Y’all may recall January 22nd, when federal Immigration Marc Miller slapped a national cap on international student visas which implied a 35% cut (but larger in Ontario) and effectively killed off the PPP industry for (mainly Ontario) community colleges. You may also recall September 16th, when Miller returned to say “surprise! Now the cap includes graduate students” and also made changes to the post-graduate work-visa program which are likely to obliterate colleges’ ability to recruit students (the guesses I am hearing from the sector right now about the expected drop international enrolment are in the 70-80% range from 2023 levels).
Until two weeks ago, most of what I was hearing from the sector did not indicate a thorough understanding of what kind of carnage this was going to cause. The talk was mostly about hospitality and travel budgets. Now, however, I think the sector is slowly coming to grips with how much this is going to re-shape the system. Let me summarize how this is going to play out in different parts of the sector.
Ontario Colleges. Think of these institutions as ground zero for the disaster to come (though of course, some of them are also responsible for said disaster). Roughly 50 percent of their income comes from international student tuition fees. The January changes will start to bite over the current school year (remember, they are still getting tuition fees from students who enrolled last year before the January changes were implemented), but by 2025-26 the expected recruitment losses will mean an average drop of about 35-40% in total income, system-wide (higher in some places lower in others).
How is that going to play out? Well, as noted back here, many institutions have some healthy surpluses they can use as a buffer. And to the extent they haven’t used previous surpluses on building new campuses, they can use money banked from the last few years to cushion the blow. But an income drop that serious is going to burn through any reserves very quickly, so we should expect institutions to try to restructure their way back to structural balance within two years (i.e. 2026-7 at the latest). And that’s going to mean a lot of job cuts. First off at the various PPP institutions around the GTA (we have no idea about numbers here, but I’d guess around 3,000 full-time employees there, maybe 4,000), but then also at the “home” campuses, where we can expect full-time headcount loss in the 20-25% range (again, this is an average, YMMV). All told, that’s job losses of at least 9,000 full-time employees, and probably at least that many part-time instructors as well (my sincere best wishes to everyone involved in OPSEU bargaining this fall).
Think we’re going to get through this without program closures? Think again. We’re talking about hundreds of program closures and all those high-cost programs in health and trades are 100% on the table, because the provincial government simply does not fund these programs at an adequate level. They’ve been cross-subsidized for years by international students. And as I said back here, its going to be a program apocalypse, one provincial governments are completely unprepared to handle because international student fees have allowed them to stay in denial about the extent of their own underfunding over the past decade.
You’ve heard the phrase “f— around and find out”? We’re about to get to the find out phase.
Colleges Outside Ontario. The effect of the latest Miller announcement on college enrolments across the country will mirror those in Ontario, but the financial effects will be different because the level of dependence on international student fees varies so much. In Quebec, close to zero income is coming from this source. It’s a bit higher in the Atlantic, higher still in the Prairies, and in BC higher still (though not quite on the same plane as in Ontario). So the dynamics elsewhere are going to be similar in terms of program closures (with health and trades programs being in the front lines) and job losses (my estimate on the latter would be about 3,000, mostly in British Columbia) but somewhat attenuated.
Universities. It’s harder to work out what’s going to happen in universities for a variety of reasons. The September policy changes to PGWP did not affect universities, but we know for certain that changes that international enrolments are down, even in places that were totally unaffected by Miller’s January policy changes. I understand that Université Laval is apparently down 25% in new international students this fall. Since Laval is located in a province that was effectively untouched by Miller’s January policy announcement (the province already had letters of attestation and was nowhere near using its cap allotment), you’d have to figure that this is kind of the minimum drop we are likely to see elsewhere.
Another data point: yesterday, the Atlantic Association of Universities released its October 1 enrolment figures. The basic figures are that international student numbers are down about 3,000 from last year, about one-third from first-time first-year undergraduate students, one-third from students transferring from 2+2s or 3+1s arrangements. One surprise was the number of graduate students who in theory were not affected by policy changes but who were probably put off by Minister Miller talking down Canadian higher education for most of last winter and spring. You can’t quite tell from the data what the percentage drop in new international students is, but my read of the above data is that this is probably down about 40%, which is consistent with the observation that many institutions could not meet their visa allocation cap.
