“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.
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.