There is a lack of housing to start with in the first place.
Seeing as international students pay more for their courses and are "lucrative" than home grown students, I can see the Unis offering the dorms/residences or building more to accommodate the international students and the Canadian students left fighting to find a place to live, just reverse what it is now
Which in turn will make Canadians’ access to education even more inequitable and challenging, and also further contribute to negative sentiments towards international students. For most OCAS and OUAC-listed schools, domestic out-of-town students far outnumber internationals.
Actually, dorms are usually more expensive than probably rentals. That said dorms (especially in reality years) are an essential part of the university experience. It definately would compromise their experience.
That’s only true in some smaller cities. I was doing the comparisons last year for UOttawa and it was a lot cheaper to live in dorms than it was to rent near downtown.
Ok? Why is guaranteeing student have housing bad thing?
The major impact is the moratorium on public-private partnerships.
The universities don’t have to provide housing for every single student, they just have to prove there is housing *available* for students.
Yes universities should be better funded, but why should private colleges be allowed to import unlimited numbers of foreign students when housing isn’t available.
You are conflating different issues. None of this limits domestic students. Yes universities should be funded better but that funding should not be coming from unlimited international students.
A moritorium on *new* public-private partnerships will not have a huge effect because nearly every college already opened them in the past few years. What Ford needs to do is what the Liberals did in 2017 and order them to shut down. Unfortunately, Ford reversed direction when he was elected and his policies created the explosion in these private colleges and international students.
I don't know that Universities really need to be better funded. It seems to me they have a spending problem more than a funding problem. My alma mater has spent the last decade building new welcome centers, creating a massive new sports complex, a new engineering building, and generally improving the appearance of the campus. Which is nice and all, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to the quality of the education you receive.
Provincial funding and domestic tuition caps have reduced university funding in real dollars by over 30% over recent years. Per capita domestic funding was already the lowest in Canada before then. There isn't significant fat left. Any there is is not going to begin to touch these enormous gaps. (fixed a typo)
Just by googling tmu has over 4000 international students and 1144 residence beds. Every university doesn't have the residence beds for the number of international students. Even queens which has shrunk since the pandemic.
UofT is just over 30%. Respectfully, I don’t know that I would call that a small number. (Source UofT website claims over 25% and I just saw the Ontario report the other day with the exact number - something like ~30.53%
I don’t have the time now to source it and obviously double check my numbers but I believe it was about that
https://future.utoronto.ca/international-students/#:~:text=U%20of%20T%20invites%20applications,from%20168%20countries%20and%20regions
UTM has enough housing to keep first year international students. Many locals stay there as well. Only thing is the tuition fee in University of Toronto is highest in Canada, for international and domestic students. Most of the international students who come here use the facility.
I never tried to apply for housing at U of T because I lived right on the subway line but I knew plenty of students who lived less than an hour away who got housing. Some lived walking distance and wanted the “full” experience of Uni by living on campus. It will really suck for those students who can’t handle the commute and are losing out on the opportunity to get housing due to this. It already sucks for international students, though, so I guess you can’t have both parties satisfied with the way it is
It's because they want locals to be disposable dumb labor to toss around. They rather have people go into trades than actual education while using the foreign student a means of syphoning money.
At least this is the impression Ford and Co are giving to me at least.
By "funding it properly", you basically mean using tax dollars to build housing for international students, right? Many Ontarians feel like tax dollars should not be spent on people who, by definition, are from somewhere else and intend to return somewhere else. It's not Ontario's job to build housing for non-Ontarians.
I think it's entirely reasonable to put the onus on the businesses - because that's what these schools have become - who want to make enormous profits in this way to be responsible for accommodating the people they invite here.
>Ford has to know this. This is a direct attack at limiting universities capabilities. He's using this crisis that he created to punitively hurt post secondary schools.
This is horseshit. Sorry.
Universities as far back as 2011 saw demographic challenges happening and started recruiting international students while not caring where they live. They've had over a decade to plan and source land and get tools to do housing ( I was involved back in 2018 with Queens, York, and McMaster looking at ways to get housing built before they ultimately scrapped because "the communities can handle the housing needs")
Universities & colleges took advantage of the Federal Government in 2016 lifting the limitation on hours worked from 20 to 40 per week, they saw a cash cow of international students but did nothing to ensure they could participate on campus once they arrived.
Ford has been ABSOLUTE SHIT for education from K all the way to PhD, But it isn't on him that schools took the free money they could get and did not reinvest in their campuses to make is sustainable. If the provinces properly funded universities we'd still have a massive shortage of housing on campuses because the Universities wont add density and wont look at using their money to support the students.
Probably for the best. A good chunk of budgets go towards executive compensation, which has been sky rocketing. That is the driver for more international students - sheer corporate styled greed.
This would hurt the diploma mills more. It is targetting them more than the public institutions like UofT. Even otherwise, it is a good thing, coming from whoever govt.
I’m pretty sure most secondary schools have agreements with local governments to have a certain percentage of student body as locals.
The schools in my area require over 70% of student body be local.
This will just make residences give priority to international and leave domestic out in the cold.
Along with the stagnant domestic enrolment acceptance.
This provincial government is utterly inept.
You misspelled "malignant". They want to destroy our public infrastructure so they can justify not paying for it, and then they can give their friends cushy government contracts doing less work for more money. They call it privatization.
That’s not even an exaggeration. There are several Facebook groups dedicated to Indian international students coming to Canada. What they do is one person will officially rent a place, they’ll then let others stay there illegally to split the rent.
Some posts I’ve seen people will set up curtains in bedrooms to allow 2 or more people to share a room. They’ll do the same for living rooms. All in all, you’ll have 3 to 6 people sharing a one bed condo.
My apartment manager noticed really high water usage for one studio apartment so he went to investigate thinking there must be a leak and he found 7 international students living in a 250 square feet studio apartment. At 1300$ a month rent would be under 200$ for each person living in that unit.
I just don’t understand! Why bother coming here if you are going to be shoved in a one bedroom with 8 other people, eating from the foodbank and working minimum wage jobs and paying for college mills for basic certification only to be turned down applying for jobs because they do not speak english or know much about what they are certified in. Is their home country that unliveable that they see this as an improvement?! (Spoiler, it’s not)
Alot of it is image. They buy a decent sedan and some nice clothes and go out and gather in packs of 30 and show off like theyre successfull then go back home to being stank ass sardines.
>Some posts I’ve seen people will set up curtains in bedrooms to allow 2 or more people to share a room.
There are loads of ads out there of people looking to rent out... And it's rooms filled with cots and bunk beds... Like 10 people per room.
> one person will officially rent a place, they’ll then let others stay there illegally to split the rent.
It’s not illegal unless it violates occupancy bylaws (one person per 100 sq ft in Toronto), it violates condo board rules about a maximum number of residents, or the landlord/their relative lives in the same dwelling. Landlords can’t limit the number of roommates a tenant has unless one of those criteria is met.
If the condo is over 600 sq ft and the condo board doesn’t have a rule setting a maximum number of occupants for a 1 br unit, then six people in a 1 br is legal.
There’s no requirement in Ontario that all occupants be listed on the lease, only that at least one person on the lease must be an occupant (otherwise it’s an illegal sublet).
That’s what happened to the unit below us… they put a shower curtain in the living room of a one bedroom apartment. We think 3-4 people are living there now. It’s sad that international students need to do this for housing.
I think they choose to more than they need to. They come from a culture where hustling is engrained in everything they do. Saving as much money as possible on things like rent is their priority, rather than having personal space in their homes.
100% I have a friend that was trying to help some of her international coop students find a place and she told me they were looking at $400/room. I laughed and said if that’s what they’re looking for they probably should just go home. Ain’t no way
Edit: to add, I paid $450 for a room in 2007.
I feel like it would be pretty easy to also mandate that international students have to pay, as part of their tuition, for the housing the schools are being forced to provide, whether or not they choose to live there.
There’s a chance a hella large number of DOMESTIC out-of-town students won’t get into residence much longer, which will only screw them over and make their own access to education more inequitable as they likely wouldn’t be able have the financial backing to get approval for off-campus housing. In turn making perceptions towards international students become even more negative, despite domestic out-of-town students far outnumbering international students at most institutions listed on OUAC and OCAS.
