding to suspend some 37 programs and to close its satellite campus down Highway 7 in Perth, Ont. Algonquin has made a big foray into online learning in recent years, but almost all of the cuts were to programs that taught students in-person.
Business courses are on the chopping block at Algonquin and elsewhere. That's not surprising. Nearly half of all international students at the college level have been enrolled in business programs, according to a report produced every year by Higher Education Strategy Associates.
But Algonquin's Faculty of Creative Arts and Media is also losing a dozen programs.
Petitions circulated to save scriptwriting, technical writing, and the radio and podcasting programs. Those advocates had just 13 days to make the case after the college made the list public on Feb. 11.
The head of OPSEU Local 415, which represents Algonquin faculty, says it makes sense that programs with heavy international enrolment are being suspended.
But Tracy Henderson worries that programs that cater to Canadian students are being lost, even when some have strong enrolment. The union hadn't been shown enrolment data, but the college president confirmed photography is one example.
Henderson points to what Ottawa lost after Algonquin decided last year to cut the program that trains local hairstylists and estheticians.
"Hair and esthetics is not a huge revenue-generating program and it costs money to run a program like that. You have salon space, products, all of that consumable stuff," said Henderson. "But if we go back to... the purpose of Ontario colleges, we are colleges of applied arts and technology. We are meant to be a community college."
Rationale for cuts
While Henderson and others in the Algonquin community only saw the list of ill-fated programs two weeks before the board's decision, college officials said Monday they began a detailed analysis of each program in their "portfolio" starting last June.
They were laid out on a grid based on industry demand and financial performance. Many of the college's programs had been "cross-subsidized" by international student tuition and were no longer viable, officials found.
The college looked at whether a program held good future job prospects for graduates.
But Algonquin president, Claude Brulé, has said one of the main criteria was whether international students could still be eligible for a work permit after graduation. Without it, studying in Canada was less attractive.
Algonquin says more than half of its programs no longer lead to a work permit. In September 2024, the federal immigration department said programs leading to a work permit would be offered in agriculture, education, health care, trade, transport and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada's cap on study permits and changes to work permits have been a major disruptor, the college says.
Algonquin's president, Claude Brulé, maintains his college still has more than 200 programs and can offer choice for learners.
"But we need to watch that to make sure that we don't all collectively get out of an area, an occupation or a field," Brulé told CBC News.
Such talks are only just starting, he added, after the meeting in which Algonquin proceeded with its own long list of program suspensions.
Ontario per-student spending at 41%
Wilson isn't surprised that colleges are still making choices based on preserving programs that can lead international students to work permits.
They have few other options, he says.
At Algonquin, an international student brings in three to four times as much money as a domestic one.
That matters because the Ontario government comes dead last among the provinces when it comes to funding its public colleges, which are Crown agencies.
At $6,553 per full-time student, Ontario provides grants of just 41 per cent of the $16,019 Canadian average, according to a report produced every year by Higher Education Strategy Associates.
This situation at Ontario's colleges and universities has been going on for 30 years, says Wilson.
At the Algonquin College board meeting, officials indeed showed charts where the grants from the Ontario government and domestic tuition revenues have hardly budged over many years, even as inflation and salary increases have led costs to rise by 25 per cent in a decade.
Brulé, points out that even if Algonquin attracts more domestic students, the college doesn't get extra money. That's because of a "corridor" funding formula set up in the agreement each post-secondary institution has with the Ontario government.
Tuition freeze
Another major issue for colleges is they haven't been able to raise tuition fees for domestic students in nearly six years.
The Ford government announced in January 2019 that it was not only freezing tuition but dropping it an extra 10 per cent. It intends to hold that stance until at least 2026-27.
In January, Algonquin's president told MPPs at a budget consultation that it's simply not "financially viable" to deliver programs to domestic students under Ontario's current tuition freeze and funding policies.
Students in 2027 will pay the same as what they did in 2015, Brulé points out.
CBC News asked Brulé how the college system would continue to cater to Canadian students, and offer training for jobs where training is more costly, perhaps because it needs hands-on time or lower ratios.
"That's the million dollar question, frankly," Brulé replied. "We need a different funding model for the colleges."
International students
Asked why the college kept relying on international student tuition in recent years when it carried risk, Brulé said Algonquin was "very responsible and reasonable in our growth of international enrolment".
International students enrich the classroom experience, he says.
"Employers need the graduates and our domestic population is insufficient to see to the future growth of the country," Brulé adds.
Colleges have been turning to international students – particularly students from India – for well over a decade, to make ends meet. Ontario's auditor general said in 2021 that tuition revenues from international students overtook domestic tuition at Ontario's colleges way back in the 2017/18 fiscal year.
Algonquin hasn't been nearly as reliant as other colleges, but it did have a target to increase international enrolment by more than 20 per cent a year. Sometimes, it surpassed that.
Algonquin has about 25,000 individual students. A few years ago, international students represented one in five students, but they are one in three in the current year.
That's led Algonquin college to see its revenues swell from $415 million in its fourth-quarter statements from March 2020 to $531 million in March 2024. The current fiscal year is a "high-water mark" for revenues, the board heard Monday.
That picture has changed dramatically. The college now expects international enrolment to go back to one in five students in the years to come. The college says if it doesn't make cuts, it would see a budget deficit of at least $60 million in 2025-2026, rising to $93 million by 2026-2027. It will discuss its next budget at the April meeting.
Algonquin also briefly joined a trend and entered a "public-private college partnership," offering programs for an Algonquin credential through the private CDI College. That program launched in 2022 and saw enrolment swell to 2,876 in 2023-24 but is now being wound down.
Warnings unheeded
The risks of depending so much on international tuition have been known to these colleges and to the provincial government for many years.
That 2021 auditor general's report warned colleges were in a precarious position and at risk if their international student revenue were to change.
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That led to the Ford government appointing a blue-ribbon panel in 2023 to see how colleges and universities could be financially sustainable.
The Ontario government refused to allow tuition to rise again, which was one of the panel's main suggestions.
So now, with the decisions from the federal immigration department, colleges across Ontario are contracting — and quickly.
Henderson says colleges are focused on federal work permits and international students.
"Yes, it's the fire that's in front of us, but it is not the the biggest issue that we're dealing with," she says. "We are here as a direct result of the chronic underfunding."
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