International students and puppy mills.

Ontario talks about financial literacy in education and shows little financial literacy in managing education.

International students bring great benefits to our country, contributing to our communities and adding talent to our economy. It’s also true that the program has grown rapidly and unsustainably in recent years.

We should continue to welcome the best and brightest, especially in areas of great need.

We should not see international students primarily as a means to balance the post-secondary books.

And yet, unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened here in Ontario.

As the CBC reports, “[i[n Ontario, the data shows foreign student recruitment has spiked significantly when Premier Doug Ford took office.”

And this: “Ontario’s public colleges alone accounted for more than 40% of the 435,000 study permits issued nationwide in 2023.”

Conestoga grew from 8,295 international students in 2020/21 to 30,395 students in 2023.

In that same time period, Fleming jumped from 1,113 students to 8,849. Niagara went from 2,286 students to 11,199. Fanshawe doubled from 5,544 to 11,706.

Algoma University grew from 747 students to 9,329.

International students now represent 2.5% of all residents in Canada and 3.5% of Ontario’s population.

Without housing and adequate supports, the rapid growth has bolstered post-secondary balance sheets at the expense of student well-being.

Two years ago, Ontario’s Auditor General made a straightforward recommendation: “do not further increase dependency on international enrolments without a longer-term strategy in place to address the risks of this approach for financial sustainability.”

Two years later, a longer-term strategy is nowhere to be found.

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How did we get here?

You’ll often hear the blame assigned to private colleges. Minister Miller has described them as the “equivalent of puppy mills that are just churning out diplomas.” I’ll admit that this was my initial instinct as well (also we should stop actual puppy mills while we’re at it).

But it’s a wider problem than that, and it mostly lands at the feet of Premier Ford.

To start with, Doug Ford’s government has brutally mismanaged the post-secondary education sector.

It brought austerity to public spending at the same time as it froze domestic tuition after a 10% cut. And the numbers are bad.

Here are some choice quotes from Higher Education’s 2023 Report:

“Now Ontario is an outlier. No province has underfunded postsecondary education more and no province’s institutions have found so many ways to raise money from private sources.

On a per-student basis, the province funds universities at 57% of the average of the other 9 provinces; on the college side it is a mere 44%.

It is tenth out of ten in every inter-provincial comparison of financing.

Merely to get the province to reach ninth place among provinces for funding of colleges and universities requires an additional investment of $3.6 billion per year

To raise spending to the average of the other 9 provinces requires $7.1 billion per year in additional funding. Ontario’s funding situation is, in a word, abysmal.”

Without new public funding or domestic tuition revenue, post-secondary institutions looked to the only source of new revenue available to them.

And it worked. International student tuition revenue has offset provincial austerity. Consider Conestoga again: thanks largely to the growth in international students, tuition fee revenue jumped from $280 million in 2022 to $389 million in 2023.

As the Higher Education Report puts its: “100% of all increased operating spending over the past 13 years has come from international student fees.”

Ontario wasn’t just a passive participant either.

Under Ford, it actively promoted the expansion of public college-private partnerships, enabling public colleges across Ontario to admit international students, take large tuition fees, and outsource the teaching (using the public college curriculum) to private colleges in the GTA.

In effect, it enabled a workaround from the federal restriction on post-graduate work permits for private colleges, and allowed public colleges to subsidize their main campus operations on the backs of international students at satellite sites.

Just as we’ve seen massive growth in public college enrolment, we’ve also seen massive growth in the number of public college students at private satellite campuses.

A 2017 report recommended that these arrangements be shut down, concluding that they “do not serve an important public purpose and are an inefficient way to provide needed revenue to colleges.” As expert Alex Usher explains, the Wynne government moved to do just that before losing the 2018 election, and they have instead proliferated under Ford ever since.

The federal government isn’t entirely innocent here. The Harper government published a strategy to double international students, and successive governments have encouraged the international student program to be used as a means to address labour force challenges and accommodated its use as a path to permanent residency with valued education an afterthought.

No doubt the feds could also have acted more quickly. But the fact remains that provinces are ultimately responsible and that the feds are now acting to clean up a mess that is mostly of Ontario’s making.

As Marc Miller put it recently: “We just need the provinces in question, in this case Ontario, to assume their responsibility.”

Or, as Mike Moffatt put it: “The provinces should’ve acted first…But it’s good to see the federal government bring some rationality back to the number of international students.”

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The way forward.

In the absence of any leadership from Ontario, the federal government has made a number of significant changes, including:

• No longer granting post-grad work permits to international students who complete public college degrees outsourced to private colleges.

• Capping study visas this year at approximately 360,000, a 35% overall reduction from last year. In Ontario, the cap as applied will likely represent a 50% drop.

Given 80% of international students are currently working more than 20 hours per week, Minister Miller will next need to reset a reasonable cap on that too (which should probably be more stringent than the 30 hours he’s floated).

Overall, Alex Usher called it a “pretty well-balanced” package.

In response, Ford complained that he wasn’t consulted on the federal changes, which Minister Miller called “complete garbage.”

Even if it was true, the Ford government should have seen this coming. According to a Global News report, internal documents show that Ontario was aware it had an “over-reliance” on international students.

Now, with the benefit of full hindsight, the Ford government is still flailing.

It announced a series of changes that were long overdue (ex. ensure programs offered meet labour market needs. Yeah, no kidding. There shouldn’t be a 6:1 ratio between business admin students and those studying healthcare). And it made other changes that were moot after the federal fix (ex. a moratorium on public college-private partnerships).

In a separate move, the province is allowing colleges to offer applied master’s degrees. Given the federal government has enabled post-grad work permits for master’s students, this will be worth keeping an eye on.

Ontario hasn’t yet provided any clarity on allocations under the new cap and its recent announcement of financial support for post-secondary education is weak at best.

Last November, Ontario’s Blue Ribbon panel called for a $2.5 billion investment into post-secondary education. With the federal changes, and a reduction in international student tuition fees, additional financial support will obviously be required.

Earlier this week, the province announced $1.2 billion over three years.

Again, Alex Usher puts it well: “Altogether, between inflation and the loss of international students, the sector was in for a hit of over $2 billion this year. This package maybe covers 20% of that. It is not a serious attempt to put Ontario’s colleges and universities on solid footing. It is, rather, the act of a government that prefers the appearance of solving problems to actually solving them.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a provincial government that preferred actually solving problems?

Instead, we get mismanagement and misdirection.

For a government that talks about financial literacy in education, it shows little financial literacy in managing education.

If young people are the future of this province, and if this is how we treat young people, what does that say about our future?