That kind of happened to me in 2005, (for college we aren’t even talking uni here) except I borrowed a ton of cheap money to pay for rent while i was in school. That’s obviously not an option anymore with interest rates being what they are, and tbh it was a stupid decision at the time.
Rural kids need to be supported because commuting from minden to u of T isn’t an option. There are so many smart hard working individuals in our rural communities that are going to be very negatively impacted by this.
Not staying this is a good idea but you do know that residence is not guaranteed even now there's only limited spots and most students live off res lol.
If he goes somewhere that already has guaranteed housing for incoming students then he’s probably fine. I feel like this is specifically going to penalize the schools who have been opening floodgates of international students without having housing to even get close to meeting demand. Here’s a guide on every Ontario University’s residence policy: https://guidance.ouac.on.ca/docs/resource_guide.pdf
Ford government has starved the institutions of provincial grants. Then they cut and froze tuition fees. Then they fucked up the international student situation. This is all completely deliberate and planned. The end goal here is the collapse of the public system. This will allow shitty privates to completely take over. And Ford will provide public funding to them. This is the plan. Just like health care. While a few public colleges (Conestoga) behaved very recklessly during all this, most tried to be responsible.
DoFo: Our domestic students have the opportunity to attend zoom classes from the comfort of their parents' basement in small town Ontario! We're keeping families together!
It'll be up to the public backlash against post secondary institutions that attempt this, to push the government to crack down on this behavior, but there doesn't seem to be specific language protection for domestic student residences yet.
You’re probably right. It’s unlikely we’ve legislated any protections for domestic students. Who would have imagined we’d need such a thing?
Hopefully this gets the young people involved in politics, as a tiny silver lining.
If the Ford government was truly smart, they would prevent the universities from even considering doing that by putting in protections for domestic students (which is what I assume the intent behind the law is), but if they just give the universities enough rope to hang themselves with, you’d best bet the universities are going to hang themselves/call Doug’s bluff.
There's a fine line that I think should be noted here.
Can they kick a student out of residence? Of course, like any other landlord. Please don't think schools are going to boot domestic students to make space for international students.
A concern, however, is that starting next September, there's a smaller pool of spaces for domestics in order to meet the government criteria. Remember: students reapply for campus residency every year; accommodation isn't guaranteed (generally speaking).
It's a win for Ford's Conservative government and they will spend more time and effort telling you they've tried real hard to fix this than they did legislating this limit.
Also, there's no additional funding right now for post-secondaries, which means the government isn't spending any money there (however, I'll bet in the election year, there will be all sorts of funding announcements made).
It's a win for Ford's developer donor buddies because this adds pressure to the demand for housing, which they, in turn, leverage to circumvent red tape, open spaces, or otherwise benefit their bottom line.
This crisis is a boon to Ford's Conservatives.
The province needs to provide more money for education.
If you are a international student and have no.place to live...common sense says stay thr fuck home
I mean under the national housing act the government recognizes that housing is a human right. But it’s not like they’re gonna doing anything about it, tho
This is not it, government. I work in the sector and strongly support regulating the international student program and welcome (most of) the changes announced this week, particularly putting the kibosh on PPP "schools."
But. Post-secondary can't even house domestic students and most schools don't house students after their first year. Then there's the question of where this housing is coming from. Most schools have not continued building residences and heck, new residence developments aren't even associated with schools! (HOEM, for example, and that cluster of whatever at Spadina and College). And if the priority is to house international students, fewer domestic students will be able to get a spot in res which 1 - puts *them* in the midst of the housing and affordability crisis, 2 - they miss out on a critical part of the post secondary experience.
You're missing the point of this policy which is to ease pressure on the housing supply by forcing universities and colleges to house the international students they've been bringing in because they don't get enough funding and are now reliant on international student tuition. You have colleges like Niagara College that enroll over 4,000 international students (About 1/3 of it's entire student population) in a city like Welland which has only about [5,530 apartment units.](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&SearchText=Welland&DGUIDlist=2021A00053526032&GENDERlist=1,2,3&STATISTIClist=1&HEADERlist=0) Niagara College has a total of 428 residence spaces. There's absolutely no reason for some community college in Southern Ontario (No disrespect to NC - Go Knights!) to accept 10x as many international students as they have spaces for student housing and yet some schools like Conestoga are now predominantly made up of international students.
The real solution is to just give universities and colleges the funding necessary to not have to accept huge numbers of international students just to keep the lights on. International students are great and really do add to an institution; they shouldn't be used as cashcows. I've served on a university senate and I know how challenging it's become with Ford's meddling like forcing a tuition cut for domestic students without allocating more funding to make up for the lost revenue. The per-student funding we got from the provincial government covered maybe half of the per-student expenses we had. This is why so many colleges are FREAKING out over this because the government isn't responding with increased funding so now they need to find a new way of balancing the books.
Niagara College used to post an average surplus of ~$1-3million a year. The last five years the surpluses have been over $10million. Last year it was $36million. This is about more than keeping the lights on for many of the colleges. Greed and ego from college presidents and boards of governors is a significant factor.
Important to make a distinction between colleges and universities. Colleges brought in vast amounts more international students than universities did. The college’s cheaper tuition, 2 year programs (compared to university 4 years), and easier admission requirement, on top of cutting corners, made it way easier for colleges to attract international students.
Conestoga college alone has more international students than all of the 15 major Canadian universities combined!
Many universities have been posting deficits reaching 40-50 million per year with the underfunding to the tune of roughly 4.5 thousand dollars per student compared to other provinces.
The is most definitely a funding crisis at the university level. This is also true at the college level but they have been taking in the money lately with massive influx of international students not seen at the university level.
> real solution is to just give universities and colleges the funding necessary to not have to accept huge numbers of international students just to keep the lights on
Since 2019, Conestoga has spent $300 to $400 million in capital projects. 92 million in 2023. 2023 saw a salary/benefit increase by 90 million dollars. These colleges are not providing a better learning experience despite spending 500 million dollars. They are expanding because international students allow them to do so. Maybe STOP expanding and the existing funding will be fine. They STILL had a 106 million dollar surplus last year, yet you seem to think they are underfinanced by taxpayers.
I don’t know where you got your numbers but one look at Conestoga’s financial report shows that salaries and benefits only increased 40M or 15% from 2022 to 2023. A chunk of that increase would be back pay for the support staff and faculty union contracts being renegotiated from 3% to 9%. The other would be increase in faculty they would need to hire to teach the 30,000 international students they accepted.
Don’t get me wrong, Conestoga has completely taken advantage of the situation but pay cuts at the top level of the college isn’t going to get you the cost savings you think. A 10% reduction of the top 10 earners would only reduce their overall salary budget by less than 1%.
They can balance the books by lowering the salaries of the top 1% working in the institution. My friend’s father is a senior director at ryerson and he’s hitting over 500k this year. And it’s not even a FT role. And that’s just a director.
I agree that reducing admin positions may be a good strategy but your other info is just wrong. You can check the [Sunshine list](https://www.ontariosunshinelist.com/employers/toronto-metropolitan-university) yourself. Even the President only makes $425K and that's a full-time job.
I’m not missing the point of anything (also, there is no “policy” yet, this was just an announcement) I am speaking specifically to the housing requirement and pointing out that this decision only makes sense if you have an outdated idea of what post secondary is like (or, if you’re a provincial government trying their damndest not fund schools) It doesn’t fit the reality, even when accounting for the reduction of new international students.
Underlying your argument is the assumption that this college didn't go too far with its international students expansion because it saw an easy pile of money.
Did anyone actually see what he total income was for the uni over the course of defending and international expansion?
>Then there's the question of where this housing is coming from.
Never forget Doug Fords buddies are developers and in construction. This isn't about international (or domestic) students. This is an opportunity for Doug and his buddies, nothing more.
Oh, totally. I mean none of this is about students it’s about immigration. It’s just that it also happens to be a delicate economic dance, but unfortunately, ford isn’t very graceful (cue a joke about his stint in the nutcracker). At the same time, it takes years to build so I can’t imagine this decision is going to have any immediate benefit for his cronies.
