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.
They’re hurting because they got addicted to international student funding and grew to ridiculous size, then that funding dried up and they don’t want to shrink back down to normal size.
It’s like a person being fed all-you-can-eat fried chicken and milkshakes, gaining 300 lbs, then being put on a healthy diet and complaining they’re hungry all the time.
Isn’t growing universities a good thing? It seems to me that giving everyone access to a university education would be highly beneficial to the people.
Universities have grown way beyond what they need to for the domestic student population. This is growth squarely aimed at international students who pay 5-10x what domestic students pay in tuition. Cut off the tap of international students and you end up with huge unused capacity and budget shortfalls.
The didn’t get “addicted”, they had their funding model fucked with by various levels of government. They don’t choose their fucking revenue models! The state clawed back a bunch of funding and replaced it with international students, and now they’re taking that away. So the result is massive hardship.
They got fucked by a model forced on them by McGuinty, then yanked out from them by Ford. In 4 years, there will not be room to train students as programs retract.
Ontario’s university system has been the only driver of the economy since the 60s producing thousands of engineers and scientists. But does a high school diploma Premiere understand that? Or does he have a personal problem with post secondary education he flunked out of in 1984?