The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why is Ontario's Post-Secondary Education Crisis Not a Bigger Election Issue?

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

A provincial tuition freeze and a federal cap on foreign student visas are squeezing the funding available for Ontario's post-secondary institutions, particularly colleges. Layoffs and program cuts have become common as a result, meaning less choice for students. So if higher education is in crisis, why is it not a bigger campaign issue for Ontario's political parties ahead of the election? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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of Toronto's George Brown College, Alex Usher, CEO of Higher Education Strategy Associates, and Elizabeth Buckner, Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, or OISE, at the University of Toronto. Welcome to you all. All right.

And Elizabeth, this is your first time, so thank you so much for coming on. It will be fun, I promise. Thanks for having me. So it's good to see you all. Alex, I wanted to start with you. How many college and university programs do you estimate that have been closed or cancelled in Ontario for lack of funding in 2024?

Because it seems like every time on the news, every day, programs have been shut, layoffs have happened. So when this all started, I guess in the January we had reductions in the number of visas available to colleges. In September the federal government changed the pathway to citizenship which effectively cut it off for a number, about half of all college programs. I estimated at that point that what you were looking at in colleges was about a 20% drop in income, 25% drop in income from last year to next year. And that would probably mean the closure of about a thousand programs. And what we've seen so far I think is six institutions each of which have

shuttered 50 programs or thereabouts. And so yeah we're on track for a little over a thousand right now. That's a lot because I imagine if you're in high school and you're planning on going to college or university and you have your passion or you have your sights set and then that program is cancelled and must impact the students themselves. But for the institutions, I just wanted to do a quick follow up from you both to see how it's impacting your institutions. Elizabeth, how is this impacting universities? Yeah, well we haven't seen as many program closures

at universities. There are some. But colleges are really being impacted much more by program closures. What we've seen at universities is more cuts to staff layoffs that are affecting, for example, student services, student-facing services. And so the concerns with universities,

in addition to program closures certainly, or suspensions, is that students will have less support. And so they concerns with universities, in addition to program closures, certainly, or suspensions, is that students will have less support. And so they might be enrolled, but they'll be possibly in much larger classes. And then they'll have fewer supports for graduating. And so really, the problem is one of equity. The students who are struggling more, who come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, are probably

going to be affected the worst. I haven't heard that part about it, so thank you for mentioning that. And what about colleges? How is this impacting colleges? Well, realizing that colleges face a structural deficit for every domestic student that they educate for the average cost program. They lose about $2,000 to $3, thousand dollars and that's because the operating grants are the lowest in all of Canada and they've been frozen for fifteen years.

Tuitions were cut back by ten percent in 2019 and they have been frozen ever since. And so when you have that kind of a structural deficit, it's very difficult to find a way out of it. International students were one way where colleges could supplement the revenues and increase the number of programs that were available by virtue of the student mix. And now, because of the significant cutbacks

in international student visas and the pathway to postgraduate work because of the restrictions on who can get those permits. That has had a devastating effect on the system. I am going to follow up on that because I don't know if you realize we're in an election period about parties and tuition being frozen. But Alex, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Blue Ribbon panel. This show has covered it a while, a couple of times actually, and this was something that the government commissioned to, I guess, get an

understanding of how much money is being spent in post-secondary education. There was recommendations that came out of it, but why do you think the government has been reluctant to implement any of the recommendations of that Blue Ribbon Panel? Well, it's implemented some of them in the sense think the government has been reluctant to implement any of the recommendations of that blue ribbon panel? Well it's implemented some of them in the sense that the government asked or pardon me the panel asked for a certain increase in government grants and it asked for a rise in tuition and there was no rise in tuition and that was where about 60% of the money was going to come from so we're down 60% already and if I remember, they said yes to about 70% of the money that

the blue ribbon panel asked for. So you know there was an ask of a billion or so a year and what the system got was about $350-400 million a year. That's substantial deficit. And we were already down by billions. And this was before, you have to remember, the blue ribbon panel reported before all the issues with international students.

