The Ontario government announced on Feb. 12 that
cash-strapped colleges
and
universities
would be getting an additional $6.4 billion, while students will be shouldering more of the cost of an education.
The package included three main pillars:
the $6.4 billion for the post-secondary secondary sector
over four years; an updated tuition framework allowing colleges and universities to raise tuition by up to two per cent per year for three years (then up to two per cent or the three-year average rate of inflation, whichever is less); and changes to the financial aid system, where students will get a maximum of 25 per cent of their Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) funding as grants and a minimum of 75 per cent of their funding as loans.
Postmedia spoke with University of Ottawa president Marie-Eve Sylvestre about how the announcement would affect Ottawa’s biggest university.
$6.4 billion is a lot of money, but it’s spread out across Ontario. What’s the University of Ottawa’s share?
We’ve received a confidential memo, so we’re not able to share the details, but we’re still trying to figure that out. There are some things that are looped into the new formula, and some things are going to be withdrawn from it. So we’re not able at this point to say exactly what it means. But I can tell you that this is significant amounts of money.
The main thing for us and for all universities is the resetting of the corridor midpoints. Universities in Ontario are funded based on a corridor model (a funding framework that caps provincial operating grants based on a range of domestic student enrolment rather than paying for every student) with enrolment targets in that corridor.
The last time those targets were reviewed was 2016-2017. Now they’ve been reset to 2024-2025 enrolment rates. That means for the University of Ottawa it’s 2,300 students that were unfunded that will be funded. That’s a significant amount of money for our university and for the other post-secondary institutions in the region as well.
Does the funding depend on the area of study?
The ministry has been given a priority to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), health sciences, trades for colleges and teacher education. These are the programs for which there is an added weight and added funding. That’s also good news for us given that we are providing these programs. These are also high-cost programs and high-demand.
For instance, in engineering we have an extra 400 students this year, so the added weighted value is going to help us a lot. That doesn’t mean that the students enrolled in the other programs like arts and humanities won’t be funded. There’s extra funding for those programs.
In January 2019, Ontario mandated a 10 per cent decrease in tuition for domestic students and tuition has been frozen since then. How will tuition increases now affect your bottom line?
It’s going to slowly get better. One thing that should be noted is that, when there was the cut and the freeze, the University of Ottawa tuition fees were much lower than our counterparts in Ontario. So for us just the lift of the freeze is such good news.
For next year, we estimate that it’s going to be around $5 million for the University of Ottawa. We have to take 10 per cent of that increase to invest in financial aid. It’s not such a big deal, but we’re getting somewhere, and at least we’re not in a position where we’re losing money every year.
Student groups have argued the changes will add to their financial burden. Can you make it up with student aid?
The University of Ottawa has given nearly $20 million in financial aid during the current year and will be giving $22 million next year. We also want to have one of the most generous scholarship programs in the country, especially for francophones and the most vulnerable, low-income students.
The other thing is that, when students receive their financial aid from the government, they’re receiving 60 per cent of that financial aid from the federal government, then they get 40 per from the province. It’s only that 40 per cent to which there has been some changes. Not to minimize the impact, but overall it’s a lower impact.
For us, the increase will be slower because we’re starting lower than others. Again, we have a lot of generous scholarships to try to mitigate the impact. The provincial average of that two-per-cent increase is around $170. Here it would be about $150.
In 2023, the University of Ottawa had 10,725 international students, about one-quarter of all full-time students. That has since dropped to 8,110 international students — less than 19 per cent. What are you doing to regain them?
They’re coming back, but not on the francophone side, for all sorts of reasons. I think the message has gone around in the world and we’re still trying to recover from that.
We’ve made agreements with certain countries to go and teach overseas. Instead of bringing the students on campus, we are going to them to teach. We’re signing agreements right now to have joint degrees with partner institutions that we select, and so the students will stay in their home country. We will send professors abroad.
In some cases, (students) will be awarded a University of Ottawa degree because in some cases half of the courses, for instance, will have been taught by University of Ottawa professors and follow all of the requirements. This is a way for us to connect with international students without having them here.
Sometimes we go abroad, we teach part of the curriculum there, then we bring them in for a year, say.
International students are key for research and innovation in some areas. If we don’t have the graduate students, we just don’t have enough domestic students to run our labs and to produce the research that we need.
We’ve recently concluded agreements with China. Our VP international has been in Morocco as well to sign an agreement for the School of Management. We have partnerships all over Europe. Our provost is in Hong Kong right now with many other provosts for the Asia Pacific recruitment fair, so we’re hoping to have those connections as well.
You’re the only bilingual research-intensive university in Canada. Will the new funding pay some of the extra costs?
Some of it we receive in a special grant for French and bilingual institutions. There has been an increase of $11 million for that grant, and we’re hoping that the University of Ottawa is getting an important share of that increased funding. It’s not going to solve all of the inequities, and it’s not paying off all the additional costs of French and bilingual education. We estimate those costs, or that difference, to be around $80 million for the University of Ottawa every year.
We have an extra 1,000 francophone Ontarians who have registered at the university this year alone compared to last year. We’ve lost a lot of international francophone students, but there has been an increase in the domestic enrolment.
Will you have a deficit this year?
The financial constraints have hit us at the University of Ottawa earlier than our counterparts, so for four years we’ve already been struggling with a deficit and trying to make sense of our budgets. We’ve done a very strict control of expenses for the last four years. We’ve imposed a freeze on hiring both faculty and staff in many, many areas. We’ve made cuts to departments and faculties over the last four years.
We’re getting much better at this point. We’ve also put together a revenue-generating plan, including through those international agreements and going abroad to teach and agreements with partner institutions so they bring in international students.
We’re not out of the woods right now, but we’re near a balanced budget. And I’m hoping, whether it’s this year or the following one, we’ll be able to balance it.
Do you see you the university pulling back in any particular areas?
This (past) fall, the university embarked in an exercise of reforming our programs. The idea is really to revitalize arts and humanities programs. When I speak to industry players and employers from the government, from the private sector, they all tell me that they need the soft skills — communication, creativity, critical thinking — that are fostered and nurtured in the humanities and the arts.
For me, it’s a question of bridging those disciplines together. I think we need to think in a much more interdisciplinary manner these days and have programs that bring together the arts and the sciences, the arts and the technology. So I’m not considering necessarily closing programs. I’m thinking that we have to reinvent some of those programs to make sure they attract our students, but also that the disciplines evolve to respond to the needs of society.
Do you see generational shifts in the student relationship with universities?
They want to be more involved in their learning than perhaps they used to be. They have their own channels of communications and information, and they come with demands and expectations towards their learning environment that are different.
So what we see, for instance, is an increase in student-led curriculum activities. They like to find their own activities, their own placements. Then we build credits around that, and then we supervise the work that they’re doing. They like experiential stuff, they like active stuff. But, let’s face it, that’s always been the way people learn the best.
(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity)
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