Ontario doesn’t need a new university

Last fall, I spent a weekend reporting from a student recruitment fair in Beijing. Representatives of Toronto’s York University and Sudbury’s Laurentian University were all there, down in the basement of the China National Convention Center, handing out flyers in Mandarin and desperately trying to convince Chinese students to travel halfway across the planet to come to their schools.

I wasn’t surprised to see them recruiting 10,000 kilometres from home. The ranks of homegrown 18- to 20-year olds in Ontario is dropping, so places like York and Laurentian either need to find fresh blood elsewhere, or make big budget cuts.

The Ontario government is well aware of this struggle to fill post-secondary seats. That’s what makes it so surprising to hear that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals are creating an entirely new French-language university.

The estimated $83.5-million “startup cost” of the newly proposed waterfront campus in Toronto — which its proponents believe federal taxpayers will fund half of — would be better spent on fixing broken classrooms in existing institutes, or giving raises to underpaid contract professors. This new university is really the last thing Ontario needs.

The government press release announcing the school quotes Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews as saying the university will improve “access” for francophones. The hastily commissioned report that outlines the proposal argues this population is currently “under-served.”

But the truth is, there is no francophone access problem; francophones are already very well served.

There were 6,340 students in Grade 12 at French-language school boards in Ontario in 2015. They had 397 French undergraduate programs to choose from, mostly at the University of Ottawa and Laurentian, but also at places like the Université de Hearst’s three campuses in Ontario’s North and York’s Glendon College in Toronto. Considering that about one in four Grade 12 students goes directly on to university, there’s roughly one undergraduate program in French for every four university-bound graduates from francophone school boards.

The 95 per cent of Ontarians who are Anglophones have thousands of programs and dozens of campuses, to be sure. But many also have first-year courses with several hundred students vying for a single professor’s attention.

The report suggests that Laurentian and Ottawa are too far from many francophones. But more than 60 per cent of Ontario’s francophones live in either Ontario’s east or northeast.

Meanwhile, the tiny francophone population without a major bilingual university nearby is spread out from Thunder Bay to Windsor to Oshawa. It’s hard to see how a Toronto-based school would fix their problem.

Besides, there is already a special $300 annual travel grant available solely to francophones who study more than 80 kilometres from their parents’ homes.

And again, there’s no evidence of a widespread access problem. The days when discrimination meant francophones couldn’t go to university have long passed. A 2013 review by the government’s own higher-education agency, HEQCO, notes that students from Frenchlanguage school boards are slightly more likely to attend university (24.6 per cent) than students from English boards (22.6 per cent).

There’s also the question of whether this new university could attract enough students to be viable. The report’s authors admit they did not have enough time to carry out a “market study.”

But even if it were to attract substantial numbers, they would mostly come at the expense of other universities, like Ottawa, Laurentian and York’s Glendon College, which — as mentioned — are struggling to find students. Ottawa’s French programs are so under-subscribed, they charge French-speaking international students the domestic rate (a discount of at least $10,000 per year) just to fill a few more seats.

So why would the government commit to something so wasteful? One explanation is the Liberals see Franco-Ontarians as an important part of their re-election strategy.

The Liberals did just announce they will split the NDP-held, far-north Ontario riding of Timmins-James Bay into two ridings, Timmins and Mushkegowuk, despite the fact that this region doesn’t have nearly the population to justify two seats. The new Timmins riding would be about 40-percent francophone, and pollby-poll results from the last election suggest the Liberals have a better chance of winning in Timmins than they did in Timmins-James Bay. The university announcement could also help them in francophone-heavy areas around Ottawa where they will battle the Progressive Conservatives.

In that sense, this new university may indeed be about increasing access. Access, that is, for the Liberals to a few more seats.

THERE’S NO EVIDENCE OF A WIDESPREAD ACCESS PROBLEM. — JOSH DEHAAS