The Decibel - Ontario colleges see alarming job losses

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

A new report has found that 19 of Ontario’s 24 publicly-funded colleges have cut more than 8,000 jobs since January 2024, when the new limits on international students came into effect. It’s the fullest picture yet of the consequences of the government’s changing immigration policy. Joe Friesen covers post-secondary education in Canada. He explains the details of the report, the reputational damage this sector has suffered and how colleges became so reliant on international student fees.  Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Publicly funded colleges in Ontario are feeling the strain, and a new report shows the fullest picture of the problem to date. An independent labour arbitrator found that over 8,000 jobs have been lost since January 2024. That's when the federal government set new limits on how many international students Canadian post-secondary institutions could accept. The ripple effects of these cuts spread beyond the people who lost their jobs. And Ontario isn't the only province dealing with the fallout.

Joe Friesen covers the post-secondary sector in Canada. He's on the show today to explain the report's findings and how colleges found themselves in this situation in the first place. I'm Irene Gallia, guest hosting The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Joe. Thanks for joining us. Hi, thanks for having me. So to start, I want to get a sense of the significance of this report.

8,000 jobs in one sector seems like a lot, but is it? It's a very big number. Uh, we haven't seen any layoff like this, I think in many industries for a long time. One comparable point recently was the Hudson's Bay Company, which I think was a similar number, uh, and that was, you that was a Canadian institution with locations across the country shutting down. So 8,000 in Ontario alone in the college sector is certainly, that's a big number. Where did this 8,000 number even come from?

So the 8,000 number comes from a report by William Kaplan, who was brought in to help manage a dispute between the College Employer Council and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, OPSU, in a negotiated contract. Now OPSU represents about 15,000 employees in the college sector, and that's not all employees. There's certainly lots who are administrators, managers, et cetera, who aren't included. But he provided a summary of the whole situation involving the sector, which is really helpful. And had he not done so, I don't know that we would have ever seen this number.

You know, what Kaplan found, I mean, in a word, he said this is a very grave situation. He described the more than 600 and so program closures as alarming. And one thing that Kaplan noted in his report is this is not even all colleges, this is 19 of 24, so there's five who aren't included here. And yet the number is already quite large.

The union OPSU has said they are anticipating more layoffs, that the number could rise closer to 10,000. So it's obviously very significant and the union really wanted to draw attention to it because the numbers have been coming out slowly on a community by community basis, but this is the first time we've been draw attention to it because the numbers have been coming out slowly on a community by community basis, but this is the first time we've been able to see

it in the whole. And let's break down this number a little. What kinds of jobs have been affected? So there are some full-time teaching jobs, about 600 roughly of those, and a much larger number of part-time teaching positions, more than 3000. So in some cases, people would have a job full-time teaching and they're teaching a

full load. Some of the people teaching at colleges would have careers elsewhere and be coming in as sort of professional experts doing a little job on the side. And there are many people who actually cobble together a career across many different colleges. So you could be teaching one course, say at Seneca in Toronto and another at Centennial and another at Conestoga and Kitchener. So there's, there's different ways of making careers work in this area. And so, you know, you're seeing a whole bunch of different kinds of people

affected and in addition, there are support staff, administrators, all the people that make an institution run. I think almost all areas of the college sector have been affected. What have you been hearing from those people who have lost their jobs? Well, it's obviously a really difficult thing. For many people, this is a career. It's what they love. It's what they've done for a long time. That's something they've taken a lot of satisfaction from. So it's painful. It's hard to lose a job. I was talking to one woman, Shannon Nelson, who was one of those college

instructors who had cobbled together a very good career, working at several different places, uh, in the same term. So she would teach a course at Fanshawe, teach a course at Sheridan. And she had more work than she could handle. And then all of a sudden this spring, it went down from say more than five courses that she

was teaching to one. That was the only offer she had. And she realized very quickly her life was about to change. And so she's been applying for other jobs. And when I spoke to her, this was a few months ago now, she'd applied for over a hundred jobs and had interviews at only a handful. So you can imagine multiply that on the scale of 8,000 people. And this is having a big effect on many people's lives.

Why are we hearing about job losses at Ontario colleges and not in other provinces? I suspect it's happening at post-secondary institutions all across the country. Ontario, because it is a unified sector and you know we did get this one report, it's easier to encapsulate it. Ontario also is the place that Ontario's colleges in particular went in the biggest for the international student boom of the last decade or so. So it had a very large proportion of students from abroad and that brought in a lot of tuition revenue for many years. But in 2024, when the federal government decided to severely limit the number of international study permits it would allocate, Ontario was the most severely affected. But there, I'm sure there have been layoffs in other parts of the country as well.

