After reading the report of the panel that they assembled to look into the financial sustainability of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions, the Ford government probably wished that they had heeded the advice implied in an aphorism from the 1001 Nights: He who asks what he ought not ask will hear an answer he does not want to hear. Asking the panel to look into the financial health of Ontario’s universities and hoping to hear that it could be improved by slimming down faculty fat cats, the government instead heard that their own funding policies are the primary threat to a secure future for Ontario’s post-secondary system. Surprisingly and encouragingly, the panel urged the Ford government to increase funding. Unsurprisingly and discouragingly, the government ignored that recommendation and insisted that institutions find more “efficiencies” in the way they use resources.

The panel defines financial sustainability as: “the financial capacity of the public sector to meet its current obligations, to withstand shocks, and to maintain service, debt, and commitment at reasonable levels relative to both national expectations and likely future income, while maintaining public confidence”(15). They boldly concluded that any threats to the financial sustainability of the sector were functions of government policy. Ontario colleges and universities receive the lowest per capita provincial funding in the country. That low level of funding has fallen further in real terms because of inflation. The negative impact of both factors is exacerbated by the on-going tuition freeze in the province. Adding these factors together, the panel found reasons to worry about the financial sustainability of this model. None of the provinces universities are in danger of becoming the next Laurentian, yet, but an over-reliance on international students, especially in smaller and comprehensive schools, jeopardizes their future should international enrollments dip.

Since I work in the university sector and have no direct knowledge of the college system I will limit my comments to the panel’s analysis of universities. I find myself in broad agreement with the panel’s recommendations on the need for increased funding, but worry that whatever good increased funding might do will be compromised by the committee’s assumption that changing labour market needs should guide university program development.

Before I fuss about the potential bad, I will discuss the good. The report begins with a frank acknowledgement that provincial policy and not wasteful spending is the root cause of the ‘challenges’ that universities and colleges are facing: “The province’s colleges and universities have faced significant challenges to their financial sustainability in recent years. In 2017, as part of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process, direct provincial funding to support domestic enrollment at colleges and universities was effectively frozen. The number of funded domestic students a college or university could enroll was fixed, as was the finding per student.. Two years later, the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities were further challenged by the province’s decision to reduce by 10% the tuition rates paid by students.” will continue through 2023-24.” (6) While most everyone involved in the sector would agree that the tuition reduction was a good thing, it nevertheless increased the financial strain on universities because it was not matched by higher government grants. As the report notes, the opposite happened: tuition was frozen and grants reduced (once inflation is factored in, the per capita domestic student grant fell from from $8514 in 2008 to $8350 in 2021)(18).

At the same time as grants and tuition fell, the Province’s enrollment corridor system effectively capped the number of domestic students that universities could enroll (17). One might wonder why the government would impose an upper limit on the number of domestic students an institution can enroll. Aren’t higher enrollments the key to sustainability? Yes, and no. The government has not imposed enrollment limits, but only enrollment limits on domestic students, because government grants to institutions must increase as enrollment increases. By limiting the number of domestic students it will fund, the government thus limits its costs. (The corridor model also indirectly serves the interests of smaller schools outside the Greater Toronto Area, by preventing the three big Toronto schools from throwing open their doors and enrolling everyone they can. The limits mean that it is at least possible for schools outside the GTA in regions with stagnant population growth to attract students who cannot get into U of T, York, and Toronto Metropolitan).

The government attains cost certainty but the institutions have no way to earn additional revenue, unless they can recruit international students. The provincial government does not fund international students. Institutions are free to recruit as many international students as they can, and charge them whatever tuition the market will bear, and they have. The intense recruitment of international students is not an act of multicultural solidarity but pure financial necessity. The report notes, in sombre tones with dire implications that “many colleges and universities are past the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students. They are financially sustainable only because of international students.”(38)

The dramatic increase in the number of international students and the creation of programs tailor made to attract them (and the much higher tuition that they pay) prompts the question of whose interests are being served? The panel addresses the question and answers that, in principle, increasing numbers of international students are good for institutions, the country, and the students. The panel notes that international students are a “source of needed talent and desired population growth. They also bring a number of benefits to the on-campus experience for all students.”(37) The federal government seems more concerned that a tipping point has been reached. A new policy will double the financial requirements applicants must meet in order to obtain a student visa in an effort to put a stop to unscrupulous recruiters exploiting prospective students, put “degree mills” out of business, and reduce pressure on local housing markets unable to cope with the influx of international students.