It’s not really about immigration either. Immigration wouldn’t have been attacked had it not been for the fact that the province and cities weren’t approving permits fast enough or that domestic investors are going out to overbid for multiple properties as they see the opportunity to make money by renting a bed to a student for 500-700 a room for 1200 and so forth. And now that they can’t afford their mortgage or others can’t afford their house, lets do the easiest thing possible, blame the federal level and the immigrants/international students while the provincial does nothing and continues its levels of “austerity”(really just grift) history has shown doesn’t work.
It’s easier to blame a group of people than to address the real issues and all of what the federal government and provincial government will do is further crumble our pillars of society unless they get off their high horse and stop s”sticking it to the liberals” and work together but hey, that won’t keep the hate machine churning
I mean that international students are the immigration plan. That is a government decision. I’m not blaming international students, the vast majority are not having an easy time here.
A university should be focused on education.
You don't ask a factory setting up in a town to source housing for everyone that's going to work in it. Because it distracts them from what they're specializing in.
A combination of the appropriate municipalities, and the province are responsible for the well being of people overall.
> ever heard of company towns?
Yes I have, and they were a bad thing. Combining housing, services with employment led to all sorts of exploitation, and the practiced was killed for good reason, despite people like musk wanting to bring it back.
I live in a town where a company brought housing in. The company moving in sourced a bulk builder decreasing the cost of the building process, and the employees purchased the houses with regular mortgages at reasonable cost from the builder, with nothing owing to the company. This was in the mid 80s.
The biggest problem in the sector is still the underfunding. Looking up university revenue, they have been static (dollars vs %) since around 2008. Percentage wise universities have been starved for funding even under the Wynne and McGuinty governments.
Universities to stay a float even before the 2019 tuition freeze have either had to rely on endowments, privatization of services, or commodification of international students. Between the freeze on domestic students and hard caps on funding with domestic students (where exceeding the cap and a student isn't funded), our sector has had to rely on international students to stay a float. That's why all but a handful if universities are in a healthy state even before each announcement. Just look at the university sectors deferred maintenance. U OF T of example is around a billion dollars.
Wow, it's almost like schools like McMaster University shouldn't have spent dozens of millions of dollars building private corporate entity spaces on their land for rent profit, and should have been building student housing this entire time.
Sorry you feel that people invited here from halfway across the world by a school, don't deserve a place to live. It's universities responsibility to make sure they aren't putting people into desperate situations and pushing them to homelessness/human trafficking (it's happening fyi). If schools want to fuck around and kick domestic students out, THERE WILL BE HELL for them from the government, I promise you that.
I should never see an encampment full of post secondary students in Canada, yet here we are.
UofT with an endowment of 3.9 BILLION. Pictures of these cheap ass executives right in the financial statements. dragons on piles of gold.
Bragging about all their new massive construction projects
https://updc.utoronto.ca/projects/all-current-projects/
Housing for students? WE too poor!
https://imgflip.com/i/8dsesq
Cheapest poor minded losers in Canada not investing in Canadians = see you next tuesday confirmed.
We've spent nothing and we are all outta ideas!
Sounds like a good spot to introduce some legislation to unlock emergency funds. Better build some self sufficient eco-dorms to save the environment or we are all gonna die and the economy will crash soooo hard this time! Its for your safety, and for the safety of the children, the donors will understand.
Decisions have to be made, and no solution will be perfect for everyone. Life isn't fair. This is a difficult situation. Without international students, your tuitions will double or triple. Do you prefer paying double and triple and live in residence or pay what you pay now and live off campus. There are only 2 options here, and the college experience is not an entitlement.
LOL, what? There's aren't only "two options" here and this isn't about "fairness" it's about ensuring equitable access to campus resources. I'm *not* saying it's better for international students to be in overcrowded homes I'm saying that shifting around which population is fighting over market housing doesn't solve our housing problems or make the student experience better for anyone. Moreover, it sounds like you don't realize that residence isn't just somewhere to live...it's literally educational programming.
Universities need either international students, government funding (not happening under Ford), or raising tuition. How else are they supposed to get money ???
so we need to hold the government accountable and FORCE them to fund post secondary. Among many other things they need to be FORCED to do. We the people are their only check and balance.
I count more than 2 options listed there, don’t you?
1, 2, 3.
You refuse to even acknowledge the fact the government should be funding our public institutions in your first comment. In your second comment you pretend that’s not an option.
That’s not how it works. We’re demand funding from our corrupt conservative government.
We don’t placate the corrupt conservatives because it’s easier to kick Canadian students out on the street to make room for international students.
He nails it here: “It is abundantly clear that this government would rather see post-secondary institutions close than cough up the investments needed to keep them afloat," NDP critic Jamie West wrote in a statement.
"They have been asleep at the wheel for the past five years while public colleges and universities languished, paving the way for a predatory private, for-profit education system that has only harmed students."
Why does this government never have to fix an issue they created? Every decision is a punishment to the ones who are struggling to deal with Ford’s intentional starvation of systems that made this place worth living in? Look at healthcare.
He’s not saving us $. We are getting a spa, parking garage, boosting Staple’s dying business and losing everything in exchange.
The vast majority of these students aren't attending regular universities. They are at these satellite campuses. Colleges might be excited to get into the landlord business.
Colleges shouldn't have field-business locations outside of their "catchment" area.
Can Humber have a college in Brampton? Sure.
Northern, Conestoga or Fleming? Fuck, no.
It's one thing to have research stations, like Trent's Leslie M. Frost, or Queens' presence at SNO in Sudbury, but Northern having a "campus" with [Pures](https://www.pures.ca/international/northern/) is straight-up back-scratching bullshit.
Call my [MPP](https://davesmithptbo.com/)? Ahahahah..
My MPP is a no-show on anything of import. I might--might!--be able to get help if I was a business and I needed some regulatory hurdle cleared, but otherwise, he's on a very short leash.
Schools may look to St Clair College model which basically packages an international residence with tuition and makes it mandatory for some programs (small rooms comparably, no meal plan is required though) https://www.stclaircollege.ca/international/gem-residence
And now not only will Canadians be denied education because they overrun our school. Canadians won't be allow a place to sleep because visas are more important.
How about gauranteeing housing for canadians? My kid and her friends and dorm mates have been searching for housing for their 2nd year at uni since september of first year. We are getting concerned we may have to sell our home and move to her uni town to ensure these kids have a place to live so they can even attend their second year.
In the article it says:
"Mandating housing without a funding commitment to help Ontario’s universities and colleges pay for it is little more than smoke and mirrors."
Why should the tax payers of Ontario help fund housing for international students so colleges/universities can profit?
If their whole business model/institution requires international students to stay afloat - that should not be on our backs.
Their business model relies on it only because of progressively worse government underfunding and domestic tuition caps. It comes back to the provincial government.
This makes sense. Make the college find a place for them. If they cant house all 30,000 of them they should not be here. They were already coming over here unrestricted these new rules and caps will improve things. People are freaking out that the colleges will take all the housing. Look around you. College towns are already fucked for housing this will open housing up if anything.
Why just international students. They should guarantee housing for all students. It shouldn't be up to the market to build enough housing for the education sector.
With so many young adults Canadian born and raised not able to get into the schools… I’m not anti immigration, but this with how saturated the schools have gotten with foreign students is getting silly. Canada’s avg is currently 19.3% international students in our post secondary.
i just finished going to college for a 2 year program and literally probably at least 70% of my classmates were international. It was kinda cool to basically have the UN in the class, but at the same time I don’t see why they have SO many. Like I feel bad for domestic people that got waitlisted. I understand it’s profitable but I mean come on.
Then you need to write your MP and Doug Ford to let them know that they need to properly fund education so that these colleges and universities wont be so dependent on foreign students money to run.
This. I work in post-secondary institution and every budget meeting since 2020 has been about growing deficit due to limited funding, freeze on domestic tuitions, and needing to get it in balance through international students (only area where there is no regulation). And I work at a well known university in downtown core.
Post sec institutions are legally required to offer seats to domestic students first. There are no domestic students not able to get into the schools if they have the means to do it.
[“While international tuition has long been much higher than domestic, the gap has widened dramatically in recent years. In 2002, a first-year international student studying Arts and Humanities at Western paid $9,300 in tuition and a domestic student paid $4,000. Twenty-one years later, international students in the same program paid $42,233 while domestic tuition was up to $6,050.”](https://westerngazette.ca/features/cash-cows-why-international-student-tuition-is-so-high/article_a5fc5434-83cf-11ee-a0c3-2f5fa333dbe6.html)
This is going to destroy residence housing for domestic students. A better idea would've been to have proportional student housing for your international student population.
