Sixty years ago today, Ontario’s 35-year-old education minister rose in the legislature to announce the creation of something totally new and exciting. It was at a time when only half of Ontarians graduated from high school. Most male grads then got jobs; a small percentage continued on to get university degrees. Society was much more sexist back then, so when a woman went to university, she was often thought to be in search of her “MRS degree” — in other words, a husband.
But this education minister in Premier John Robarts’s government thought, even if you don’t go on to university, there should be an alternative, continuing stream of formal education for people who wanted to become nurses, welders, or secretaries.
And so Bill Davis announced the creation of a new system of colleges of applied arts and technology (often mistakenly referred to as “community colleges”). The first one was called Centennial College, opening a year-and-a-half after the announcement and nine months before the country’s 100th birthday. It featured 16 different programs for just 500 students.
Today, Centennial has 45,000 full- and part-time students — an unambiguous indication of its relevance and popularity.
Meanwhile, Ontario has 24 colleges in every corner of the province: from Confederation College in Thunder Bay to St. Clair College in Windsor, and from Northern College in Timmins to Algonquin College in Ottawa. Along with satellite campuses, these colleges not only educate hundreds of thousands of students, but they also represent significant economic anchors to smaller cities and towns. Yes, Humber Polytechnic educates 86,000 students (not to mention employing 3,400 academic staff) in Toronto. But the importance of Canadore College to North Bay can’t be overstated, despite a student population of only 3,500. The same goes for College Boreal, the francophone institution in Sudbury, educating more than 10,000 students.
Ontario’s college system has been considered such a success story, dignitaries from all over the world have visited, hoping to replicate the same system in their countries. After Davis succeeded Robarts as premier, he even sent his colleges and universities minister to pre-Ayatollah Iran — so interested was the Persian nation in creating an Ontario-style college system for itself.
Education Minister Bill Davis (centre) in 1967, breaking ground in Hamilton for Mohawk College. Davis is bookended by J.G. Smith on the left and J.W. Hazelton on the right.
Decade after decade, the college system grew, assuming an increasingly important role in educating the province’s populace. It was often looked down upon by the snootier university sector, considered by some as a place for students who didn’t have the academic chops to get into university. But then, a fascinating phenomenon gained prevalence a couple of decades ago. The colleges became a popular option for university grads who, having acquired a liberal arts degree to teach them how to think, then followed up with a more practical college education, which offered more job-related, on-the-ground training. And when the great recession hit in 2008, the colleges stepped up to train 20,000 new students and help 45,000 laid-off workers re-enter the workforce through the Second Career program developed by the Dalton McGuinty government,
But that was then.
The colleges are now going through the most challenging time in their six decades. It’s been a perfect storm of trouble.
First, the current provincial government froze tuition for Ontario students when it took office seven years ago. Students may enjoy the notion that they’re getting a financial break, but the other side of the coin is that the colleges are being deprived of money they need to keep providing excellence.
That tuition freeze was tolerable so long as the federal government kept the spigot on foreign students wide open. But it hasn’t. The 50 per cent reduction in those visas has meant that foreign students, whose tuition payments triple or quadruple those paid by domestic students, can no longer be counted on to offset the tuition freeze.
This government has not displayed a particular fondness for higher education. The file has seen four ministers in seven years, largely very junior and not terribly influential.
The result: campuses closing, programs cancelled, and staff laid off.
“We think we’re aligned with the government’s priorities,” says Maureen Adamson, head of Colleges Ontario, the organization representing all 24 of the province’s colleges. Adamson points out the colleges have graduated 70,000 construction workers, half the people working in mining and resource development, not to mention a huge chunk of the province’s nurses.
“A lack of funding means fewer choices,” Adamson says. “Our grads have to be job-ready by the end.”
If the colleges had hoped to find a more sympathetic ear at Queen’s Park when this year’s budget was unveiled, no such luck.
“Colleges have to make adjustments like everyone in the real world does and they’re going through that,” Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy told me last week on budget day. While the budget doesn’t specify what kinds of cuts are looming in the college sector, it does show the budget for the ministry of training, colleges and universities will be cut from $14.2 billion this year to $12.8 billion by fiscal year 2027-28.
Bethlenfalvy says the government has stepped up with $750 million for 20,500 more science, technology, engineering, and math positions, plus another $300 million for the Ontario Research Fund. He also boasted of $1.3 billion in supports last year, even though that number was only half of what the government’s own blue-ribbon panel had recommended. (And those numbers relate to both colleges and universities).
For more than a decade, Lyn Whitham has taught business communication, ethics, and corporate social responsibility at George Brown and Centennial. “I couldn’t get over how amazing it was,” she says of her early days. “It offered concrete, employable skills to young people and it offered hope. New Canadians had an entry into the job market and a bright future.”
Now, Whitham says, with program and school closures, “many colleges are in chaos.” She says the system’s administrators share some blame because they used the buoyant revenues from foreign students to paper over, or ignore, other burgeoning problems.
She notes that some colleges are cutting construction project management courses at a time when all three levels of government are desperate for a building boom.
“It’s really terrible,” Whitham adds. “It seems a brilliant idea is being squandered, a sad commentary on the 60th anniversary.”
Happy anniversary, indeed.