Days after the federal government capped the number of international students coming into the country, Ontario is rolling out new guardrails to “protect the integrity” of colleges and universities.
The new measures include a review of some programs with a focus on pipelines from education to work, a pause on public-private college partnerships and a requirement for housing to be provided to international students.
“We need to strengthen the links between Ontario’s labour market needs and the programs being offered to students so we can get even more people into rewarding careers in health care and the skilled trades,” Minister of Colleges and Universities Jill Dunlop said in a statement.
A major change the province plans to introduce will be the requirement for colleges and universities to “guarantee” they have housing options for international students.
That change comes after the federal housing minister suggested “certain pockets of the country” had seen their population explode through the rise in international students.
On Monday, Immigration Minister Marc Miller, who announced the cap, said for 2024 the cap is expected to result in approximately 364,000 approved study permits.
Ontario also said it would begin reviewing programs with “sizeable” international enrolments to assess their quality.
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The province is planning to check whether programs will lead to graduates in sectors that need more workers.
A pause on private-public partnerships will temporarily stop established public colleges from joining with newer private colleges to create satellite campuses.
Documents obtained by Global News suggest the government was aware — and concerned — by these arrangements as early as 2022.
A briefing note from November 2022 said five public-private partnerships had campuses where the number of international students at the private partner exceeded those at the public colleges by more than two to one.
David Orazietti, the president of Sault College, told Global News the nature of the federal announcement meant “students are really being scapegoated.”
He said a lack of provincial funding meant governments had “encouraged” colleges to look for other sources of revenues, which included recruiting more international students through public-private partnerships.
“Public colleges are partnering with private colleges to generate revenue to keep the lights on, to pay the bills, to keep staff,” Orazietti said, stressing the systems Sault College has in place to regulate public-private relationships.
“This is money the provincial government is not investing in the sector so we’re, out of necessity, working with private career colleges,” Orazietti continued. “But there is a right way to do it and there is a wrong way to do it and there needs to be a much more surgical approach to this than simply whacking all of the sector.”
In its Friday announcement, Ontario also said it planned to “better integrate” enforcement and oversight.
“We must find more ways to work together to combat gross recruitment practices while protecting our ability to attract the world’s best and brightest to study here in Ontario,” Dunlop said.
“These actions will also ensure that we implement sensible policies that protect against worsening Ontario’s housing affordability issues. We need to ensure that students coming to study here have a place to live.”
It is not yet clear how Ontario will enforce the policies, how long it will take for them to be completed or if they will be introduced through new laws or regulations.
The government is also still reviewing the recommendations from its Blue Ribbon Panel, established to look at the financial reliability of post-secondary education in Ontario.
It delivered its suggestions late last year.
The NDP criticized the Progressive Conservatives for failing to respond to a government-commissioned report that last year recommended the province increase tuition fees and funding colleges and universities.
“It is abundantly clear that this government would rather see post-secondary institutions close than cough up the investments needed to keep them afloat,” NDP critic Jamie West wrote in a statement.
“They have been asleep at the wheel for the past five years while public colleges and universities languished, paving the way for a predatory private, for-profit education system that has only harmed students.”
In 2022, a report from Ontario’s auditor general said the province’s schools had become increasingly dependent on tuition fees from international students.
International student enrolment has quickly increased over the past several years, said a report last summer commissioned by Ontario’s Big City Mayors.
The number of international students at Ontario universities nearly doubled from 2014-15 to 2021-22, and more than tripled at colleges. The majority of institutions built no new student residence spaces during that 2014-15 to 2021-22 period, the report found.
Ontario, like much of Canada, remains gripped in a housing crisis. The province has pledged to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 in an effort to address the supply shortage.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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