Changes to Ontario’s student loan program can’t come soon enough for the province’s colleges.
Falling enrolment at post-secondary institutions has been particularly disastrous for colleges. Without action, it could potentially send schools into nearly $2 billion of debt in eight years, according to a recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, an advisory firm.
“The government has been only funding colleges for enrolment growth,” said Linda Franklin, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario. “What that means is if your school’s enrolment goes down two per cent, you get less money from the government.”
Franklin said an aging population likely means that enrolment will keep falling.
“We’ve just hit a period in time where the echo boom has just gone through post-secondary [education],” Franklin said, describing the children of baby boomers. “There was a huge decline in kindergarten through grade 12 for a while there too.”
Schools in large urban centres have managed to avoid the trend of declining student enrolment, mostly due to factors such as immigration. But Franklin said colleges in remote areas have been hit harder by declining enrolment.
“For a lot of other places in the province, [including] southwestern Ontario, northern Ontario, eastern Ontario, those communities are not growing right now, they’re actually losing young people, and because of that the government gives the colleges in those areas less money,” she said.
“Colleges are really important in many of these small towns,” said Patrick Gibson, a Carleton University professor and labour market expert. “What happens at the college will affect the whole city. Without graduates, businesses are going to have to try to attract workers from elsewhere, and potentially pay more money.”
That could be an issue for the future skilled trade market in both urban and rural areas.
“Frankly, if you don’t have the resources to run those programs, you’re not going to have the highly-skilled work force that you need,” Franklin said.
“There is a real labour market concern here if the colleges really cannot produce their core—trades, electricians, plumbers—at a time when Canada’s infrastructure needs a lot of work,” Gibson said. “It’s pretty important to have this steady flow of trades, otherwise your whole infrastructure project is in jeopardy. Everything will be over budget and maybe you won’t even get the quality you want.”
The Ontario government is hoping that a new funding structure for the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) coming in September 2017 will make tuition more affordable, which in turn could bring more students to colleges and universities.
Deb Matthews, Ontario Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development, recently told The Globe and Mail that upcoming OSAP changes will address declining enrolment, because additional financial assistance for students will help more mature and Indigenous students afford post-secondary education.
However, Franklin said she is worried this won’t be enough to solve the issue.
“[The grant] might absolutely increase the number of people choosing to go to college or university, but it’s still a smaller pool every year for the next decade,” she said.
Franklin said colleges have been pushing for a funding structure that relies less on the number of students enrolled. She said the province has expressed interest in switching the funding model for colleges, but she recently found out there will be no changes to the funding model for at least three years.
In the meantime, colleges will have to keep soldiering on.
“What colleges have had to do is become much more entrepreneurial [and] look for savings everywhere . . . But the challenge we’re facing now is there’s just not that many options for saving money anymore,” Franklin said.
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