And international students, the lost in the colleges alone, it's $2 billion. So if you look at what the government of Ontario has been giving compared to the financial losses that institutions are taking, which in turn are on top of those structural deficits that Anne talked about you can see that yes there has been some government response I mean you know Doug Ford can legitimately say there's been a response but it's been tiny and compared to compared to what was needed. And I guess there are all

these unintended consequences because I mentioned it's impacting students, it's impacting the teachers, but it's also having an impact on the labour force because we have this understanding that you go to post-secondary education to pursue certain jobs, certain jobs actually require you to have that education. So Anne, what are your biggest fears for Ontario's labour force if the financial squeeze continues? I think my biggest fear right now is exacerbated by the fact that we have a pending trade war. And I don't think any of us know exactly how that's going to manifest itself. I think we're at a time of an existential crisis and I think that we're going to have to respond, and I'll talk about Ontario, we're going to have to respond by being more competitive

and that's going to mean that we need people in the labour market with the right skills to fuel growth in certain industries, to fuel growth in capacity where we might have to change our pattern of what we import or export. And if you don't have the programs available in colleges and universities, but I'll talk about colleges, to meet those labour market needs, you're going to be in an even worse position from responding to the threat and responding to how are we going to be competitive in the future. And when the federal government did their blunt instrument approach to cutting back

on international student visas, they didn't take into account the fact that geographically, labour markets are different and you might need different skills. I was talking before we got on the show about, I remember being in Jasper a number of summers ago when our younger son was working at Jasper Park Lodge for the summer. So we went out for a week. At the time, a number of restaurants had signs on them that said, we're only open for breakfast, not only lunch or dinner, or we're only open for lunch because we don't have enough staff.

So if you have an area that relies on tourism for its economic well-being, you might need a different type of graduate, and if you cut back at a blunt instrument level, the kind of education you support with postgraduate work permits, you're going to have more significant impacts in certain areas than anyone would have predicted. And Elizabeth, I saw you nodding. Yeah, I agree completely. And this is a time where we also are thinking about sort

of what is the future, what is going to be the nature of the future economy? We have AI changing things. There's like a demand for green skills. And these are areas where the colleges historically have been able to produce sort of applied, you know, graduates with applied skills, but they need the funding to be able to respond

to changing labor markets. And so, you know, traditionally we have done quite well, colleges and universities and, you know, assessments sort of say, okay, we've done a good job of producing labor for our labor market, but we need to be able to continue to adapt. And that's sort of the problem. And again, I'll go back to the question of inequality between institutions. Not all institutions can ride this wave in the same way. And we know that it's the ones in Toronto, in urban areas, in the GTA that are older and wealthier that will have

fewer program cuts. Students who can get into those institutions will still have their choice of programs. They'll be the ones that are able to graduate students. And it's students in institutions in more rural areas in the north that are going to be hit harder. And also it's the students who depend on those institutions who then will have fewer options.

And then their local economies will be worse off. And I imagine too, if you have less spots, it means it's actually more competitive for the students to get in as well. Exactly. Can I just also reinforce to Elizabeth's point, when you go to rural and northern areas, especially at the college level, students prefer to stay in their community.

And so they're looking for access for affordability reasons, for all sorts of reasons, to those programs in their local area. And if the large program cuts come largely outside the larger urban areas, that's going to hurt even more. I want to bring up a chart that is actually your chart, and if you can explain to us what it is. So, Shelton, if you can bring this up. And it's a chart of post-secondary operating income since 2001 to 2002, which includes Ontario's $1.3 billion top up to 2027. The red line marks when that funding

ends the amount of funding on the right side of the red line is projected. Alex can you please walk us through what we're seeing here? What's the significance? So look at the blue area there because that tells you the story about government funding. Government funding peaked effectively just after the financial crisis in 2010. So Anne you said it's been 15 years of cuts. Yeah and they haven't all been cuts. It's mostly been freezes, and you allow inflation to eat away at it.

And you can see that that is something that happened that started well back in the liberal period, right, that it was under, I guess, the peak would still have been under McGinty, even though higher education funding increased quite a bit under Dalton McGinty. But we've had 15 years of gradual decline. And what institutions have done over time is ask students to pay that.