At the university level, international student fees account for 20% of total income. A drop of 25-40% in international student enrolments therefore implies – eventually – a drop of 5-8% in total revenue. But how quickly all this happens depends on the structure of an institution’s enrolments. If all of its international students are in four-year programs, then it will take four years for the full effects of the policy change to be seen and the immediate hit will only be 1.25-2%, with the rest coming in subsequent years. However, If most international students are in undergraduate 3+1 or 2+2 programs, or are in one-year graduate programs, then the income stream is going to dry up a lot faster. And of course, numbers might rebound. The changes to PGWP mean colleges aren’t going to need as many spots under the provincial caps, and universities might actually have room to expand in future years. Maybe. If the country’s image abroad stops tanking, if the institution can offer the right programs at the right price point, etc.UniversitiesoutsideOntario, Quebec and British Columbia might also be able raise their fees to counteract the loss of student numbers, though this too is uncertain.
In other words, it’s not really clear how much universities are going to lose. It is clear, though, that income growth isn’t on the cards anymore. And so, at the very minimum, maintaining the practice of staff and faculty salaries rising at roughly 3% per year either has to come to an end or has to be counteracted by trimming staff counts. If you had to make me guess about how this will play out in terms of staff numbers, I’d say we’re probably looking at losses of 5-10% of full-time jobs (i.e. 6,000 to 12,000 positions) over the next four years achieved largely through attrition.
Tl;dr: the carnage will be immediate and catastrophic in Ontario colleges, immediate and severe in colleges elsewhere, and slow-moving but severe in universities. With, in total, probably something like 20,000 job losses. It’s not going to be pretty. And it’s deeply unnecessary: true, something had to be done about Southern Ontario’s housing market. It’s just not clear this was that something.
The only ray of hope here is that there is at least a chance that the system on the other side will be smarter, leaner, better. But for that to be true, we have to resist the lure of “enshittification” —attempting to keep doing the same thing we’ve always done but with fewer resources. This is a terrible idea, of course, but one made very likely because of the way university governance operates (college governance tends the same way but not quite as hard). Reimagination and redesign of programs and services is the preferable if more difficult course. Better is possible, even in a financial crisis.
The blog is off next week. See you again on October 30th
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There’s more to the story of reduced international graduate student enrolment than just the reputational damage. Word is that Global Affairs Canada dropped the ball on processing study permits for graduate students through both massive processing delays and improper denials (perhaps because of practical confusion around the carve-out for grad students).
At my university new graduate enrolments in my department are down 50% from last year. We sent out the same number of admissions letters. But visa approval rates have been way lower. Seems like another tool being used to bring down enrolment.
Visa approval is tie to work permit approval (for 2 years study visa + 3 years work permit). Work permit approved for high demand jobs list. If the study program is not related to the high demand job list, the study visa is not approved.
Just an anecdote, but I’ve been getting far fewer emails than in past years from international students inquiring about doing grad studies with me. Seems like the interest in Canada has collapsed.
I teach at a public college in Ontario (15 years) and it’s shocking how few employees of the college understand what is about to happen here. Our college is likely to suffer a decrease of $80 to $100 M in operating revenue, with corresponding layoffs in faculty, support, and administration. Entire departments (business, hospitality & tourism, & culinary come to mind) will be mostly wiped out, left with only a small rump of domestic students in a few remaining programs.
And yet our union seems determined to take us out on strike……
I’m wondering how private “universities” play into all this. With the government effectively creating a two-tiered system (exempting bachelors and masters degrees from universities from the PGWP restrictions/CIP codes), this effectively benefits these private universities – pushes would-be international BA students away from publicly funded colleges and into private, for profit “universities”
Not my real name posting anonymous.
I am a part time instructor at one of the PPP colleges in Toronto. When the announcement was first made back in January the admin played up a good game of trying to save the school but realistically there is just no way to support the scale of the the building and staff that have been created without a lot of international students paying a lot of money. So the school is basically winding down and each new term there are less students and less instructors/staff. So it’s definitely a morbid environment and pretty sure there is not going to be a staff Xmas party this year!!!
Personally, although I need the money it’s probably for the best. Most students are here to get the work permit and could care less about what we are trying to teach them. Although there are some students that are eager to learn but they are the exception. Personally I am not against immigration but it’s probably best to just charge people directly for a work permit and skip the two year process of “playing school”.
Surprisingly, and perhaps this is a sad statement on the Canadian economy, the school was able to build a very strong faculty. Lots of instructors with masters and PhDs from big name schools with great work experience. So the students are definitely getting a good education (if they were interested in learning haha).
In your last paragraph, you use “enshittification” in a way I’ve never seen before, though I’ve copied the Doctorow essay to my tablet to read later, in case I missed something.
