How Ford is hurting higher education

Competition will be unfair, writes Anne-Marie Roy.

For decades, Ontario’s students and faculty have been advocating for more public funding to our post-secondary education system. Ontario is already the province with the lowest per-student funding and the largest class sizes in Canada.

Instead of delivering a solution to decades of chronic underfunding, the provincial government recently announced that college and university moneys would be tied to 10 vaguely defined performance metrics. In other words, colleges and universities will have to compete for funding, leaving smaller, rural, francophone and bilingual institutions at a disadvantage.

While the government is trying to package this new funding formula as an “accountability measure” for the sector, labour and student unions in Ottawa view it as a pretext for funding clawbacks, and as a clear signal that this government plans to move toward further privatization of our publicly assisted colleges and universities. Many of our post-secondary institutions are already strapped for cash, setting up an uneven playing field for the funding “hunger games” to come. The inevitable outcome of this new policy announcement will be program cuts; larger class sizes and more online courses; fewer student support services on campuses; and the continued rise of precarious and contractual labour on campuses. None of these measures will improve the quality of higher learning.

The context in which this budget is tabled is further cause for concern. In January, the Doug Ford government announced funding cuts in the form of a 10-per-cent tuition fee decrease for domestic students, $670 million in cuts to OSAP grants, and an unprecedented attack on our democratic student unions through the “student choice initiative.” These changes, along with the new institutional funding formula, will inevitably lead to higher student debt, fewer services to support students, and

None of these measures will improve the quality of higher learning.

even more tuition fee increases for international students.

At a time when many students rely on food banks so they can eat, when there is a growing number of mental health crisis and an ever-increasing wait-list for counselling, and when one in four students reports being sexually assaulted, this government’s attacks on student rights and their services, coupled with funding cuts, are simply reckless.

We also wish to express our solidarity with international students who have been treated as cash cows in this province. International students already contribute almost $3 billion annually to the provincial economy through tuition fees, basic living expenses, consumer spending and their contribution to the Ontario personal income tax system. International students pay three to four times the tuition fees paid by domestic students; they can only work limited hours because of federal regulations; and they are not covered under OHIP.

International students are the No. 1 customers at many existing campus food banks, and at many institutions have lower graduation rates than domestic students due to a lack of academic support services tailored to their needs. Despite this unwelcoming climate in Ontario, they will likely end up picking up the tab for this government’s funding clawbacks.

The University of Waterloo recently announced a 62.1-per-cent tuition fee increase for international students, and we have reason to fear that similar fee increases may become a trend at colleges and universities across the province.

As a coalition of labour and student unions from post-secondary institutions across the City of Ottawa, it’s difficult for us to understand how this government can claim to be working “for the people” when this provincial budget can only exacerbate the pressures felt by a sector that’s been starved of the resources it needs to thrive for the last two decades.

Anne-Marie Roy is communications and research officer for the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa. The Ottawa post-secondary education coalition is a group of labour and student unions from colleges and universities across Ottawa that meets regularly to discuss issues on their campuses and identify responses to the provincial austerity agenda.