Ontario’s public colleges are meant to prepare students for good jobs and provide the economy with a skilled workforce – but for years, they have been starved of funding. Ontario is dead last among the provinces for per-student funding of postsecondary education.
Chronic underfunding, the root of the current crisis, is hurting our students and our colleges.The affordability crisis is negatively impacting student mental health, as students are struggling to keep up with their studies while juggling multiple part-time jobs to afford tuition and the cost of living.
Our college classrooms, labs and student services direly need investment. Faculty and staff face ever-increasing workloads on top of efforts to make limited resources stretch further. Thousands of faculty and staff face the additional stress of being part-time or on contract with little to no benefits or job protection.
To fill the funding gap, colleges have turned to the high, unregulated tuition paid by international students to fund their operations – a disservice to both domestic and international students who are not to blame for the government’s own shortcomings.
There is a solution: fund the colleges sustainably to the average of other provinces. This would require doubling the current funding for colleges and universities, somewhere in the ballpark of $7.1 billion.
Ontario has failed to meet this metric. In response to the federal government’s two-year cap on international student visas, the province announced $900 million for colleges and universities. It is not nearly enough. This one-time funding is spread out over 3 years between 24 colleges and 23 universities, and the full amount will not be available to all institutions.
It is a drop in the bucket of what’s actually needed – a sustainable increase to the base funding that colleges and universities receive every year from the province to operate.
Send a message to your MPP, the Premier, and the Minister of Colleges and Universities. If thousands of us take action, we can put pressure on the provincial government to fund the colleges now!