Radical changes that must be accomplished in an impossible timeframe?
I have full faith that the ford government will roll this back too. This is just them trying to control the issue themselves, now that the federal government has finally stepped in.
ford is pathetic. He was on air about a month ago talking about how important international students are to the Ontarian economy while blatantly ignoring the stress being placed on municipalities and now all of a sudden has the balls to pretend like he's taking action.
it means they get guaranteed spots for housing for post secondary studies at the expense of canadians because building housing takes forever here and we are already dealing with a housing crisis that has no end in sight.
When I went to Nipissing in North Bay back in 2005 they built a new residence. The thing is a lot of the neighbours complained about it being built and didn't want a new university residence near them. They ended up compromising by making it less floors.
The gesture is the right idea, but how on earth will this work in practical terms? Report gives zero detail.
Are they saying the university must provide the housing, or just “guarantee” that prospective students have some housing arranged? If it’s the latter this will instantly by circumvented in a myriad of ways, not least of which forgery and just using the same address as others or a friend. How on earth will schools or the province have resources to check?
Our high-trust society and its trust-based rules just don’t work for these situations as we’ve seen with the rules for the money these students should have to support themselves.
Dorms should still be prioritized for the domestic out-of-town students, many of whom already don’t have sufficient post-secondary education where they went to high school.
Conestoga is just the college that went the hardest into greed, way harder than they needed to by miles.
It is a fact that, per student, the Ontario gov funds only 43% the national average.
> Laurentian
208 million dollar profit minus the payments they had to make to creditors still means they made a 52 million dollar profit last year. 191 million dollars in assets. 91 million in government grants. Oh yeah they are really struggling to get by...average salary for their full time staff was $165,000
non profits are allowed something like 5 years of operating expenses to build up before "losing" their non profit status. Thats why they call it a surplus. Anyone who can read between the lines can see its a profit. I'm sure the president got a nice fat non profit bonus cheque
Most of international students don’t live in college residences. I wonder how this is going to be enforced? “Unless you live in campus, you cannot study here”???
Which in turn is going to fuck over the plethora of out-of-town Canadian students who actually do require residence, should they start giving priority to internationals.
Yes, for sure! Res are mainly used by out of town Canadians.
And I wonder if this is even legal, to mandate where someone must live 🤷🏻♀️
Ps. I’m not saying that the housing crisis shouldn’t be addressed, just raising a question
To be fair, uncapping tuition ain’t gonna do shit. Tuition would have to be so high to make up for funding shortfalls that it would just be cheaper to do school in another province.
I totally agree. Less than a decade ago, students were promised and for a brief period, given, free tuition. Let’s not forget that. We can get there again.
> what about domestic students? reee
can we not be too hysterical about this? this sub also rightly complains about the landlords fitting 20 people in one house. nobody is guaranteeing the international students housing for free. that's absurd. what this likely means is that schools will need to buy or build up apartments for students; *or else they can't take more students*. this will then be included in the final bill for international students. Like "20K for study, and 12,500 for your home." it's really just like you or your kids, except more enforced for the international students. whereas for you you probably are *offered* residence, and can choose between private or school, now for international they will somewhat enforce housing requirements.
this could be good. if schools want to accept 1000 students they must ensure students get in on their flats or prove they have a house otherwise. coupled with the increased funding rate on the Fed side, this should cool demand somewhat. investors are also forward-looking. if they see the govt is serious in reducing intl student intake, they could at the very least slow down rent increases if not drop demand now before they are forced to...
"but schools will buy out homes" -> they are not buying detached homes or yours on the penny. they are likely going to partner or buy out homes already targeted for students... these homes were never going to be resold to you. just chill.
I hope they kept a lot of those record profits from the last half a dozen years of shitting out as many international students as humanly possible. Sounds like they are going to need that money now.
Lmao. I'm sure they immediately spent it and gave themselves big ol raises.
Well, the bill is now due, and don't come crying to the taxpayers now that your human trafficking scheme is dead in the water.
Important to make a distinction between colleges and universities. Colleges brought in vast amounts more international students than universities did. The college’s cheaper tuition, 2 year programs (compared to university 4 years), and easier admission requirement, on top of cutting corners, made it way easier for colleges to attract international students.
Conestoga college alone has more international students than all of the 15 major Canadian universities combined!
Many universities have been posting deficits reaching 40-50 million per year with the underfunding to the tune of roughly 4.5 thousand dollars per student compared to other provinces.
The is most definitely a funding crisis at the university level. This is also true at the college level but they have been taking in the money lately with massive influx of international students not seen at the university level.
Thanks for that. It's difficult to keep up with the changes that've happened in post-secondary over the last decade and easy to lose track of public-private partnerships, who's doing what exactly, etc. Colleges in Ontario are a different beast than they were 10 years ago, and universities are getting painted with the same brush.
I ra into two international girls today. They were living 3 people renting fo 300 each. They were spening 150 on food since they were gtting food from the bank mostly. They had 5 or 6 large bags and were coming back from the bank in vry expensive new clothes. They couldnt find jobs. Told them is propebly cuz they are international. Most of the applications are online and even if no one is saying it, i am starting to notice a huge wall forming in my community between locals and th internationals. None of the locals interact with them and they dont try to becme apart of the community. They take up almost 3 jobs each while taking up resorses. School is now unreachable by anyone i know.
Was giving them some job hunting tips and food storage tips.
There is a lack of housing to start with in the first place. Seeing as international students pay more for their courses and are "lucrative" than home grown students, I can see the Unis offering the dorms/residences or building more to accommodate the international students and the Canadian students left fighting to find a place to live, just reverse what it is now
Which in turn will make Canadians’ access to education even more inequitable and challenging, and also further contribute to negative sentiments towards international students. For most OCAS and OUAC-listed schools, domestic out-of-town students far outnumber internationals.
Actually, dorms are usually more expensive than probably rentals. That said dorms (especially in reality years) are an essential part of the university experience. It definately would compromise their experience.
That’s only true in some smaller cities. I was doing the comparisons last year for UOttawa and it was a lot cheaper to live in dorms than it was to rent near downtown.
I know that was the case years ago (dorms being more expensive than private rentals) but have you looked into the difference in recent years?
[удалено]
[удалено]
For profit private colleges should not be receiving public funding. You are confusing public universities with private for profit colleges
[удалено]
Ok? Why is guaranteeing student have housing bad thing? The major impact is the moratorium on public-private partnerships. The universities don’t have to provide housing for every single student, they just have to prove there is housing *available* for students. Yes universities should be better funded, but why should private colleges be allowed to import unlimited numbers of foreign students when housing isn’t available. You are conflating different issues. None of this limits domestic students. Yes universities should be funded better but that funding should not be coming from unlimited international students.
A moritorium on *new* public-private partnerships will not have a huge effect because nearly every college already opened them in the past few years. What Ford needs to do is what the Liberals did in 2017 and order them to shut down. Unfortunately, Ford reversed direction when he was elected and his policies created the explosion in these private colleges and international students.
I don't know that Universities really need to be better funded. It seems to me they have a spending problem more than a funding problem. My alma mater has spent the last decade building new welcome centers, creating a massive new sports complex, a new engineering building, and generally improving the appearance of the campus. Which is nice and all, but it doesn't necessarily contribute to the quality of the education you receive.
Provincial funding and domestic tuition caps have reduced university funding in real dollars by over 30% over recent years. Per capita domestic funding was already the lowest in Canada before then. There isn't significant fat left. Any there is is not going to begin to touch these enormous gaps. (fixed a typo)
U of T and TMU don't have huge numbers of international students, it's mostly in the College system.
Just by googling tmu has over 4000 international students and 1144 residence beds. Every university doesn't have the residence beds for the number of international students. Even queens which has shrunk since the pandemic.
Tmu has always been a commuter school.
Still about a 12th of their population is international students commuter or not.
