Ford says he faced ‘massive pressure’ from colleges, universities to increase tuition

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he was inundated with calls from students over the weekend, worrying about his government’s decision to raise tuition fees and cut OSAP grants, saying he couldn’t fight against post-secondary leaders any longer.

Last week, the government confirmed it would allow colleges and universities to raise tuition fees by two per cent a year and substantially scale back the grant funding available to students.

At the same time, funding for the sector will increase to roughly $7 billion per year, after thousands of layoffs and hundreds of program cancellations across the post-secondary sector.

“I got a lot of calls from students about OSAP and they were interesting calls, and I returned every one with a standard statement,” Ford told reporters. “It wasn’t hundreds, it was thousands.”

Ford said he had tried to tell students that keeping fees frozen “wasn’t sustainable any longer” and that he had spent years fighting to maintain his freeze.

“I just wish the students knew how hard I fought,” the premier said. “When I first came into office, I knocked the tuition down 10 per cent and under massive pressure from the heads of the colleges and universities, I refused to increase tuition.”

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From September, colleges and universities will be able to increase fees by two per cent annually for the next three years. After that, they will increase by either two per cent or an average of the rate of inflation — whichever is lower.

After fees were frozen by Ford in 2019, colleges and universities increasingly turned to international students to deal with revenue issues, with roughly one-third of total college revenue coming from international students.

When the federal government capped the number of international students at the beginning of 2024, that revenue stream dried up. Colleges, in particular, felt the brunt of it, laying off more than 8,000 staff and closing campuses.

“It’s just not sustainable, and the sector was telling me it’s not sustainable; it would mean closing down colleges and universities,” Ford said. “I think it was accepted by the general public because they’re paying the bills.”

At the same time, the government is also overhauling how student loans and grants work — shifting from offering large grants to an approach which requires students to repay more.

The current proportion is about 85 per cent grants to 15 per cent loans, the government said, but starting this fall, students will receive a maximum of 25 per cent of their OSAP funding as grants.

Ford said he thought that approach might make students work harder.

“I believe that students will focus and be more accountable if they have investments into their education, if their parents have investments in their education, they’re going to focus on it, they aren’t going to drop out,” he said.