To describe the crisis that universities are facing at the moment, imagine this.
Imagine you built a car decades ago and it was a world-class car envied the world over. It was beautiful and reliable. However, in the last few years you didn’t invest and maintain it at all. Your car is still running but is in bad shape, but you refuse to make important investments in keeping it repaired and running. Then you blame everyone else for the car falling apart but not your own lack of investment.
This is what’s happening in the university sector. The provincial government is blaming everyone but themselves for the dire situation universities find themselves in.
For decades, provincial governments of all stripes have chosen to underfund public universities, leaving them no choice but to use international students to make up for the funding shortfalls. To compare, the average undergraduate tuition in Ontario for an international student is $48,267 versus $8,514 for a domestic student.
The province is now ironically blaming the federal government for its universities’ financial woes, with the Minister of Colleges and Universities remarking, “a rebalancing [is] going to happen with the federal government’s unilateral decision, and there is going [to] be some challenges because of (fewer) students.”
International students are essential to making a university world-class. A cap sends the wrong signal: brightest students in the world are not welcome; it also doesn’t increase university access for domestic students. The government’s current model caps the number of domestic students funded by the province. This is especially problematic given that Statistics Canada is predicting a demographic shift of more young people enrolling in universities in the next few years.
So the international student levels are not the problem. The problem is the province’s chronic underfunding. International student fees were a wobbly solution to the problem created by the provincial government in the first place.
The real, more permanent solution is an extremely simple one: Fund Ontario’s public universities properly.
To get out of this crisis and just to bring Ontario close to the national average, the provincial government needs to increase its funding by 11.75% every year for the next five years. We know the Ontario government can afford it – it can, after all, afford a generous $200 rebate for every Ontarian, which amounts to $3.2 billion.
The car owner needs to stop blaming everyone else and actually start giving the car the maintenance and repair it needs.
The alternative will be much more costly and ineffective.
Without the car, you can’t get to work and will lose your job. Without public universities, economies will fail (as we saw in Sudbury when Laurentian University filed for bankruptcy), innovation and economic progress will falter, and the province will fall behind.