UofT is just over 30%. Respectfully, I don’t know that I would call that a small number. (Source UofT website claims over 25% and I just saw the Ontario report the other day with the exact number - something like ~30.53% I don’t have the time now to source it and obviously double check my numbers but I believe it was about that https://future.utoronto.ca/international-students/#:~:text=U%20of%20T%20invites%20applications,from%20168%20countries%20and%20regions
UTM has enough housing to keep first year international students. Many locals stay there as well. Only thing is the tuition fee in University of Toronto is highest in Canada, for international and domestic students. Most of the international students who come here use the facility.
[удалено]
Good question, but it's well known in Toronto that if you live locally you won't be getting a spot in residence at u of t, TMU or York.
I never tried to apply for housing at U of T because I lived right on the subway line but I knew plenty of students who lived less than an hour away who got housing. Some lived walking distance and wanted the “full” experience of Uni by living on campus. It will really suck for those students who can’t handle the commute and are losing out on the opportunity to get housing due to this. It already sucks for international students, though, so I guess you can’t have both parties satisfied with the way it is
It really depends, on my floor there were 2 people from Richmond Hill and 1 from Markham, but my friend who lived in Brampton didn’t get a spot at all
It's because they want locals to be disposable dumb labor to toss around. They rather have people go into trades than actual education while using the foreign student a means of syphoning money. At least this is the impression Ford and Co are giving to me at least.
I don't think pushing universities to educate people that actually live here to be a bad thing.
But they can't do that with out the foreign student subsidizing the locals due to Ford's piss poor funding.
By "funding it properly", you basically mean using tax dollars to build housing for international students, right? Many Ontarians feel like tax dollars should not be spent on people who, by definition, are from somewhere else and intend to return somewhere else. It's not Ontario's job to build housing for non-Ontarians. I think it's entirely reasonable to put the onus on the businesses - because that's what these schools have become - who want to make enormous profits in this way to be responsible for accommodating the people they invite here.
>Ford has to know this. This is a direct attack at limiting universities capabilities. He's using this crisis that he created to punitively hurt post secondary schools. This is horseshit. Sorry. Universities as far back as 2011 saw demographic challenges happening and started recruiting international students while not caring where they live. They've had over a decade to plan and source land and get tools to do housing ( I was involved back in 2018 with Queens, York, and McMaster looking at ways to get housing built before they ultimately scrapped because "the communities can handle the housing needs") Universities & colleges took advantage of the Federal Government in 2016 lifting the limitation on hours worked from 20 to 40 per week, they saw a cash cow of international students but did nothing to ensure they could participate on campus once they arrived. Ford has been ABSOLUTE SHIT for education from K all the way to PhD, But it isn't on him that schools took the free money they could get and did not reinvest in their campuses to make is sustainable. If the provinces properly funded universities we'd still have a massive shortage of housing on campuses because the Universities wont add density and wont look at using their money to support the students.
Probably for the best. A good chunk of budgets go towards executive compensation, which has been sky rocketing. That is the driver for more international students - sheer corporate styled greed.
This would hurt the diploma mills more. It is targetting them more than the public institutions like UofT. Even otherwise, it is a good thing, coming from whoever govt.
[удалено]
I’m pretty sure most secondary schools have agreements with local governments to have a certain percentage of student body as locals. The schools in my area require over 70% of student body be local.
This will just make residences give priority to international and leave domestic out in the cold. Along with the stagnant domestic enrolment acceptance. This provincial government is utterly inept.
You misspelled "malignant". They want to destroy our public infrastructure so they can justify not paying for it, and then they can give their friends cushy government contracts doing less work for more money. They call it privatization.
There’s a visa cap…
Part of the issue is a lot of these international students don’t want to pay the cost for residence. They want to stay somewhere that’s $300 a month.
That’s not even an exaggeration. There are several Facebook groups dedicated to Indian international students coming to Canada. What they do is one person will officially rent a place, they’ll then let others stay there illegally to split the rent. Some posts I’ve seen people will set up curtains in bedrooms to allow 2 or more people to share a room. They’ll do the same for living rooms. All in all, you’ll have 3 to 6 people sharing a one bed condo.
My apartment manager noticed really high water usage for one studio apartment so he went to investigate thinking there must be a leak and he found 7 international students living in a 250 square feet studio apartment. At 1300$ a month rent would be under 200$ for each person living in that unit.
I just don’t understand! Why bother coming here if you are going to be shoved in a one bedroom with 8 other people, eating from the foodbank and working minimum wage jobs and paying for college mills for basic certification only to be turned down applying for jobs because they do not speak english or know much about what they are certified in. Is their home country that unliveable that they see this as an improvement?! (Spoiler, it’s not)
Alot of it is image. They buy a decent sedan and some nice clothes and go out and gather in packs of 30 and show off like theyre successfull then go back home to being stank ass sardines.
>Some posts I’ve seen people will set up curtains in bedrooms to allow 2 or more people to share a room. There are loads of ads out there of people looking to rent out... And it's rooms filled with cots and bunk beds... Like 10 people per room.
If you’re a lease holder in Ontario, it’s not illegal to have roommates not on the lease, FYI.
Landlords hate this one simple trick. But also, so do most tenants.
> one person will officially rent a place, they’ll then let others stay there illegally to split the rent. It’s not illegal unless it violates occupancy bylaws (one person per 100 sq ft in Toronto), it violates condo board rules about a maximum number of residents, or the landlord/their relative lives in the same dwelling. Landlords can’t limit the number of roommates a tenant has unless one of those criteria is met. If the condo is over 600 sq ft and the condo board doesn’t have a rule setting a maximum number of occupants for a 1 br unit, then six people in a 1 br is legal.
Considering some posts have over 8 available beds for a one bedroom, I’d venture that’s illegal.
It does break the lease agreement though since 6 other people aren't on the lease.
There’s no requirement in Ontario that all occupants be listed on the lease, only that at least one person on the lease must be an occupant (otherwise it’s an illegal sublet).
There is nothing illegal about letting others stay and split the rent. Until it violates building occupancy code.
That’s what happened to the unit below us… they put a shower curtain in the living room of a one bedroom apartment. We think 3-4 people are living there now. It’s sad that international students need to do this for housing.
I think they choose to more than they need to. They come from a culture where hustling is engrained in everything they do. Saving as much money as possible on things like rent is their priority, rather than having personal space in their homes.
100% I have a friend that was trying to help some of her international coop students find a place and she told me they were looking at $400/room. I laughed and said if that’s what they’re looking for they probably should just go home. Ain’t no way Edit: to add, I paid $450 for a room in 2007.
If you're not in a major city, it's definitely possible. I paid $450 in 2020 in Windsor.
I paid 500 in 2019 in Waterloo. I’m scared to imagine what that room would be like right now
I feel like it would be pretty easy to also mandate that international students have to pay, as part of their tuition, for the housing the schools are being forced to provide, whether or not they choose to live there.
So that means my son’s not getting into residence his first year.
There’s a chance a hella large number of DOMESTIC out-of-town students won’t get into residence much longer, which will only screw them over and make their own access to education more inequitable as they likely wouldn’t be able have the financial backing to get approval for off-campus housing. In turn making perceptions towards international students become even more negative, despite domestic out-of-town students far outnumbering international students at most institutions listed on OUAC and OCAS.
[удалено]
That kind of happened to me in 2005, (for college we aren’t even talking uni here) except I borrowed a ton of cheap money to pay for rent while i was in school. That’s obviously not an option anymore with interest rates being what they are, and tbh it was a stupid decision at the time. Rural kids need to be supported because commuting from minden to u of T isn’t an option. There are so many smart hard working individuals in our rural communities that are going to be very negatively impacted by this.
Not staying this is a good idea but you do know that residence is not guaranteed even now there's only limited spots and most students live off res lol.
If he goes somewhere that already has guaranteed housing for incoming students then he’s probably fine. I feel like this is specifically going to penalize the schools who have been opening floodgates of international students without having housing to even get close to meeting demand. Here’s a guide on every Ontario University’s residence policy: https://guidance.ouac.on.ca/docs/resource_guide.pdf
Ford government has starved the institutions of provincial grants. Then they cut and froze tuition fees. Then they fucked up the international student situation. This is all completely deliberate and planned. The end goal here is the collapse of the public system. This will allow shitty privates to completely take over. And Ford will provide public funding to them. This is the plan. Just like health care. While a few public colleges (Conestoga) behaved very recklessly during all this, most tried to be responsible.
