How Ontario Sleepwalked into a Crisis in Higher Education

On June 29, 2018, Doug Ford’s first day as premier of Ontario, he cancelled the Colleges Task Force.

Composed of experts and community members, the task force had been working to address a series of issues left on the table after a college faculty strike a year earlier—low wages, increased reliance on precarious contract work, provincial funding that is the lowest of any jurisdiction in Canada, and the general deterioration of student learning conditions.

“That task force had made significant movement towards a proposal, a series of recommendations for the future of the college system,” says Anna Ainsworth, a professor at Seneca Polytechnic and president of OPSEU Local 560, the union that represents the college’s faculty and staff. “But it was unilaterally cancelled. That was on day one.”

Nearly seven years later, the burgeoning crisis in post-secondary education that the Colleges Task Force was created to address has come to a head. Last year, the federal government announced a 35 percent reduction in the number of study permits it would issue for international students, whose tuition dollars Ontario’s colleges and universities have come to rely on in the absence of adequate provincial funding. This year, they announced a further cut of 10 percent. As a result, Ontario’s 24 colleges are projecting a billion-dollar deficit by the 2026-2027 school year. In Toronto, Centennial College has already suspended 49 programs; Seneca Polytechnic has closed its Markham campus; and just last week George Brown College offered buyouts and early retirement packages to staff and announced the suspension of several programs.

Universities in the province face a similar road ahead. Despite a tuition freeze in 2019, the province’s undergraduate students have some of the highest tuition rates in the country and graduate with more student debt. Meanwhile, much like the colleges, Ontario’s universities have been starved of public funding for the past decade, receiving the lowest public funding of any province in the country. To compensate, they have been cutting to the bone, consolidating departments and programs, increasing class sizes, and deepening their reliance on precariously employed contract faculty. At York University, admissions to over a dozen programs were suspended just last week.

“The reality is, there are less and less resources at the university-level,” says Nigmendra Narain, the president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. “So, we have graduate and undergraduate programs being cut, and the students that remain in the system, they’ve got bigger classes, a lack of access to professors and the services they need to succeed.”

The crisis in Ontario’s post-secondary education sector did not begin with Doug Ford and the current Progressive Conservative government. It is a result of failures by successive administrations to foresee demographic demands on the province’s colleges and universities, and to commit the funding necessary to meet them.

As in most provinces, funding for Ontario’s post-secondary institutions is calculated based on the number of domestic students they enroll. The average Canadian university receives just over $16,000 for each full-time domestic student registered, but this funding ranges wildly between provinces. At the top is Newfoundland, at more than $30,000 per student. Ontario, meanwhile, sits comfortably at the bottom, committing just over $10,000.

This funding, and the number of funded full-time domestic students each university can enroll, were frozen in 2017 under then-Premier Kathleen Wynne. Ostensibly to protect the interests of universities in Northern Ontario with fluctuating enrolment numbers, the freeze was meant to be adjusted annually to reflect demographic changes. Instead, it has been left unchanged over the past seven years under Ford’s leadership. Meanwhile, demand for higher education from Ontario’s domestic students continued to rise, meaning these institutions took on more domestic students than they received public funding for, simply to provide qualified students the educational opportunities they deserve.

Currently, universities are assuming the costs for 28,000 domestic students for whom they receive no public funding. By 2030, this number is projected to rise to 100,000. If the provincial funding cap is not lifted, it will become financially untenable for Ontario’s universities to educate them.

This combination of factors created the conditions for our present crisis. In the absence of the necessary public funding, Ontario’s colleges and universities turned to another stream of revenue, one that would inadvertently grow a cottage industry of recruiters, loan sharks, and middlemen in its wake, and bankrupt families in poorer countries around the world looking to send their children abroad for a Canadian education.

Five decades ago, in 1977, Ontario was the first province to enact differential fee policies for international students, charging them three times as much in tuition to attend the same programs as domestic students. Other provinces quickly followed suit until, by 2010, international education contributed $8 billion a year to the Canadian economy.

Not so incidentally, public spending on higher education in Ontario fell by more than 25 percent over the same stretch of time. In 2014, the federal Tory government under Stephen Harper laid out a new higher education strategy that sought to capitalize on these students’ market potential. It proposed an ambitious plan to double the number of international students in the country by 2022. Upon taking office in 2015, Justin Trudeau’s administration accelerated this plan.