But there are also critics in the home countries of these students. The report notes that international students bring a needed supply of talent to Canada, but that means that those talents will be realised here and not in their home country. He was speaking to a domestic audience, but the point that Indian Marxist political economist Prabhat Patnaik was making should inform Canadian thinking on the matter of international students as well. “If using tax payers money to subsidise students who go on to have lucrative careers is ethically questionable, using tax payers’ money to subsidise students with lucrative careers providing services in the advanced countries is even more so. It constitutes both private appropriation of public resources and a ‘drain of wealth’ overseas … The existing system of allowing ‘brains’ to ‘drain’ away needs to change.”(203, Re-Envisaging Socialism) To be fair, the report was not commissioned to work out just political economic international relations, but everyone involved in higher education in Canada needs to think about the consequences of attracting the best students from the Global South for the nations from which they are recruited.

The focus on international students is also having a profound (and mostly negative) impact on the intellectual structure of Ontario universities. The report notes that in 2021-22 63 new University programs were approved, 75% in health and STEM, because those are areas “of high labour market demand. All these programs identified career pathways and strong ties to business and industry.” (13) Many of these programs are designed explicitly to attract international students. Getting institutional and government approval is a massive undertaking. Any new program must prove that there will be demand for its graduates and it must be at least cost neutral (bring in as much money as running the program will cost). The implications of these trends are dire for the humanities: undertaking the sorts of innovative pedagogical transformations that I think we need to undertake would require approval of new programming, but proving to the institution and government that labour market demand exists for graduates will prove a difficult task.

The problem is not that humanities graduates do not find work, (at the University of Windsor, 83% of Humanities graduates were employed after 1 year, 97% after 2– a higher rate than Sciences, Social Sciences, and Engineering). The problem is that the government wants to see very specific demands for very specific credentials. I have never seen a job add (outside universities) for a philosopher in the way one sees ads for physiotherapists and medical diagnostic experts. Humanities departments, already threatened by low enrollments, could well enter into a death spiral: low enrollments rule out investment, lack of investment impedes the ability to re-think and re-organize how we deliver humanistic education, our faculty ages and retirements are not replaced, course offerings need to be consolidated, consolidations impedes our ability to recruit, until finally the last retiree turns out the lights and the corridors go dark, forever.

The report was not concerned with how Universities spend their revenues, but one cannot disconnect provincial and institutional priorities. In public, administrators and politicians always say the right things about the importance of the student experience and the enduring significance of the humanities, but when push comes to shove, as in the case of Laurentian, the philosophers and literary critics lose their jobs. Institutions cannot simply buck provincial demands: they remain dependent on government grants for a large portion of their revenue and the government has the final say on the creation of new programs. I prefer catastrophising to naive optimism (I am never disappointed when worse comes to worst). Perhaps we humanists will find away out of our precarious state, but simply increasing operating grants will not help us. Other things being equal, those additional resources will be allocated to the “growth centres” in the university, and, with very few exceptions, those disciplines will be in STEM and professional programs.

I do not begrudge my colleagues in those fields the resources that they need, but I do think the universities need to reject the activity-based budgeting models they have adopted in favour of a more whole-institutional approach. Such a model would start from the assumption that the university is a single institution articulated into faculties and departments. Instead of forcing departments into contrived competition for scarce funds, the administration would treat them all as organic elements of the institutional whole. The first principle of resource allocation would be sufficient funds to ensure consistent delivery of existing programming, with increased funding allocated to growing disciplines and departments. Secure in the knowledge that retirements will be replaced, smaller enrollment disciplines like philosophy will be better positioned to re-imagine themselves and hopefully attract larger numbers of students.

Nevertheless, re-imagination and re-invention of the humanities is a complex problem for another day. I doubt very much whether the Ford government will respond favourably to the recommendations of the the panel to approve a 1 time increase of 10% to the grant and then index future grants to the Consumer Price Index in subsequent years following.(20) Change will probably not come unless the federal government’s policy changes cause a crisis, and the last time an institution was forced to change because of a crisis– Laurentian– the result was disastrous for academics, staff, and students.