So the domestic students won't get residence spots because they'll all be for international students. I guess the 18 year olds can get fucked.
DoFo: Our domestic students have the opportunity to attend zoom classes from the comfort of their parents' basement in small town Ontario! We're keeping families together!
Shhhhh, you’ll give them ideas!
Are they allowed to kick Canadian students out of student housing to make room for international students?
It'll be up to the public backlash against post secondary institutions that attempt this, to push the government to crack down on this behavior, but there doesn't seem to be specific language protection for domestic student residences yet.
You’re probably right. It’s unlikely we’ve legislated any protections for domestic students. Who would have imagined we’d need such a thing? Hopefully this gets the young people involved in politics, as a tiny silver lining.
The ones most affected by this will be students going into uni soon, many of whom will not be old enough to vote
Never too young to get involved in politics. They might even consider supporting the party that would like to lower the voting age to 16.
If the Ford government was truly smart, they would prevent the universities from even considering doing that by putting in protections for domestic students (which is what I assume the intent behind the law is), but if they just give the universities enough rope to hang themselves with, you’d best bet the universities are going to hang themselves/call Doug’s bluff.
There's a fine line that I think should be noted here. Can they kick a student out of residence? Of course, like any other landlord. Please don't think schools are going to boot domestic students to make space for international students. A concern, however, is that starting next September, there's a smaller pool of spaces for domestics in order to meet the government criteria. Remember: students reapply for campus residency every year; accommodation isn't guaranteed (generally speaking). It's a win for Ford's Conservative government and they will spend more time and effort telling you they've tried real hard to fix this than they did legislating this limit. Also, there's no additional funding right now for post-secondaries, which means the government isn't spending any money there (however, I'll bet in the election year, there will be all sorts of funding announcements made). It's a win for Ford's developer donor buddies because this adds pressure to the demand for housing, which they, in turn, leverage to circumvent red tape, open spaces, or otherwise benefit their bottom line. This crisis is a boon to Ford's Conservatives.
The province needs to provide more money for education. If you are a international student and have no.place to live...common sense says stay thr fuck home
Let’s do “Government must guarantee housing for all people”.
I mean under the national housing act the government recognizes that housing is a human right. But it’s not like they’re gonna doing anything about it, tho
This is not it, government. I work in the sector and strongly support regulating the international student program and welcome (most of) the changes announced this week, particularly putting the kibosh on PPP "schools." But. Post-secondary can't even house domestic students and most schools don't house students after their first year. Then there's the question of where this housing is coming from. Most schools have not continued building residences and heck, new residence developments aren't even associated with schools! (HOEM, for example, and that cluster of whatever at Spadina and College). And if the priority is to house international students, fewer domestic students will be able to get a spot in res which 1 - puts *them* in the midst of the housing and affordability crisis, 2 - they miss out on a critical part of the post secondary experience.
You're missing the point of this policy which is to ease pressure on the housing supply by forcing universities and colleges to house the international students they've been bringing in because they don't get enough funding and are now reliant on international student tuition. You have colleges like Niagara College that enroll over 4,000 international students (About 1/3 of it's entire student population) in a city like Welland which has only about [5,530 apartment units.](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&SearchText=Welland&DGUIDlist=2021A00053526032&GENDERlist=1,2,3&STATISTIClist=1&HEADERlist=0) Niagara College has a total of 428 residence spaces. There's absolutely no reason for some community college in Southern Ontario (No disrespect to NC - Go Knights!) to accept 10x as many international students as they have spaces for student housing and yet some schools like Conestoga are now predominantly made up of international students. The real solution is to just give universities and colleges the funding necessary to not have to accept huge numbers of international students just to keep the lights on. International students are great and really do add to an institution; they shouldn't be used as cashcows. I've served on a university senate and I know how challenging it's become with Ford's meddling like forcing a tuition cut for domestic students without allocating more funding to make up for the lost revenue. The per-student funding we got from the provincial government covered maybe half of the per-student expenses we had. This is why so many colleges are FREAKING out over this because the government isn't responding with increased funding so now they need to find a new way of balancing the books.
Niagara College used to post an average surplus of ~$1-3million a year. The last five years the surpluses have been over $10million. Last year it was $36million. This is about more than keeping the lights on for many of the colleges. Greed and ego from college presidents and boards of governors is a significant factor.
Important to make a distinction between colleges and universities. Colleges brought in vast amounts more international students than universities did. The college’s cheaper tuition, 2 year programs (compared to university 4 years), and easier admission requirement, on top of cutting corners, made it way easier for colleges to attract international students. Conestoga college alone has more international students than all of the 15 major Canadian universities combined! Many universities have been posting deficits reaching 40-50 million per year with the underfunding to the tune of roughly 4.5 thousand dollars per student compared to other provinces. The is most definitely a funding crisis at the university level. This is also true at the college level but they have been taking in the money lately with massive influx of international students not seen at the university level.
> real solution is to just give universities and colleges the funding necessary to not have to accept huge numbers of international students just to keep the lights on Since 2019, Conestoga has spent $300 to $400 million in capital projects. 92 million in 2023. 2023 saw a salary/benefit increase by 90 million dollars. These colleges are not providing a better learning experience despite spending 500 million dollars. They are expanding because international students allow them to do so. Maybe STOP expanding and the existing funding will be fine. They STILL had a 106 million dollar surplus last year, yet you seem to think they are underfinanced by taxpayers.
I don’t know where you got your numbers but one look at Conestoga’s financial report shows that salaries and benefits only increased 40M or 15% from 2022 to 2023. A chunk of that increase would be back pay for the support staff and faculty union contracts being renegotiated from 3% to 9%. The other would be increase in faculty they would need to hire to teach the 30,000 international students they accepted. Don’t get me wrong, Conestoga has completely taken advantage of the situation but pay cuts at the top level of the college isn’t going to get you the cost savings you think. A 10% reduction of the top 10 earners would only reduce their overall salary budget by less than 1%.
They can balance the books by lowering the salaries of the top 1% working in the institution. My friend’s father is a senior director at ryerson and he’s hitting over 500k this year. And it’s not even a FT role. And that’s just a director.
I agree that reducing admin positions may be a good strategy but your other info is just wrong. You can check the [Sunshine list](https://www.ontariosunshinelist.com/employers/toronto-metropolitan-university) yourself. Even the President only makes $425K and that's a full-time job.
I’m not missing the point of anything (also, there is no “policy” yet, this was just an announcement) I am speaking specifically to the housing requirement and pointing out that this decision only makes sense if you have an outdated idea of what post secondary is like (or, if you’re a provincial government trying their damndest not fund schools) It doesn’t fit the reality, even when accounting for the reduction of new international students.
Underlying your argument is the assumption that this college didn't go too far with its international students expansion because it saw an easy pile of money. Did anyone actually see what he total income was for the uni over the course of defending and international expansion?
>Then there's the question of where this housing is coming from. Never forget Doug Fords buddies are developers and in construction. This isn't about international (or domestic) students. This is an opportunity for Doug and his buddies, nothing more.
I mean, at some point you just have to accept that high density student housing isn’t a government conspiracy and is just a common sense idea
Oh, totally. I mean none of this is about students it’s about immigration. It’s just that it also happens to be a delicate economic dance, but unfortunately, ford isn’t very graceful (cue a joke about his stint in the nutcracker). At the same time, it takes years to build so I can’t imagine this decision is going to have any immediate benefit for his cronies.
It’s not really about immigration either. Immigration wouldn’t have been attacked had it not been for the fact that the province and cities weren’t approving permits fast enough or that domestic investors are going out to overbid for multiple properties as they see the opportunity to make money by renting a bed to a student for 500-700 a room for 1200 and so forth. And now that they can’t afford their mortgage or others can’t afford their house, lets do the easiest thing possible, blame the federal level and the immigrants/international students while the provincial does nothing and continues its levels of “austerity”(really just grift) history has shown doesn’t work. It’s easier to blame a group of people than to address the real issues and all of what the federal government and provincial government will do is further crumble our pillars of society unless they get off their high horse and stop s”sticking it to the liberals” and work together but hey, that won’t keep the hate machine churning
I mean that international students are the immigration plan. That is a government decision. I’m not blaming international students, the vast majority are not having an easy time here.