I mean, that was, in effect, the way that this whole system was supposed to work. And until about 2012, 2013, that was still mostly domestic students. After that, as Anne said, people started to look at international students because there wasn't a tuition cut. There wasn't a tuition., there wasn't a tuition, there weren't the same curbs on tuition regulation, so they could charge a more market rate. And you can see it went up and up and up until this year.

And what you see is about a three billion dollar drop in revenue, a little more on the college side than on the university, or a little bit more on the college side than the university side. Tuition fees are higher in universities but colleges were more dependent on international students so it evens out. And you know three million dollars in one year is a lot to take in right that's an eight or nine percent cut in one year and everybody's adjusting to it and it doesn't look like it's coming back.

I mean you can see when the Ford government talks about new funding, you can see that little blip around 22, 23, but it's tiny, right? It's not very big compared to the whole thing and it's certainly nothing in comparison with the drop in funds that we've seen in the last little while. That funding, that blip in funding was also spread over three years. So when you translate that to what happened to the college system, I think the college system across 24 colleges got about $100 million a year, which is a drop in the bucket when you look at a reduction of billions.

Which brings us to the election and whatever government comes into power, they will be running the show until presumably 2029. And considering that an investment in an education is an investment in future economic growth, why do you think post-secondary education is not getting the headlines it should maybe getting during this election cycle? Elizabeth, I'll start with you. Yeah, it's unfortunate, certainly.

I think that voters are distracted. There are just simply more politically pressing issues. There's the tariffs and there's health care crises and post-secondary education always has to vie with other sectors for attention. And so even though we are in crisis in many ways, the other issues are more pressing. And I will also add that many of the individuals, the international students themselves, whose lives have been upended by these policies, are not voters.

And so it is an issue that sort of has undue influence on people who aren't participating in the election. But this will impact domestic students too. Certainly, it will. But again, post-secondary education is a much smaller proportion of people are in post-secondary at any one time. So it's sort of on their radar than K-12, for example.

And so unfortunately, that won't be the case. If you have kids in schools now, you're going to need a strong post-secondary college and university sector in the future, but it might not be on the top of mind right now. Ann? I think what people have cared about post-secondary education when they have a child or a family member who's ready to go to post-secondary, and they care that they have a spot for that family member, and they care that the tuition is reasonable. To date the

colleges and universities in Ontario have done a great job. They've been able to weather the storms. They've had capacity available to take those kids and so it hasn't been an issue. It hasn't risen to the crisis level that we're probably likely to be facing in the short order and it's never frankly pulled well. I've talked to a lot of people who have worked on the political side of the just political side. And they always say, it just doesn't pull well. Because if there's capacity there,

if your kid or your family member is going to get a spot, cost is reasonable. I don't have to worry about it. But now we're at a point where I don't think the colleges, especially in the universities, are going to be able to recover from this total onslaught of issues to deal with. So if families care about this issue, when it impacts their own, what about the labor market?

What about governments? This is something that will impact everybody at some point, no? I just don't think governments care about growth anymore. Like I can't, I don't see governments anywhere in this country making serious efforts to to increase productivity, to increase output. What they care about is dollars in pockets. You get these very short-term affordability discussions. There's nothing about investing for the future.

And that's not just Ontario, that's everybody. But Alex don't you think that's going to change with what we're facing right now with a potential trade war with the US? I think they're starting to talk about the economy and how we're going to be successful and things do have to change and if they don't start thinking about productivity and if they don't start thinking about having the right skilled labour market and in fact even understanding what the labour market needs. I think that's one of our biggest problems. The federal government and the provincial government have to work together to come up with a plan that says this is the kind of profile of

labour market we need in the future and how are we going to make sure that we get there and part of that could be international students which I still feel we are going to rely on or need need to rely on, to meet our total labor market needs in the future. Well, we can come back to this. I just want to show you, because we had a debate last week, and we want to show you a clip of what the leaders had to say about post-secondary education. Please roll the clip. The answer isn't to increase tuitions.

