OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a letter regarding funding for colleges and universities, published Jan. 26.
Time for Dunlop to what?
We live in a time and culture where everyone’s problem has a solution: more government money.
There is a laundry list of organizations and groups that all believe: “If the government just gave us more money, we could save the world or, at least, our world. In fact, we deserve that money.”
There are good reasons for some organizations — namely, hospitals — to ask for funding to build and meet the needs of an aging population. No doubt, there are others that could reasonably be added to the list. However, there is not an endless supply of money.
People who say, “It is the federal government’s responsibility or the province’s responsibility,” perhaps forget that all that money comes from the taxpayer and, increasingly, long-term, nearly unmanageable debt.
The cry to have the government fund universities’ and colleges’ shortfalls caused by the federal government placing restrictions on the number of international students is both misplaced and unwarranted. Oh, please, stop yelling in your head and crying.
The fact is that international students have funded the largesse of educational institutions and the building of staff to both recruit and retain them. The fact that 10 of Ontario’s colleges have more international students than domestic students supports that assertion.
The unintended consequence of the growth of international students is pressure on the housing market, according to some. The reality is that a Canadian education has value in the world but is not a guarantee to a job or residency or citizenship. To promise otherwise is, at best, misleading.
As someone who has worked with international students in higher education before the flood in the marketplace, I understand the desire of international students to come to this great country to study and find success. The fact is they don’t all succeed.
So, now a crisis, international students have been propping up educational institutions, with bloated staff and faculty whose allegiance is to degrees/programs that are no longer relevant, nor lead to a job. (See Queen’s University, which is right-sizing its programs.) In other words, if there are not enough students to pay for the course or program, cut the program.
There have been many times that businesses have had to respond to market realities and adjust and cut. To say that universities/colleges should be exempt from this reality is to continue to exist in a past that is no longer relevant.
The truth is there is not an endless supply of students, domestically or internationally. The key isn’t more money from the government. This is an opportunity to right-size and link courses to marketplace realities.
It is rather unconscionable to continue to build Canadian institutions on the wallets of international students and even more so to have the government continue to prop up a system unwilling to examine itself and adjust. It’s a business case that faculties of business might want to study.
Duncan W. McDonald
Orillia