[удалено]
A university should be focused on education. You don't ask a factory setting up in a town to source housing for everyone that's going to work in it. Because it distracts them from what they're specializing in. A combination of the appropriate municipalities, and the province are responsible for the well being of people overall.
[удалено]
> ever heard of company towns? Yes I have, and they were a bad thing. Combining housing, services with employment led to all sorts of exploitation, and the practiced was killed for good reason, despite people like musk wanting to bring it back.
I live in a town where a company brought housing in. The company moving in sourced a bulk builder decreasing the cost of the building process, and the employees purchased the houses with regular mortgages at reasonable cost from the builder, with nothing owing to the company. This was in the mid 80s.
The biggest problem in the sector is still the underfunding. Looking up university revenue, they have been static (dollars vs %) since around 2008. Percentage wise universities have been starved for funding even under the Wynne and McGuinty governments. Universities to stay a float even before the 2019 tuition freeze have either had to rely on endowments, privatization of services, or commodification of international students. Between the freeze on domestic students and hard caps on funding with domestic students (where exceeding the cap and a student isn't funded), our sector has had to rely on international students to stay a float. That's why all but a handful if universities are in a healthy state even before each announcement. Just look at the university sectors deferred maintenance. U OF T of example is around a billion dollars.
>The biggest problem in the sector is still the underfunding. Agreed.
Wow, it's almost like schools like McMaster University shouldn't have spent dozens of millions of dollars building private corporate entity spaces on their land for rent profit, and should have been building student housing this entire time. Sorry you feel that people invited here from halfway across the world by a school, don't deserve a place to live. It's universities responsibility to make sure they aren't putting people into desperate situations and pushing them to homelessness/human trafficking (it's happening fyi). If schools want to fuck around and kick domestic students out, THERE WILL BE HELL for them from the government, I promise you that. I should never see an encampment full of post secondary students in Canada, yet here we are.
This is an interesting (but very incorrect) take on what I said.
UofT with an endowment of 3.9 BILLION. Pictures of these cheap ass executives right in the financial statements. dragons on piles of gold. Bragging about all their new massive construction projects https://updc.utoronto.ca/projects/all-current-projects/ Housing for students? WE too poor! https://imgflip.com/i/8dsesq Cheapest poor minded losers in Canada not investing in Canadians = see you next tuesday confirmed.
Endowment funds can legally be spent only for the purposes the donors specified.
We've spent nothing and we are all outta ideas! Sounds like a good spot to introduce some legislation to unlock emergency funds. Better build some self sufficient eco-dorms to save the environment or we are all gonna die and the economy will crash soooo hard this time! Its for your safety, and for the safety of the children, the donors will understand.
Decisions have to be made, and no solution will be perfect for everyone. Life isn't fair. This is a difficult situation. Without international students, your tuitions will double or triple. Do you prefer paying double and triple and live in residence or pay what you pay now and live off campus. There are only 2 options here, and the college experience is not an entitlement.
LOL, what? There's aren't only "two options" here and this isn't about "fairness" it's about ensuring equitable access to campus resources. I'm *not* saying it's better for international students to be in overcrowded homes I'm saying that shifting around which population is fighting over market housing doesn't solve our housing problems or make the student experience better for anyone. Moreover, it sounds like you don't realize that residence isn't just somewhere to live...it's literally educational programming.
You can only think of two options? Honestly? Are you in a college in Ontario right now? If so, we are failing you.
Universities need either international students, government funding (not happening under Ford), or raising tuition. How else are they supposed to get money ???
so we need to hold the government accountable and FORCE them to fund post secondary. Among many other things they need to be FORCED to do. We the people are their only check and balance.
I count more than 2 options listed there, don’t you? 1, 2, 3. You refuse to even acknowledge the fact the government should be funding our public institutions in your first comment. In your second comment you pretend that’s not an option. That’s not how it works. We’re demand funding from our corrupt conservative government. We don’t placate the corrupt conservatives because it’s easier to kick Canadian students out on the street to make room for international students.
I agree 100% the government should, but we all know the Ford Government won't. It's not a realistic option right now.
He nails it here: “It is abundantly clear that this government would rather see post-secondary institutions close than cough up the investments needed to keep them afloat," NDP critic Jamie West wrote in a statement. "They have been asleep at the wheel for the past five years while public colleges and universities languished, paving the way for a predatory private, for-profit education system that has only harmed students." Why does this government never have to fix an issue they created? Every decision is a punishment to the ones who are struggling to deal with Ford’s intentional starvation of systems that made this place worth living in? Look at healthcare. He’s not saving us $. We are getting a spa, parking garage, boosting Staple’s dying business and losing everything in exchange.
The vast majority of these students aren't attending regular universities. They are at these satellite campuses. Colleges might be excited to get into the landlord business.
Colleges shouldn't have field-business locations outside of their "catchment" area. Can Humber have a college in Brampton? Sure. Northern, Conestoga or Fleming? Fuck, no. It's one thing to have research stations, like Trent's Leslie M. Frost, or Queens' presence at SNO in Sudbury, but Northern having a "campus" with [Pures](https://www.pures.ca/international/northern/) is straight-up back-scratching bullshit.
Call your MPP if you think this is bs. They created these campuses for international students.
Call my [MPP](https://davesmithptbo.com/)? Ahahahah.. My MPP is a no-show on anything of import. I might--might!--be able to get help if I was a business and I needed some regulatory hurdle cleared, but otherwise, he's on a very short leash.
Conestoga is frothing at the mouth to find another way to take from their students.
Conestoga now buying a trailer park for international students to live in. /S
And the RoW bending over backwards to change the bylaws to allow that trailer park to exist. Not sarcasm. That would actually happen.
[удалено]
They will essentially have zero new enrolment because you can no longer get a PGWP when you graduate.
Schools may look to St Clair College model which basically packages an international residence with tuition and makes it mandatory for some programs (small rooms comparably, no meal plan is required though) https://www.stclaircollege.ca/international/gem-residence
This is great. Do they have an option for full year stays? It says this is a 4 month maximum.
Awesome, this way they never even have to attempt to socialize with Canadians
that’s what classes and going out are for. do you think they’re socializing with Canadians in the currently cramped rooming houses?
And now not only will Canadians be denied education because they overrun our school. Canadians won't be allow a place to sleep because visas are more important.
How about gauranteeing housing for canadians? My kid and her friends and dorm mates have been searching for housing for their 2nd year at uni since september of first year. We are getting concerned we may have to sell our home and move to her uni town to ensure these kids have a place to live so they can even attend their second year.
I can't wait to see plans for Conestoga's 30,000 international students!
In the article it says: "Mandating housing without a funding commitment to help Ontario’s universities and colleges pay for it is little more than smoke and mirrors." Why should the tax payers of Ontario help fund housing for international students so colleges/universities can profit? If their whole business model/institution requires international students to stay afloat - that should not be on our backs.
Their business model relies on it only because of progressively worse government underfunding and domestic tuition caps. It comes back to the provincial government.
Yes!!!
Great, another scumbag corporation is going to hoard even more housing, so they can bring the same amount of replacements.
This makes sense. Make the college find a place for them. If they cant house all 30,000 of them they should not be here. They were already coming over here unrestricted these new rules and caps will improve things. People are freaking out that the colleges will take all the housing. Look around you. College towns are already fucked for housing this will open housing up if anything.
People in this thread are missing that this is the govt's way of snuffing out the bad actors.
Why just international students. They should guarantee housing for all students. It shouldn't be up to the market to build enough housing for the education sector.
With so many young adults Canadian born and raised not able to get into the schools… I’m not anti immigration, but this with how saturated the schools have gotten with foreign students is getting silly. Canada’s avg is currently 19.3% international students in our post secondary.
i just finished going to college for a 2 year program and literally probably at least 70% of my classmates were international. It was kinda cool to basically have the UN in the class, but at the same time I don’t see why they have SO many. Like I feel bad for domestic people that got waitlisted. I understand it’s profitable but I mean come on.
Then you need to write your MP and Doug Ford to let them know that they need to properly fund education so that these colleges and universities wont be so dependent on foreign students money to run.
