Brown-John: Universities, colleges ‘overdosing’ on foreign students

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As recently reported in the Windsor Star, the University of Windsor projects a $30-million-plus operating budget deficit next year — at least double the current-year financial shortfall.

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I have reviewed UWindsor’s annual budget on several occasions in the past and one can readily pinpoint some serious financial difficulties.

Over the years, as the local university sought to make its mark on Canada’s academic ladder, ever greater reliance was placed on tuition revenue from lucrative foreign students.

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Ontario’s universities and colleges became addicted to foreign student income. In the 1960s, the province’s institutions of higher learning expanded to serve more Ontario students, as well as other Canadians should they wish to seek an education in Ontario.

I cannot recall any Ontario government announcing that a new university was being opened to serve students from countries abroad. Nonetheless, as faculties expanded and the hired talent demanded higher negotiated salaries, universities began to realize, from Ontario’s demographics, that local student numbers would peak and then begin to slide.

The answer became trolling for foreign students in India and Hong Kong and the Middle East.

In the heydays of harvesting foreign students, senior university administrators flitted about the world meeting with alumni associations in Hong Kong and Kuwait and any place they could find a plausible excuse to visit at public trough expense. It paid off, especially for science and engineering faculties at Ontario’s universities. So many foreign students wanted to be engineers and so few sought out social work or arts.

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Meanwhile, colleges and universities expanded, adding new programs and new, higher-priced faculty. After all, if a university supposes itself to be both a teaching and research institution then higher quality — and higher priced — faculty — are essential. Consequently, in pursuit of reputation and improved rankings on assorted independent scales, universities literally — to quote Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock’s Lord Ronald — jumped on expansion and “rode madly off in all directions.”

New programs and even new schools and faculties sprouted up. In the 1960s and ’70s, desperate to find faculty, recruitment had spread to the U.S. and abroad. It was a boom period of growth. I was recruited from Canada’s foreign service to the University of Windsor in 1968.

Today, that “boom” has left Ontario’s taxpayers with 23 universities and 24 colleges, all of which are in large part publicly funded. Most offer somewhat similar programs with some localized specialities.

Certainly, as Ontario’s university system rapidly expanded, there was an underlying assumption that regional universities — like the ones opened in Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Peterborough and St. Catharines — would serve regional student markets.

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However, as they grew and new faculty were added, universities became somewhat competitive within Ontario. True, the well-established continued as major attractive universities for students — Toronto, McMaster, Queens, Western in Ontario. Degrees from prominent universities overwhelmingly outweighed in name-value degrees from upstart universities.

In practice, however, what many grads from newer colleges and universities eventually discovered is that what really mattered was talent and not where you obtained a degree.

For schools like UWindsor, rapidly increasing costs — particularly burgeoning salary budgets — were offset by foreign student intake and their higher fees.

For the University of Windsor, the challenge it faces in 2025 will be enormous, with seven collective agreements set to expire for eight bargaining units.

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Cutting programs such as Sheridan College plans to do may be one answer. Mandating earlier retirement opportunities for faculty, especially for those high on the Sunshine List, might work, especially if senior faculty were required to teach first-year — large-class — courses.

Restraining hires, especially those on tenure track, might also help, as well as reducing burgeoning senior administrative positions.

Time for Ontario’s universities to seek rehabilitation, kick the foreign student addiction and begin operating somewhat like businesses.

Lloyd Brown-John is a University of Windsor professor emeritus of political science and director of Canterbury ElderCollege. He can be reached at lbj@uwindsor.ca.

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