The answer is to properly fund post-secondary institutions. And I will add that the reliance on international students breaks my heart. A lot of those young people wanted to come here to build a life. They are part of our future. Science, technology, engineering, and math, those are the jobs of the future. We're going to continue investing in it, not to mention the skilled trades. There's a reason why all the trade unions are supporting us at one time used to support you, but they know there's no future with any of your parties.

My plan would be to cap foreign students at 10 percent so our kids have more space and reliance. I'm also going to increase OSAP for our students and extend the amount of time that they have to pay it back and increase the threshold in which it kicks in when they have to pay it back. But let's fund our colleges and universities properly. The 1.3 billion dollars that was given to universities and colleges wasn't even enough to make up for the loss in funding from international students. We will not solve this crisis.

We will not generate the trained workers we need for our economy if we don't fix this. So I would like to get your reactions to what the leaders said. What stands out for you, good and bad? Elizabeth, I'll start with you. Yeah, well, I'll say that, I mean, it's welcome certainly to hear that the NDP and liberals and Greens are talking about properly funding post-secondary of course they you know they their estimates are not really even making up for like the blue ribbon panels suggestion but I also and

obviously yeah hearing funding of OSAP is good I mean we want it we want to restore OSAP funding because that supports students who wouldn't be able to attend otherwise. But I mean personally I think the cap on tuition that all the parties are pretty much sticking with as far as I understand is a problem. Why do you think that's a red line for parties? I mean no one wants to pay more. No one wants to be the party saying, yes, we want to charge you more in tuition. But the reality is that many families could afford to pay more in tuition. And that if there are fewer students in colleges and universities because we're not willing to pay higher taxes or willing to charge more tuition, then the public money that we are

putting to higher education ends up being a subsidy for the upper middle class. And that's actually incredibly inequitable. Alex, what did you think of what the leaders had to say? Well, it was interesting, I think Premier Ford's comment about STEM. I'm not sure he was referring to how they have been investing in STEM because they haven't. But just recently, apparently, they have put, they have suggested that they will put, I think the number was 750 million around there, in STEM over the next little while.

And I think that's interesting because you asked what would make this an issue and I think it's not whether or not your kid can get a spot in university or college because we kind of solved the access problem like most people will go, but what if they can't get into the program they want to get into? And it's the STEM programs where the real demand is. It's the STEM programs that are expensive. Institutions have been covering the cost of rising enrollment there. They've been, you know, shifting out of cheap programs and into more expensive programs, bearing that cost themselves. I think what the Conservatives were really worried about was not the...

I think what the conservatives were really worried about was people saying, what if my kid can't get into the computer science program they want to get into? What if they can't get into the engineering program? And that's probably what they want to avoid, is a situation where a certain chunk of the middle class are having those kitchen table conversations saying, wow, this underfunding is going to affect my child. I don't think it has yet, because, yes, we're talking about cutting programs now, but that hasn't affected anybody's decision yet.

But in the next couple of years, it might. And so I think that's probably what the STEM comment is about. And Anne? First of all, I'd like to say that I don't agree that we can keep tuitions frozen. I mean, they were frozen, and because of inflation, we've continued to fall behind. So I think something has to give there. I've always believed in a

system where both government and the individual contribute. I think there's a fairness in that and if there's an affordability issue I think they have to go back to improving the OSAP loan and grant program. They cut that back significantly. When it comes to STEM and trades funding, the Conservatives did mention that they put quite a bit of money into trades training. They've done that with union shops. They haven't done that with the publicly funded post-secondary education institutions like colleges and those programs are expensive to run. You need the capital to have current equipment.

But you also want to give students an opportunity to take pathways through education and not be limited because they've got a very limited scope of training when they go to just a union shop that has one skilled trade that they support students in. So I think we have to increase the grant. I think it's been kept low too long. I think we have to increase the grant. I think it's been kept low too long. I think we have to allow some leverage on tuition.

