ARE FILLING FUNDING SHORTFALLS
UBC’s 2015-16 annual report noted in the last five years, the university had its operating grant revenue from the province drop 10 per cent, while its most recent operating budget states salary, facilities, and seismic upgrade costs have climbed by seven per cent in the last year alone.
In response, Davison believes colleges and universities have been ramping up international student recruiting, while also hiking the tuition these students pay, to make ends meet.
“The intentional growth by the former government of international student numbers over the last four years has created a complex situation that can’t be looked at in isolation of other pressure points in the post-secondary sector,” Melanie Mark, B.C.’s Minister for Advanced Education, Skills and Training, said in an emailed statement.
Last year at UBC, tuition revenue from international students surpassed the revenue derived from domestic students for the first time, even though the latter outnumber the former by more than three to one.
UBC charges international students $34,847 per year for an undergraduate arts degree, almost seven times more than the domestic student tuition fee of $5,189 per year.
Universities and colleges charge these fee differentials because neither provincial nor federal governments grant funding for international students. Administrators say the higher fees are charged to recover this funding shortfall, and to keep tuition fees lower for taxpaying students and parents.
Some colleges and universities have begun to make much larger annual increases to international student fees than to domestic tuition rates. UBC raised international rates by 38 per cent between 2011 and 2016. SFU’s international fees have risen by 39 per cent in the same period, according to the Ministry of Advanced Education. Last March, the University of Victoria sparked student protests after its administration decided to raise international tuition rates by 3.5 per cent, decoupling the increase from the domestic rate, whose rise is capped by the provincial government at two per cent.
Students argued that, although international tuition was justifiably higher than domestic tuition, allowing universities to raise international tuition without a cap would create unexpected financial hardship for these students.
The U.S., Australia and the U.K. all charge higher tuition fees for international students than for domestic students. France and Germany, which are close competitors to Canada in the international student market, do not. There are some indications university departments are being rewarded with funding incentives if they attract more international students. The Faculty of Arts at UBC was awarded additional reserves in last year’s budget after it was forecast they would attract 346 new international students. The most recent operating budget for UBC says 65 per cent of international undergraduate tuition fees flow directly to faculties to support teaching costs.
UBC’s Sauder School of Business, where about 40 per cent of students are from abroad, had revenues of $25.3 million for 2017-18, compared to $24.3 million for the previous year. On the other hand, faculty budgets may be limited if they are unable to recruit international students.
UBC’s most recent operating budget notes the faculties of dentistry, law and medicine, which do not attract large numbers of international students, will face constraints on their budgets.
“This complicates the path forward for these faculties because they do not have the same international revenue opportunities to offset the annual costs of merit and career progression that our direct-entry faculties have,” the report states.
A letter dated Jan. 17, 2014, sent by John Innes, the dean of UBC’s forestry department, to then-B.C. minister of advanced education Amrik Virk, outlines how Innes sought out international students as a means of funding outside of provincial operating grants.
“In the past, we might have approached the provincial government for the additional funding that we need, but the need for fiscal restraint to achieve a balanced provincial budget has indicated clearly to me that I should develop alternative opportunities,” Innes wrote.
“We are already subsidizing forestry programs through increased enrolment of international students. We have done this so successfully that we now have one of the highest percentages of international students in the university.”
International students accounted for 36 per cent of undergraduate and 57 per cent of graduate students in UBC’s faculty of forestry in 2016. Stuart Neatby and Bala Yogesh are 2017 recipients of the Langara College Read-Mercer Journalism Fellowship. This series was produced through the fellowship.