Langara faculty takes the lead in fight for funding
Post-secondary teachers worry province relies too much on foreign-student fees
Vancouver’s Langara College faculty is helping lead a provincewide effort to persuade the B.C. government to hike funding for higher education.
Worried that the B.C. Liberals are relying too much on the high fees paid by 130,000 foreign students, Langara faculty members are working on a campaign with the federation that represents 10,000 B.C. faculty and staff to push Victoria to return to earlier levels of post-secondary funding.
“The rise in international students is very much on our radar,” said humanities instructor Jessie Smith, who is on the board of the Langara College Faculty Association.
In the past year Langara College has seen the proportion of its foreign students rise by one-third — to 23 per cent of its 15,000-student population.
“It’s really noticeable,” said Smith.
While Langara faculty generally appreciate the sense of diversity brought by students from around the globe, most of whom are Asian, Smith said the high percentage of foreign students, combined with reduced funding for domestic students, is creating difficulties for all young people attending B.C. colleges and universities.
Working with the Open the Doors B.C. campaign of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C., Langara faculty and students have created graphic transit ads that depict an ethnic mix of B.C. students who are exhausted and anxious, weighed down by debt and the need to work to afford high rents and tuition fees.
“Put our money where our minds are,” says one campaign ad.
“Full-time job. Full-time school. How’s that working for you?” says another ad depicting a student who has fallen asleep at his desk.
The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C., which represents faculty and staff at colleges and teaching universities such as Capilano and Kwantlen, maintains that per capita funding for domestic B.C. students has dropped by 20 per cent since the B.C. Liberals took office 16 years ago.
Langara faculty says their campus has been hit worse than many others by the funding crunch, since the grant it receives from the B.C. government now covers only 33 per cent of its operating budget, compared to 56 per cent in 2001.
The faculty association does not blame Langara College administrators for assertively appealing to full-fee-paying foreign students in recent years, Smith said, since not doing so would have led to “faculty layoffs and fewer course offerings for students.”
However, in an open letter, the Langara Faculty Association took exception to a recent statement by Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson that his government has increased Langara College’s funding by 32 per cent since 2001.
The Langara faculty association letter said Wilkinson is being misleading about Langara’s cuts, since he is not including inflation or the fact that the college has increased its number of domestic students by one fifth since 2001.
UBC professor Donald Fisher, who has written books on higher education in Canada, said in a Friday interview “there’s no doubt” B.C. government funding for post-secondary education has “decreased quite dramatically” since the 1990s.
The biggest drop came in the first five years of the B.C. Liberal government after Gordon Campbell was elected premier in 2001, said Fisher. Since then, the rate of decreases in the B.C. government’s grants appear to have eased.
In 1994, Fisher said, the B.C. gov- ernment provided 73 per cent of all funding to B.C. universities (with the ratio roughly similar for colleges). But that B.C. grant proportion, he said, declined to 58 per cent in 2008, the last year for which reliable data is available.
UBC political scientist emeritus Philip Resnick said Friday that Canadian universities and colleges “have gone whole hog down the road of seeking international students to help balance the books.”
For her part, Smith, who coordinates Langara’s Latin American studies program, said college administrators have been trying to make up for lost government revenue by adding courses that appeal to foreign students, such as business and computer science.
She would like to see colleges offer more courses that cover Canada, B.C. or the humanities, which tend to appeal to lower-fee-paying domestic students.
Smith said her heart goes out to the international students at Langara and elsewhere who “face so many barriers.”
Many struggle with English and miss their offshore families, Smith said. And many have not been properly prepared by their high schools to take part in the kind of research and class discussion associated with Canadian higher education.
Asked about the University of California’s decision this week to limit the proportion of foreign and out-of-state students to 20 per cent, Smith said a cap is an important option for B.C. to consider.
“It’s risky to rely on foreign students for higher-education funding. It puts everyone in a precarious situation. What if something happens in China or India and those students stop coming?”