Looking abroad to make up for underfunding
Bae sits in the lobby of Centennial’s Downsview Campus Centre for Aerospace and Aviation, overlooking a hangar filled with aircraft.
The $72-million campus, which includes a drone lab, was funded by federal and provincial government grants and the college’s own cash surplus generated by international enrolment. It opened earlier this year, creating instruction space for about 1,000 students, tripling the size of the program.
Bae, whose tuition this year is $20,400 for the aviation technician-aircraft maintenance program, compared with $5,300 for domestic students, looks admiringly at the “hightech” surroundings.
“I spent this much money and if the facilities aren’t good I’d be disappointed,” says Bae, who chose college over university because fees are considerably less and programs shorter. “I know all the money we pay goes to the campus. It’s like a business for the college.”
Virginia Macchiavello is a driving force behind the growth at Centennial, which boasts the highest number of international students at any Ontario college. They make up half of the college’s 28,000 student population.
“(I’ve been) accused of being an entrepreneur — not in a good way,” says Macchiavello, associate vice-president, international education, business development. “But we really do believe in education.”
Revenue from international students has allowed the college to make capital investments, expanding and updating campus facilities. Just last year, Centennial generated $210 million in revenue from tuition of international students, and the college ended the 2018-19 fiscal year with a budget surplus of $59.6 million. It also has a $33-million endowment fund — created in part by using one per cent of international revenue — to pay for scholarships and academic programming overseas.
A dozen years ago, when Linda Franklin became president and CEO of Colleges Ontario — an advocacy group representing the province’s public colleges — campus facilities were far from the gleaming, light-filled structures they are today.
“A lot of these colleges had very sad buildings,” she says, recalling 50-year-old portables. “That was their reality. And I remember at the time one president saying to me, ‘We’ve got to fix this because a post-secondary student has to feel when they walk in the doors that they’re walking into some place that matters.’ ”
This transformation is, in part, being financed by international students in a province where domestic enrolment is declining. Ontario college revenue is largely made up of tuition and government grants, which on a per-student basis are the lowest in the country and not keeping up with rising costs of the system. To supplement their income, colleges have turned to international students, whose education is not subsidized by taxpayers and who typically pay up to four times more in tuition than their domestic counterparts.
At St. Clair College in Windsor-Chatham, the 2019-20 budget shows for the first time that international student tuition is the largest source of revenue, with a projected $71.8 million. By comparison, operating grants are $41.3 million, and tuition for its budgeted 7,600 domestic students is about $24.3 million. This fall, the college, which has seen its population of international students grow from just about 500 in 2014 to 4,200, increased tuition for new international students by 15 per cent.
Ross Romano, minister of training, colleges and universities, says the province wants schools to be entrepreneurial, adding, “The more revenue they generate, the better the institutions they can be.” He welcomes the growth in international students and hopes they consider staying in Ontario, noting, “We have an economy that’s booming.
“(International students) know they are going into a place where they are going to get a quality education, a worldclass education, and they know there’s an opportunity for a great job at the end of that education,” he says. “When people are working, everybody wins.”
John Tibbits, president of Conestoga College in Kitchener, says local labour market demands have been a driving force in the college’s outreach to international students. And college surveys show about 80 per cent of Conestoga students have consistently indicated they plan to stay in Canada.
The revenue they generate has been a lifeline, given the drop in domestic enrolment across much of the sector because of a declining birth rate and high school students choosing university over college. Administrators point out international students aren’t taking seats from domestic students — they’re sitting in seats that would otherwise be empty.
“We would have faced significant downsizing … if we hadn’t gone to the international market,” Tibbits says. “We’re filling a lot of programs that we would have probably had to cancel.”
Increased enrolment from international students has allowed the college to invest in more programming, also benefiting domestic students. For instance, in 2018, the Waterloo campus expansion was completed, and in Brantford, it purchased three buildings and leased two, allowing it to grow enrolment there from 100 students to more than 1,000 this fall. And in a record year, Conestoga hired about 90 new full-time faculty and staff, mostly front-line workers delivering student services. In the last couple of years, Conestoga spent about $75 million on campus improvements, buildings, and equipment — some of it financed through grants, but the majority paid for by the college.
Enrico De Francesco, who teaches hospitality at Ottawa’s Algonquin College, says when he started there in1989, all his students were domestic. Now, about 90 per cent of his first-year students are international.
“A lot of colleges saw this international opportunity as the goose that lays the golden egg,” says De Francesco, who represents the college’s school of hospitality and tourism for Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 415.
“It’s a business, right? Schools run based on the funding and money they can make. If there’s no funding, they have to find their money somewhere — and international students are a good draw.”
At the end of the first week of school, Bae is exhausted. She wakes at 6:30 a.m. to head to campus, and she waitresses late into the night at a Korean restaurant to cover tuition and rent. She’s also mentally spent, having to concentrate extra hard in class since English isn’t her first language.
“(If ) there are words I don’t understand I have to look it up, so it takes more time than domestic students.”
Bae is determined to succeed. After all, she uprooted her life in Seoul, where she got an architecture degree and taught English to children after school. She has chosen a program she hopes will lead to good job offers and eventually permanent status, since graduating here garners extra points on a residency application.
But to get into the workforce, she first needs a diploma — without it she can’t apply for a postgraduate work permit.
That’s a big reason international students graduate at much higher rates when compared with domestic students. According to the Star’s analysis of colleges, 89 per cent of international students graduated in 2018, compared with