“Not only has (Premier Doug) Ford walked away from post-secondary education, he’s shifted the responsibility of financing our colleges, a public good, onto students and institutions,” JP Hornick, president of OPSEU and faculty at George Brown College, said in a prepared statement.
Honestly, I’m not going place all this at Ford’s feet for once. A lot of the colleges became far too reliant on foreign tuitions.
They didn’t choose to. They had their funding slashed and their international student limits raised. Their choice was either go bankrupt or take the bait.
Part of the reason they’re reliant on that is because of Ford’s government. They put a freeze on tuition five years ago. In theory, that’s good for local students. However, the costs of operating the schools have gone up. Colleges helped make up the shortfall by increasing the number of international students. This effectively subsidized their domestic classmates.
For some colleges that was true, for others, they fueled unnecessary expansions. Hopefully things balance back out, and we get a government willing to fund things properly.
Are you joking? Ontario pays about $8,000 per student per year for post-secondary education. It is the lowest in Canada. The next lowest is Nova Scotia, which pays $13,000.
