Challenges in Ontario's Post-Secondary EducationMajor challenges exist throughout the post-secondary education sector as the fall 2020-21 session approaches in the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. The shaping of post-secondary education over decades of retrogression and the anti-social offensive has left the entire system with few options: either a change of direction in the service of advancing Canadian society or more crisis and chaos will follow. The Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), David Robinson, recently made the point that the "COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the long-forming fault lines and fissures within our universities and colleges. The increasing reliance of our institutions on private financing, the exploitation of precarious labour, and the turn toward market-oriented curriculum and research have left us ill-prepared to deal with the current crisis."[1]
There has been an 11 per cent decline in provincial funding per full-time student between 2008 and 2018. Fully 53 per cent of university funding now comes from tuition fees. Universities on average rely on foreign student tuition for 20 per cent of their revenues. In 2018 over 500,000 international students studied in Canada, bringing in more than $6 billion in tuition fees.[2] Fleecing foreign students to sustain post-secondary education is another expression of state-organized racism in Canada, much like the human trafficking carried out through government-sponsored migrant worker programs, which denies these "guest" workers Canadian status. Universities and colleges have been encouraged by the federal government, especially since the economic crisis of 2008, to solve their financial difficulties by increasing tuition and recruiting foreign students. While banks and the financial oligarchs were bailed out and society was saddled with the debt load, the cost of post-secondary education has been increasingly transferred onto students and their families in the form of higher tuition and debt. It has also resulted in much larger class sizes for students and an explosion of precarious contract teaching for faculty. Most in the post-secondary education sector -- from students to faculty to administrative, maintenance, service and cleaning staff are concerned about the prospect of yet another round of cuts to funding for public education by various levels of government once the COVID-19 emergency response spending comes to an end. According to University Affairs online magazine, Manitoba and Alberta have instructed higher education institutions to develop scenarios for cuts of up to 30 per cent and in this direction some universities are already making non-academic staff redundant for the near term.[3] Universities across the country appear to be making their plans with little, if any, input from the members of the academic community. The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) objected to this situation in a recent consultation held with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Advisory Council, under the auspices of the Ontario Jobs and Recovery Committee. The OCUFA brief reports, "Since March academic staff have been devoted to getting through the term while taking the best possible care of their families and communities. On campus, members have undergone an overnight shift to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)," which was defined by university administrations as a temporary move, a shift which created a myriad of challenges for faculty. OCUFA continues: "It appears that remote teaching arrangements are not likely to be as temporary as we all hoped. While some research and campus operations may resume by the start of the fall semester, most universities have formally announced that the bulk of the fall term will be remote ... It is also expected that, where physical distancing is possible, some research projects will also resume on campus. This reliance on ERT is creating new challenges and exacerbating some of the tensions faculty experienced in the initial move to remote teaching. Adding to this tension is the fact that most universities only consulted faculty superficially or not at all about these looming challenges. If we are going to succeed in delivering post-secondary education through this pandemic, it is imperative that collegial governance and the collective bargaining rights of faculty be respected."[4] Students, faculty and staff -- those most affected by the conditions at post-secondary institutions -- have essentially been marginalized, with no say over the safety or quality of their working and learning conditions. It cannot be allowed to continue that others make decisions that can adversely affect their lives while the only role they have is to react after the fact. The academic community must continue to raise their voices and take pro-active stands in determining their working and learning conditions and the very direction of post-secondary education itself. Notes1. "Imagining Education after the Pandemic" by David Robinson, CAUT Bulletin, May-June 2020. 2. Containing the Impact of COVID-19 on Higher Education by Michael A. O'Neill, policyoptions.irpp.org. 4. "COVID-19 and the Academy," OCUFA policy brief.
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"During the past
30 years," he writes, "governments of various
political stripes have steadily shifted the
costs of post-secondary education from
collective public funding to individual private
tuition fees. The scale of this change has been
nothing short of staggering. In 1990, just over
80 per cent of university operating funding came
from government grants. As of 2018, that figure
had plummeted to about 47 per cent. "The
result," he points out, "is that our
institutions have become financially addicted to
tuition fees, including the high fees charged to
international students. Institutions that have
come to rely upon the latter to prop up their
operations face a potentially devastating
decline in those revenues if the pandemic
persists into the next academic year."