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.
Lol. I had some profs who would never have gotten their first loonie.
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.
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”
That ended last year buddy. Foreign students are now capped at 8%. You know who came up with that scheme? The McGuinty Liberals.
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
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?
Tuition fees have been capped, not tuition costs. Tuition costs go up when universities build more buildings, hire more staff, pay for more electricity and heating. If they’re doing all that stuff to cater to extremely lucrative international students who then get cut off, the school ends up with budget shortfalls.
This is all excess capacity (and luxury) that domestic students don’t need and didn’t ask for. It’s all designed to compete for international students on the global market.
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.