I think we have to improve the OSAP and the loan programs to make those that can't afford them be able to afford them better. And I think it's all of those things. And I think we also have to focus on understanding the labor market and maybe bringing or opening it up more for some international students where we don't have the domestic population to support the labor market in those areas.

But politically that seems to be something that parties are moving away from. The international students side? Because of all the ripple effects that are politically not advantageous. I said this a year ago on this program where I think blaming the housing crisis strictly on the backs of international students is a little bit simplistic and naive. Yes, you have to have all of the supports available, but I think if the provinces and the federal government worked together to actually understand what their labour market needs are in particular areas, maybe a particular province would say to the federal government, we want you to loosen up the opportunity for international students in this area because we can't attract the domestic students and we need these people

for our industry and labour market needs. I remember when I was still in high school, bursaries were still a thing that happened and now bursaries have been eliminated. The Liberals are suggesting to cap the international students, increase OSAP. What else do you think could be some way to create financially sustainable funding for post-secondary education in Ontario? Because around international students it's like it's good then it's bad.

And it also seems a little, you know, I'm sure those students also want an education they don't want to be political pawns. But what do you think is missing that we can create actually a financial sustainable future? I'd like to get your thoughts on all of it. I have a couple of ideas. One thing I think we can do is we can incentivize collaboration. Right now everyone does their own thing and they spend a lot of money doing it. We also have heard that we have quite a significant importing of services from

the United States. So if we can incentivize buying Canadian, I think that would help industry in Canada, but would also give a little bit of an incentive to post-secondary institutions to look at opportunities closer to home. But I think the collaboration between institutions would also be a huge opportunity that right now everyone does their own thing and I think it ends up costing the system a lot more than it needs to. Yeah, I mean, I think there is some work that can be done on efficiencies, certainly. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a revenue crisis. And revenue is the answer to financial stability for the sector.

I go back to lifting the freeze on tuition. That should happen. And I hope that the federal government will, there's some leeway there to change these caps. I think that they've gotten sort of worse, not better. They've extended them to graduate students now, which I really don't think makes sense given our long-term concerns for productivity and for research output. So possibly, you know, working with the federal government to change some of their policies if the federal

government changes, for example. And then there's also, of course, you leave institutions to their sort of pursuing other sources of revenue through entrepreneurial activity, which led them down the path to this. But I mean, there are other sort of other revenue streams through like credentials, smaller credentials that are fully born by the students. Micro credentials, that sort of thing. I don't know how much additional revenue that can really bring but some hopefully.

I'm hearing from the common thing that both of you are saying is the collaboration piece. And Alex, you study this space, you're very passionate about this space. What do you think is missing? Well, I'm not sure I can add very much to that. I mean you need more money from government and I think the Greens and the NDP have You know in their way to gesture towards that you need more tuition revenues and nobody's gesture towards that you need some efficiencies and You and that's I mean that's to happen anyway. I don't think it's a huge secret that there's a lot of stuff in universities

you could re-engineer if you wanted to. Colleges are a little bit leaner. But universities, I think in particular, there are lots of ways that the sector is reluctant to look at its own practices, let's put it that way. And so this crisis, if you will, is maybe a little bit salutary in that people are looking at things and saying, gosh, maybe we don't need to do that. And you can get rid of some things that

are a little bit extraneous, and you don't need as much revenue. That's not terrible, right? But it is those three. And of course, part of the piece, as Anne said, on tuition revenues is that some of it probably is going to have to come from international students.

Universities and colleges are, to a certain extent, their businesses. They're selling educational services. Let them sell. Part of your answer was very mysterious, but that's probably another panel. But I think part of this discussion, maybe like the elephant in the room,

is that if we valued education, we would pay more for it. So does this mean in some respects Ontarians don't think higher education is of value? No, I mean, I think they do think it's of value, certainly. And I think that, I mean, they care about it. They definitely care about it for themselves. We know. I mean, it's just we've taken our higher education system for granted. We've had a high quality sector for a long time. And we've done it on much less funding than other provinces.

And that's partly because we are able to attract international students. And we have a strong labor market for them. It's just, you know, and we've done a good job. I think that it's just that, yeah, we've taken it for granted. We're not willing to pay. And I think that's with many things. No one wants to pay. But I come back to that either we pay in taxes or we pay in tuition or we pay down, we pay later. We pay down the road by, you know, less productivity. And so we will

pay for it. I'm also thinking if you are someone who might be thinking about going into teaching, that you're looking at the sector and thinking, no, maybe I should pursue something else. Do you worry about that and how that might impact the future educators watching what's happening in this sector? Well, we've seen it before. I mean, we were in exactly this position from about 1996 to 2000, right? And you did see most institutions did stop hiring for three or four years. It's very unfortunate for people who are of a certain age who want to get into it,

but it seems to me that we have yet to find a way of running our post-secondary system in a way where we don't have these every 25 years. We have these big chopping exercises because we haven't figured out a plan for the long term. I think the point about complacency is a valid one. I mean I think it's always been there and it hasn't been an issue. I think this is our opportunity to actually tie the value of post-secondary education more closely to our economy and our competitiveness and then I think people will start to care more. Tell us more about that. What is the relationship between an educated workforce and economic growth?

We have the workforce that you need to be able to staff the industries that you're trying to grow or that you're trying to make more productive and if you don't have that labor market you can't grow and you can't even meet your basic needs and we know that things have to change if we're going to get into a trade war with the states. Yeah. And I just want to remind everyone that the purpose of higher education and its value to society is not only economic. And it's true that, you know, that is many people's reason for going as to better job

and your, you know, lifetime earnings are substantially higher. But the value of having strong colleges and universities is more than economic, right? They're anchor institutions for communities. They support the arts. They also support social mobility. If we want to be a society where you can have opportunity and you don't have to be sort of born into it, then we need a strong post-secondary system.

We've got about three minutes left, and you've mentioned the US President, President Trump. And this week, he seemed to confirm that tariffs will be coming to Canada, at Canadian imports on March 1st. As of this taping, we have no details. If I can just get from you quickly, a minute each, how could an educator to skilled workforce,

how to mitigate the economic damage that these tariffs are expected to cause? Alex, I'll start with you. I'm not sure I would go right away to the skilled workforce. I think a lot of it has to do with the way that we make our economy more knowledge intensive, right? And so that can be research, that can be collaboration between institutions and businesses

on developing new products. I actually kind of think that's where we've been falling down. We haven't put the investments that have allowed us to, you know, go to places like Finland, go to places like the Netherlands or Belgium. You can see the difference that universities in particular play in the economy and the way that they grow.

And I just don't think that we've been doing that we haven't put those longer-term investments in place that allow us to grow so to my mind I would put it more there I mean it's not entirely the labor market aspect isn't entirely absent but I think just you know research has a big role to play here we've been ignoring it. And Anne? And I'd like to add that applied research is very important as well. Pure research is more of the university purview, applied research, which does help our productivity, which does help how effectively we use our resources and the inputs into any kind of a production process.

And I think we need a vast array of skills to be able to meet our needs. So what we're going to have to be able to do is respond. And we're going to have to be proactive in that. We can't just be in a reactive mode that wait to see what kind of tariffs we're going to put on and then what industries that's going to impact and then what can we do. I think we know that we have to lift inter-provincial trade barriers. I think we know we're going to have to grow industries. I think we know we're going to have to become more self-sufficient in certain areas.

And in order to do that, you need a workforce. You need research. You need pure research, applied research. And post-secondary education is a key to enabling a lot of those things. Elizabeth? Yeah, I agree completely. I think that for too long we've been treating a higher education policy sort of in a reactive sense just knee-jerk and it's politics, right?

And we haven't really seen higher education as a long-term investment and so maybe this is sort of an opportunity even to rethink that moving instead of it's not just politics. We need long-term investment approaches. I love that to look at it as an opportunity for us to maybe do more that we weren't doing before. A painful one. We appreciate your time, learned a lot during this and I hope it was enjoyable for you. Thank you so much for your time, we appreciate it. Thank you.