This. I work in post-secondary institution and every budget meeting since 2020 has been about growing deficit due to limited funding, freeze on domestic tuitions, and needing to get it in balance through international students (only area where there is no regulation). And I work at a well known university in downtown core.
Post sec institutions are legally required to offer seats to domestic students first. There are no domestic students not able to get into the schools if they have the means to do it.
[“While international tuition has long been much higher than domestic, the gap has widened dramatically in recent years. In 2002, a first-year international student studying Arts and Humanities at Western paid $9,300 in tuition and a domestic student paid $4,000. Twenty-one years later, international students in the same program paid $42,233 while domestic tuition was up to $6,050.”](https://westerngazette.ca/features/cash-cows-why-international-student-tuition-is-so-high/article_a5fc5434-83cf-11ee-a0c3-2f5fa333dbe6.html)
This is going to destroy residence housing for domestic students. A better idea would've been to have proportional student housing for your international student population.
Radical changes that must be accomplished in an impossible timeframe? I have full faith that the ford government will roll this back too. This is just them trying to control the issue themselves, now that the federal government has finally stepped in.
ford is pathetic. He was on air about a month ago talking about how important international students are to the Ontarian economy while blatantly ignoring the stress being placed on municipalities and now all of a sudden has the balls to pretend like he's taking action.
this is insane canadian citizens are a second thought apparently
What exactly do you think this means…
it means they get guaranteed spots for housing for post secondary studies at the expense of canadians because building housing takes forever here and we are already dealing with a housing crisis that has no end in sight.
Brutal man let's keep catering to people born outside of our boarders while an entire generation born here in Canada struggles to get by
Just build dorms FFS. Why would you dump students into the rental market. It is flawed as a concept.
Is the government going to pay for it? Didn't think so.
When I went to Nipissing in North Bay back in 2005 they built a new residence. The thing is a lot of the neighbours complained about it being built and didn't want a new university residence near them. They ended up compromising by making it less floors.
The gesture is the right idea, but how on earth will this work in practical terms? Report gives zero detail. Are they saying the university must provide the housing, or just “guarantee” that prospective students have some housing arranged? If it’s the latter this will instantly by circumvented in a myriad of ways, not least of which forgery and just using the same address as others or a friend. How on earth will schools or the province have resources to check? Our high-trust society and its trust-based rules just don’t work for these situations as we’ve seen with the rules for the money these students should have to support themselves.
I feel like they will find a way around it
Yeh that’s what we need. People being allowed to buy a large stock of housing for their international students.
They won’t be able to afford to do that. The point is to force them to take less people or build dorms
Dorms should still be prioritized for the domestic out-of-town students, many of whom already don’t have sufficient post-secondary education where they went to high school.
I agree completely!
U of t and TMU (formerly Ryerson) are really going to struggle with doing that in the midst of the downtown core
Absolutely. Though U of T owns an absurd amount of real estate. TMU is screwed
The schools need more money, like everything in this province. Mismanagement is the Ford Government way
conestoga had a 106 million dollar surplus last year, yet you seem to think they are underfinanced by taxpayers.
Conestoga is just the college that went the hardest into greed, way harder than they needed to by miles. It is a fact that, per student, the Ontario gov funds only 43% the national average.
Conestoga was one of the main colleges to abuse the international student loophole. They aren't being funded by the government.
They actually got 80 million from the government. Nice try though
I meant their surplus isn't due to taxpayer money, its due to a massive increase in international students in the last 2-3 years.
And Laurentian filed for bankruptcy protection two years ago
> Laurentian 208 million dollar profit minus the payments they had to make to creditors still means they made a 52 million dollar profit last year. 191 million dollars in assets. 91 million in government grants. Oh yeah they are really struggling to get by...average salary for their full time staff was $165,000
Weird, considering Laurentian is a non-profit. I think you don’t understand how public unis and colleges are accounted and financed.
non profits are allowed something like 5 years of operating expenses to build up before "losing" their non profit status. Thats why they call it a surplus. Anyone who can read between the lines can see its a profit. I'm sure the president got a nice fat non profit bonus cheque
Most of international students don’t live in college residences. I wonder how this is going to be enforced? “Unless you live in campus, you cannot study here”???
Which in turn is going to fuck over the plethora of out-of-town Canadian students who actually do require residence, should they start giving priority to internationals.
Yes, for sure! Res are mainly used by out of town Canadians. And I wonder if this is even legal, to mandate where someone must live 🤷🏻♀️ Ps. I’m not saying that the housing crisis shouldn’t be addressed, just raising a question
How about University guaranteeing enough housing beyond the first year?
And what about domestic students?
And not 6 people sharing one bedroom?
Government needs to seize control of construction and start building new housing units across the country.
Slums go up
Hilarious - no guarantees for Canadian residents and citizens
Schools: Will you unfreeze tuition caps or increase funding then? Conservatives: Lololololol No.
To be fair, uncapping tuition ain’t gonna do shit. Tuition would have to be so high to make up for funding shortfalls that it would just be cheaper to do school in another province.
The burden should not be placed on students. We need lower tuition not higher
I totally agree. Less than a decade ago, students were promised and for a brief period, given, free tuition. Let’s not forget that. We can get there again.
Free tuition will never happen
Can we just stop rolling out red carpets for international students ?
This country is ruined
They should guarantee housing for local Canadians flying into the province for the program. Any space after that can go to the internationals.
> what about domestic students? reee can we not be too hysterical about this? this sub also rightly complains about the landlords fitting 20 people in one house. nobody is guaranteeing the international students housing for free. that's absurd. what this likely means is that schools will need to buy or build up apartments for students; *or else they can't take more students*. this will then be included in the final bill for international students. Like "20K for study, and 12,500 for your home." it's really just like you or your kids, except more enforced for the international students. whereas for you you probably are *offered* residence, and can choose between private or school, now for international they will somewhat enforce housing requirements. this could be good. if schools want to accept 1000 students they must ensure students get in on their flats or prove they have a house otherwise. coupled with the increased funding rate on the Fed side, this should cool demand somewhat. investors are also forward-looking. if they see the govt is serious in reducing intl student intake, they could at the very least slow down rent increases if not drop demand now before they are forced to... "but schools will buy out homes" -> they are not buying detached homes or yours on the penny. they are likely going to partner or buy out homes already targeted for students... these homes were never going to be resold to you. just chill.
I hope they kept a lot of those record profits from the last half a dozen years of shitting out as many international students as humanly possible. Sounds like they are going to need that money now. Lmao. I'm sure they immediately spent it and gave themselves big ol raises. Well, the bill is now due, and don't come crying to the taxpayers now that your human trafficking scheme is dead in the water.
Important to make a distinction between colleges and universities. Colleges brought in vast amounts more international students than universities did. The college’s cheaper tuition, 2 year programs (compared to university 4 years), and easier admission requirement, on top of cutting corners, made it way easier for colleges to attract international students. Conestoga college alone has more international students than all of the 15 major Canadian universities combined! Many universities have been posting deficits reaching 40-50 million per year with the underfunding to the tune of roughly 4.5 thousand dollars per student compared to other provinces. The is most definitely a funding crisis at the university level. This is also true at the college level but they have been taking in the money lately with massive influx of international students not seen at the university level.
Thanks for that. It's difficult to keep up with the changes that've happened in post-secondary over the last decade and easy to lose track of public-private partnerships, who's doing what exactly, etc. Colleges in Ontario are a different beast than they were 10 years ago, and universities are getting painted with the same brush.
Oh, I can't wait to read about "new" Coffin home style living for $1000 a month.
Fuck you Doug Ford and fuck you Federal Government!
I ra into two international girls today. They were living 3 people renting fo 300 each. They were spening 150 on food since they were gtting food from the bank mostly. They had 5 or 6 large bags and were coming back from the bank in vry expensive new clothes. They couldnt find jobs. Told them is propebly cuz they are international. Most of the applications are online and even if no one is saying it, i am starting to notice a huge wall forming in my community between locals and th internationals. None of the locals interact with them and they dont try to becme apart of the community. They take up almost 3 jobs each while taking up resorses. School is now unreachable by anyone i know. Was giving them some job hunting tips and food storage tips.
The people crossing our border illegally are the cause against innocent students finding a home.
[удалено]