In any case, the greater risk, in my mind, is that we become so besotted with “change” that we undermine and ultimately abandon the life of the mind altogether. What this terrifying juncture might provide is an opportunity to abandon the treatment of education as a business — at which it is manifestly failing — and, at the personal level, to abandon careerism, since universities can’t make payroll, never mind hiring half-million-dollar-a-year superstars.
Realizing that we’ll never individually rise very high, and institutionally will never amount to anything but a public service, we might return to the Dewey-ite, Humboldian, and Newman-ish bases of the university as such.
An interesting question on the side. We are talking about the very high probability of loss of 1000s of well-paying jobs, not simply in Ontario, but in the GTA. Who will perceive this as the greater political risk – Premier Ford or Prime Minister Trudeau? How will each of them respond to their own risk assessment? Or maybe a few thousand constituents do not matter that much in the GTA? But then again, if this would be a car manufacturer closing shop…
The absurdly high number of international student population in several Ontario and BC institutions are there because each stakeholder in the recruitment and visa process either turned a blind eye to the skewed numbers or were a party knowingly to the damage this would do to the social fabric. We have talked about need (turning into greed) of the public colleges to get international students as the only way to survive. However an important element that everyone is missing out is that in the last 6-7 years the Peter’s principle “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”has been playing out at the public colleges and some universities. The senior administrators at these colleges and especially in International were people who came into that role because of successful recruitment numbers were actually not suitable for leadership roles. They had no vision, no strategy, no fallback plans but only numbers to show as an achievement. So the same method and plan continued leading to the current situation. On the side of the federal government they lacked the resources and the political will to do their job which was to keep non genuine students away. Eventually the system was designed to collapse.
Yeah, tracks with my calculation of a 25% of revenue from 2017 levels (after inflation) for St. Clair. I dont think the public will realize the results.
Positive spins? Let’s get those domestic stay at home in the basement kids back to school. Ontario colleges vary in their PPP #s and it was just 5 years ago I think we had very few, we’ll readapt. Of little consolation is some colleges use PT employees, many are students or grads, as a buffer for hard times and they would be the hardest hit before slapping union folks with layoffs.
Not only will the resulting decrease in full-time faculty positions affect current staff, but it will also have a spin off future effect on new PhD graduates hoping for careers as academics. Positions that are already hard enough to come by will become virtually impossible.
International students generally find Canadian cities boring. Not much of a nightlife and lack of social activities leading many international students not wanting to apply to Canadian schools.
Ontario Colleges started offering early voluntary retirement incentives during Covid and have continued to do so since 2020, decreasing the overall number of senior faculty.
Ontario Colleges have a combined “cash on hand” of almost $3 Billion dollars, with a few racking up some large surpluses, i.e. Conestoga with around $700million.
Colleges cutting trades programs is a big mistake considering the number of journeymen trades people retiring over the next 3-5 years. which will hurt all the housing plans made by all levels of government.
The problem with the surplus, though, is that the most irresponsible colleges have amassed the biggest war chests. The schools like Conestoga, Fanshawe, and Niagara that went all-in on international will be able to weather the storm far better than the responsible actors like Mohawk, Durham, Fleming who are already making cuts. It feels uniquely unfair for Conestoga to hang in there for longer than others with its giant treasure chest of sector-breaking visa loot.
The country’s public universities are insisting that they have been responsible players in the international student marketplace. They cite data to support this assertion and focus on the loss of “the best and brightest” from around the world in high calibre programs, mostly STEM fields. I truly believe that they will win at least some concessions from Miller and the feds in the future. Frankly, their case has merit.
But my oh my, Ontario’s public colleges do not appear to have a clue. I just read the string of press releases on the Colleges Ontario website and they are not even claiming to have been responsible players in the international student marketplace, nor are they pitching an alternative plan anyone could actually get behind. Their entire approach seems to be “It’s not fair!” and “leave us alone!” Jeezus. Surely they can do better than that. Maybe read the room?
The international students cap is for everyone private and public.
Former college administrator here at a place that was central to the crisis. I left shortly after the pandemic. As much as I’d love to say it was in protest of the President’s decision-making gaffes, or in protest of the risky internationalization strategy, it was essentially due to burnout.
I remember joking with some colleagues in 2015 that we were all aboard the S.S. Titanic, though I had worried more about some sort of diplomatic retaliation from India being the cause of us sinking rather than the Feds pulling the plug.
So here’s my message for everyone here: anybody in any decision-making role at a public college who didn’t see us steer towards the iceberg in the past ten years years ago is either wilfully ignorant or completely incompetent. We knew. We did nothing to even slow down the ship.
Direct your anger at the coming collapse accordingly.