Advertisement

Canadian universities facing a financial crunch

image

[Radio-Canada]

Universities across Canada are getting squeezed by provincial budget cuts, declining enrolments, program changes and the weak loonie.

Nipissing University should consider measures like cutting money-losing programs, reducing faculty and selling off real estate assets, advised an independent PwC audit commissioned by the Ontario government that was first reported by the Globe and Mail.

But the North Bay university isn’t the only one facing a tough financial situation. Institutions across the country need to make difficult economic decisions because of the same factors.

University of Windsor president Alan Wildeman addressed concerns like aging professors, fewer younger Canadians and provincial funding and program changes in a campus address earlier this year.

“We have no option but to respond to these changes, and to do so as quickly as we can and in ways that position the university to be stronger and more relevant in the future,” Wildeman said.

An ongoing overhaul of education programs for teachers in Ontario is causing some financial strain for universities in that province. When the restructuring of teacher education is done, there will be half the existing number of spaces for students and the program will take two years instead of one.

Enrolment down

And for some schools, the problems lie in the fact that the number of university-aged Canadians is dropping — and lower enrolment numbers mean both less revenue and less funding.

At Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L., undergraduate enrolment was down 1.6 per cent last year, according to the school’s 2015 president’s report — a decrease that is likely caused by the province’s overall declining youth population.

In 2014, overall enrolments for Ontario schools was down for the first time in 15 years, according to the province’s central application centre.

Overall enrolment dropped by 464 students at the University of Windsor for fall 2015, compared to a year ago. “Overall, the number of full-time undergraduate students this year, 10,885, has not been this low since the 2002-03 academic year, 13 years ago,” Wildeman said in his campus address.

Acceptances dropped at other more remote schools as well: down 17.2 per cent at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, 16.5 per cent at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and 14.3 per cent at Laurentian University in Sudbury.

Nipissing will have a $24-million deficit by the 2019 academic year if the school doesn’t cut costs and increase revenue, the PwC report states.

Oil revenue impact

Universities and colleges experienced budget cuts in Alberta — 1.7 per cent for the 2015-16 fiscal year and 2.3 per cent the next fiscal year — as the province deals with decreased oil prices. And Campus Alberta, the program that funds post-secondary schools in the province, is moving towards less reliance on government funding.

Memorial University in St. John’s had to raise tuition after Newfoundland and Labrador cut funding for post-secondary education in the most recent provincial budget. A drop in provincial oil revenues has led to tighter provincial coffers there and in other provinces, including Alberta and Nova Scotia. While undergraduate tuition at Memorial remains frozen, as it has been since 1999, graduate student tuition will rise 30 per cent for fall 2016.

The university scrapped plans to raise tuition for international students, but the option remains on the table for next year’s budget if needed as does a tuition increase for out-of-province undergraduate students.

Mount Allison University in New Brunswick was criticized earlier this month for cuts that would eliminate its women’s and gender studies minor, which it said were part of wider budgetary decisions for the university. After protests, the university reinstated 50 per cent of the current funding for the program, but its long-term fate remains unclear.

The loonie effect

Schools across the country are also dealing with a lesser-known budget restriction as the low loonie makes subscriptions to scholarly journals more expensive. Memorial University announced in December that it would cancel its subscriptions to about 2,500 academic journals, as a cost-cutting measure to counter rising subscription costs and the weak dollar.

At Western University in London, Ont., 77 per cent of the library system’s $14.1-million budget for book and journal purchases is invoiced in U.S. dollars, which means that the recent drop in the value of the loonie has had a serious effect. As a result, the university had to make about $850,000 in cuts for this fiscal year in order to reduce its deficit. More cuts will come as journal subscription renewals come up.

“With every cent that the dollar drops, we lose $100,000 worth of purchasing power, so we need to find significant savings,” Catherine Steeves, vice-provost and chief librarian at Western University. “We really didn’t have a choice, in that we had to make some cost reduction decisions.”

The decision highlights the fact that many factors that affect institution budgets are outside of the control of the school or even the province, and will have an ongoing effect on universities in every part of the country.

“Funding for higher education is under strain in every province in this country, I think,” Steeves says.