Why doesn’t Doug Ford care about funding colleges and universities? Because you don’t care either

Posted on January 24, 2025 in Education Debates

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TheStar.com – Politics/Opinion
Jan. 24, 2025.   By Martin Regg Cohn, Political Columnist

Here’s one issue you’ll hardly hear about on the campaign trail ahead:

The crisis in post-secondary education.

Colleges and universities are core to the knowledge economy of tomorrow, but you wouldn’t know it today. Most days, you’ll hear Doug Ford talk about our highly skilled workforce as Ontario’s biggest draw, yet nothing ranks lower than higher education in our political discourse.

There’s a reason campuses across Ontario are forever underfunded by the premier: Ford’s government sees little political payoff from investing more funds and, more importantly, senses little electoral risk from putting less money down.

So why don’t political parties care more about Ontario’s 24 colleges and 23 universities?, Part 1

Here’s a better question: Why don’t more voters care more about the crisis on campus?

Yes, students surely worry, but they don’t vote in large enough numbers to count. True, parents certainly care, but you’ll never see them rise up and rally for their grown children as they do for younger kids in kindergarten or high school.

On the eve of an election, the results are already in for higher education: It doesn’t rate as a vote-determining issue, which is why politicians don’t put it on the agenda.

And so when colleges lay off staff, as they did again this month, it barely makes news. When professors threaten to strike, as they did again the other day, it’s old news.

When universities cut their courses, as they did this semester, it’s more of the same retrenchment. When our institutions of higher learning go deeper in debt, as they have in the last year, there’s no one to dig them out.

How did we get here? Perennial funding shortfalls are nothing new, but Ford’s Progressive Conservatives did what no other government had done before.

Shortly after taking power in 2018, with colleges and universities starved for money, the premier further reduced their cash flow by ordering every campus to cut tuition by 10 per cent. It was a classic populist gesture from a premier who plays pocketbook politics, knowing that affordability matters most to voters.

But those tuition dollars weren’t his to cut — the money was remitted by students. More to the point, his government didn’t consider making up the difference to keep universities and colleges whole, leaving them in a deeper fiscal hole.

It only got worse. In the six years since, the premier has compelled post-secondary institutions to keep tuition fees frozen at that same reduced level, while inflation rose steadily year after year.

That’s no way to run an institution, as even the minister of post-secondary institutions, Nolan Quinn, surely understands. After all, Quinn is a college graduate and the proud owner of a Dairy Queen in Eastern Ontario.

If you’d told Quinn that headquarters had just dictated a 10 per cent price decrease in chocolate dipped cones from afar and expected local Dairy Queen outlets to make up the difference, he’d swallow hard. If you told Quinn that DQ HQ had also demanded a perpetual price freeze for the Misty Freeze slushy, he’d wonder how his own franchise would stay solvent.

Yet Quinn is just following orders from head office at Queen’s Park. He is the fourth minister in six years, unable to push back against a premier determined to cut higher education down to size.

Even a government-appointed panel of experts, hand-picked to avoid embarrassing the Tories, dissented from the party line: A blue-ribbon panel recommended a major tuition increase but the government balked last year, offering only a short-term bailout that ignored warnings of a long-term flame-out.

Instead, Ford put forward what amounts to a perverse Ponzi scheme: Underfunding (and undercharging) for domestic students, cross-subsidized by overcharging (and overcrowding) for a seemingly unlimited number of foreign students whose endless pool of revenues would keep campuses afloat.

It was never sustainable, nor desirable. As the money rolled in, colleges recruited so many international students that they emerged as the majority on many campuses — shifting the demographic balance in the classroom.

Colleges (unlike universities) are on the provincial balance sheet, so red ink on campuses dragged down the overall Ontario deficit. By turning public colleges into profit centres, the Tories buffed up their own annual budget.

But a sudden surge in foreign students overwhelmed inner city housing supplies. Recurring visa abuses sparked a public clamour about a distorted agenda.

When the federal government belatedly cracked down on a student visa program out of control, reducing the allocations for each province, the fiscal fallout was inevitable. The sudden declines in foreign enrolments amounted to shock treatment for campuses that were already financially stressed, and are now doubly distressed.

Ultimately, it all came crashing down — leaving colleges and universities in the lurch. And yet the premier has never paid a political price .

Today, with a campaign perhaps just days away, Ford’s Tories are riding high in public opinion polls — not least because they have kept tuition fees unsustainably low.

(Disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University and also at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy).

Martin Regg Cohn is a Toronto-based columnist focusing on Ontario politics and international affairs for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/why-doesnt-doug-ford-care-about-funding-colleges-and-universities-because-you-dont-care-either/article_0c95669e-d9cf-11ef-8199-53911f374a51.html

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