These 8,000 jobs were at publicly funded colleges, but what about universities? What's happening there? So at universities too, there have been some financial impacts. International tuition makes up a big portion of their revenue as well. The universities in part because their cycles are longer, you're looking at four-year degrees typically versus a two-year or one-year cycle in the college system. They will feel the effect a little more slowly and the proportion of students at most universities who are international was not as high as it was

at some Ontario colleges. Now, every institution is a little different. So you are gonna hear about the effects of this at places all across the country. So far, it hasn't been quite as severe at universities because they didn't ramp up their international enrollment quite as quickly, but it's still going to have an impact. All right. So let's start to dig into why this is happening.

You've mentioned the role of international students, but what exactly are college administrators saying about why they've had to cut back on so many jobs? Is it simply because there are fewer international students? I think that's certainly part of it. The loss of international students is going to have a big impact on college revenues. There's just no getting around that.

They make up a huge portion of what a college takes in in a given year. So international students, over the last decade, as I was mentioning, the numbers have grown considerably. And their tuition was allowed to grow, while Ontario students in particular, the domestic students, their tuition was cut by 10% in 2019 by the provincial government and

then frozen. And just for context, what is the difference between the tuition that an international student would pay versus a Canadian student? So an international student will pay several times what a Canadian student does and it can range. So in the college sector, a Canadian student

is paying, I think somewhere in the range of about three and a half thousand. An international student would probably pay about five times that in Ontario. But in the university sector, you know, you can see some tuition prices for international students over $60,000. I think the average is closer, is in the

thirties, whereas Canadian average would be about maybe seven or 8,000. So they're paying substantially more. To be fair, there is no provincial grant that comes along with that student. So every student gets a certain funding level from the provincial government. In part, the reason they pay more is to cover that.

But there's also an additional amount that the institution is keeping and has been using to fund operations. Wow, it's significantly higher. Yeah, so domestic tuition income hasn't changed for six years. Over those years people's salaries have tended to go up so that puts more strain on an institutional budget. The shortfall was being made up for with international students and for a number of years the money was pretty good. you look back three or four years ago, the whole system had a surplus of more than half a billion dollars.

Almost every college in the province was running a surplus. And then all of a sudden the door for international students was closed by the federal government, not entirely, but substantially. And the impact was almost immediate. Joe, can you just remind us of the specifics around the new limits on international students? So in January 2024, the federal government was facing a lot of pressure about housing.

And they wanted to cut down the number of temporary residents. So they said they would limit the number of visas that they would issue by 35%. And then there were a number of announcements that sort of shifted that number to make it a little bit smaller, even more constrained. And this year they were cut by a further 10 percent and they also added the grad students to the total who hadn't been previously being included. So that sort

of constrained universities and colleges even further. The new federal government, the Carney government, has said it wants to cut the number of temporary residents to below 5% of the population, which is even smaller than the current constrained number of international students. So this number could be getting even tighter. So the government is putting a limit or a cap on the number of international students that can be accepted into these colleges? More or less. They don't exactly have that power legally. What they have a legal power to do is to constrain the number of applications they process. So they're processing fewer applications, which essentially has the effect of meaning fewer students can be admitted. And what happens is

the provincial government is given a certain number of permits it can allocate to institutions. And so the institutions get a chance to make these offers to international students, then the international students apply. And if they're accepted by the federal government in a somewhat complicated process, then they can come to that institution. But essentially it works out that there's an

effective 35% cap on the number of visa permits that Canada is going to issue. Do we know if the colleges are hitting their caps? Are they filling all those spots? So what I've been hearing is that the cap itself is actually no longer the most relevant point. It's that the demand has been significantly curtailed because Canada's brand has been damaged.

And students who have seen that this policy has changed a number of times over the last year or so, they're seeing that Canada may not be the welcoming place that maybe they thought it was a year or two ago, and they're voting with their feet and applying elsewhere. So those numbers, I believe, are not as high as people were expecting them to be. We'll be right back. So fewer students are coming in and the colleges have cut 8,000 jobs in response. What are the ripple effects of this? Well, it's got a lot of ripple effects. I mean, at the institutional level, they've responded by trying to save money.

So they're cutting jobs and all those people are, you know, out of work. That affects the economy. They're spending less, that they change their plans for the future. I'm sure it's a bit of a blow to many families. Um, they've cut the number of programs that they offer as well, or suspended admissions to those programs. And that's a huge number. I think about 650 across the province have been either closed or suspended.