By the time Doug Ford took office in 2018, this goal had been surpassed. Over the next four years, his first term, the provincial Tories pursued the aggressive growth of the international education sector, ignoring warning signs about the unsustainability of that growth.

In 2019, to address the fact that Ontario has some of the highest tuition rates for domestic students, the province cut tuition by 10 percent and instituted a freeze that remains to this day. This move, however popular, was not matched with a corresponding investment in post-secondary education. Instead, the province cut operating grants by more than $60 million per year without increasing funding for domestic students, meaning that public funding continued to erode over the following years due to inflation.

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the combined loss of revenue between 2018 and 2022 for Ontario’s colleges and universities exceeded $1.1 billion.

Meanwhile, the Ford government also instituted a series of cuts that hurt domestic students, including scrapping a program that would have provided free tuition for low-income students, and cutting almost $1 billion in OSAP grants, converting them instead into repayable loans. Today, Ontario’s domestic students have the highest student loans of any province in the country.

In the next five years, Ontario’s universities will not be able to afford to educate 100,000 of its own students, spurring fears of an exodus of young talent from the province.

To compensate for these cuts, not only did Ontario’s colleges and universities enrol more international students, they charged them more too. Between 2018 and 2025, the average undergraduate tuition for international students in Ontario rose from around $35,000 to just under $50,000. They now pay five times more than domestic students.

“Universities have used international student tuition to make up for the provincial funding gap,” says a report by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), “with the province effectively downloading responsibility for funding a large portion of its public postsecondary system to international students and their families.”

In 2022, the provincial Tories got re-elected in a landslide victory with the lowest voter turnout in history. That year, international students contributed a whopping $20 billion to Ontario’s economy. However, the cracks in this model had become impossible to ignore.

The previous year, the Auditor General released a report on the province’s funding for colleges and found they lacked “a formal and comprehensive long-term strategy and action plan to mitigate the long-term financial sustainability risks that the high reliance on international student enrolment poses to the sector.”

Public sentiment turned on international students, unleashing a wave of racist invective. They were blamed for using food banks, blamed for the housing crisis, and blamed by Ford himself for COVID-19. In Scarborough, news spread of one student living under a bridge. A funeral home in Ford’s riding of Etobicoke North went public about a spike in suicides, reporting that they alone repatriated the bodies of four or five international students a month to India.

“We have been using international students as ATMs,” says Nigmendra Narain, the president of OCUFA. “That doesn’t just degrade the student experience, it degrades us.”

In early 2024, the federal government announced a policy that would mark the beginning of the end of the international student era. It reduced study permits by 35 percent, distributing these cuts across the provinces and by institution level. In Ontario, these cuts were largely absorbed by the college system, which now foresees a billion-dollar deficit by next year.

At George Brown College in downtown Toronto, this has meant the suspension of 20 programs, with more announced in late February.

“The proximate cause of the immediate crisis we’re in is the [immigration] policy changes, but the ultimate cause is the chronic underfunding of the college system,” says Jeff Brown, a professor at George Brown and vice-president of OPSEU Local 556, the union that represents its faculty and staff. “You wouldn’t have this much disruption resulting from federal policy changes if you weren’t already in a very precarious position.”

This precariousness does not just stem from an overreliance on international students, who made up 41 percent of the college’s student body before the federal caps were announced. It also has to do with decisions made by college administrators during the international student gold rush, the millions they made in surplus income.

Earlier this week, Toronto Today reported that the college would be offering “voluntary retirement incentives to longtime workers, and voluntary exit incentives to full-time employees and part-time support staff.”

“Knock on wood, we haven’t heard anything about layoffs yet at George Brown for faculty,” says Brown. “But one of the reasons for that, perversely, is because we have such a small percentage of full-time faculty.” Instead of layoffs, contract faculty just won’t get their contracts renewed.

At Seneca Polytechnic, which closed the Markham Campus home to its International Academy last fall, similar uncertainties loom over faculty, around 70 percent of whom are also hired on contract.

“By the senior administration’s own admission, the contract faculty are going to be the first to be let go before the full-timers,” says Anna Ainsworth, the president of Seneca’s faculty union. “We have already seen a reduction of contract faculty in September, and a further reduction this semester.”