And that means there's less choice for students in the college system. It may make college as a whole less attractive to domestic students. So over the longer run, we may be seeing fewer graduates who can do some of the jobs that our economy needs. And that's something that OPSU has raised as a real concern, that this will have an impact on local economies, not only in the big centers, but in smaller places, northern Ontario, rural communities where there are colleges

and where they rely on some of these graduates to bring new vitality to their businesses. Right. And just briefly, are there particular examples of colleges that have been significantly affected by this? Well, almost every college has been significantly affected, but if you look at say, you know,

Centennial, I think they've closed more than 50 programs. St. Lawrence, I think it's a number in the range of 40. Uh, Sheridan, I believe it was about 40 programs. Seneca is closing one of its campuses, has closed one of its campuses, which was used primarily by international students.

Confederation College and Thunder Bay has paused plans to build a new trades training center. They're looking to find ways to save money any way they can. So what you're saying then is that these colleges had become reliant on international student fees. They were hugely reliant and it's funding a major

part of their operations and has been for at least a decade. And what they have done to sort of make up for their shortfalls in finding is just to add more international students. That has been their answer for the last several years. Now, part of the story is the level of funding they're getting from the provincial government. I mentioned already the tuition fee freeze, but there's also the operational funding they get from the provincial government, which is, I believe, the lowest in the country or close to on a per student basis. So the colleges have been asking for more money for a long time, but they knew also the risks of getting involved in the international student game. So in 2021, the auditor general warned that the sector as a whole was over-reliiant on what could potentially

be a risky sector since there could be some change in the international regime that made international students less likely to come to Canada. And if that ever happened, it would have a devastating impact on the sector. So we had hints of that with diplomatic conflicts with Saudi Arabia, with China, and then more recently with India. But the telling blow in the end, um, to use that old horror phrase, we didn't realize the call was going to be coming from inside the house. It was the federal government that said, we're going to reduce the number of international students.

So if the Ontario auditor general was warning about this, even before the federal government set this new cap, why didn't schools or provincial governments do anything about this problem? Well, some may have done some things. They may have tried to reduce their reliance on international students, but there's only so many

leavers at their disposal to raise income. One of them is domestic tuition. Well, the provincial government had put a legal cap on that. They couldn't do that. One of them is domestic tuition. Well, the provincial government had put a legal cap on that. They couldn't do that. One of them is international tuition. Well, they certainly took advantage of that for all it was worth in most cases. Uh, and then there are things like operational funding from the

provincial government, which had not increased substantially. Although in the last year or so, the provincial government has injected an additional, I think a couple billion dollars to universities and colleges. And there's things like ancillary income, which in the pandemic was harder to come by things like residences, cafeterias, other ways of making money on a campus.

But there, there just aren't that many other tools available to them. What they can do is cut costs and maybe they could have done that a little sooner to avoid the mess that we're seeing over the last few months, but the result may ultimately have been the same. You mentioned the Ontario government said it was increasing funding. How much are we talking about here? I think the numbers they provided are somewhere in the range of about 5 billion annually is what they have been providing. And they've increased that by about 2 billion over the last couple years. Okay, do schools think that's

enough? Schools do not think that's enough. They are asking for more, which you know you would expect them to and the government is trying to run a tight ship. But there have been some expert panels on the outside brought in to consult on this who have said that the money needs to increase. For example, there was a blue ribbon panel appointed by the Ontario government that said in order to ensure the financial sustainability of the sector that there needed to be a multi-billion dollar injection over several years and the schools needed the right to raise domestic tuition fees if they were going to be sustainable. And the provincial government provided some of the money that that blue ribbon panel was asking for,

but only about half, I think, of what they recommended. A blue ribbon panel is a group of experts, right? Yeah, that was a group of outside experts appointed by the province, led by a former academic administrator at Queens. Joe, essentially what you're saying is that in a way, both governments and colleges profited off of

international students. It allowed governments to keep their funding low and colleges to earn a profit. In a way, yes. Both parties benefited greatly from this arrangement. You're right. Governments were able to fund the post-secondary system at a lower level because institutions made up the difference with international student fees. And the colleges grew quite a bit in this era, thanks to the international students coming. There were some warning signs that this couldn't last forever and then it didn't. So the next school year starts in about a month and a half. Given what's happened over the last year, how are people feeling right now? I think it's an anxious time in the sector. People are wondering what is still to come.

You know, I don't know that this is the end of the cuts. We may only be at the beginning of a long process of basically the sector shrinking. We'll have to see how people respond in the next few months. Everyone is going to be asked to do what they were doing before, but with fewer resources. There's less to go around. I suspect morale is not great given the number of programs that are closing that people are looking at friends and colleagues who have departed or who are expecting to

lose their jobs. That's a hard kind of environment to work in. You know, we'll have to see what happens. It could go a number of different ways. Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That was Joe Friesen, The Globe's post-secondary education reporter. That's it for today.

I'm guest host, Irene Galia. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein and Ali Graham. Kevin Sexton mixed today's episode. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pacenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening.