Tuition costs have been capped for the last 8 years in Ontario. Is everyone just pulling numbers out of their asses?

They’re not, really. Their expenses have gone up to match. The days of just teaching with just blackboards are over.

If all expenses are necessary is another question, though. Someone mentioned administration bloat.

WTF are you even talking about?

Universities have grown way beyond what they need to for the domestic student population. This is growth squarely aimed at international students who pay 5-10x what domestic students pay in tuition. Cut off the tap of international students and you end up with huge unused capacity and budget shortfalls.

I’d rather see reform, but this is almost as good.

Actual reform would be the way to go.

UofT appears to have done a good job of keeping their books balanced, despite the glut of foreign students, but many others have not.

There is too much bloat. I’ve seen first hand essentially glorified admins being paid $130k + full pension. They need to trim the fat at these places and restructure operations to get rid of all the waste.

Okay, right after you explain why Real Estate agents are millionaires.

The federal and provincial governments have been underfunding universities for decades. Recently, universities were able to start recruiting foreign students to make up for the shortfall, but it looks like that money tap will be turned down. It doesn’t look like there’s a plan to make up for it.

At the same time, the feds want to

recruit more than 1,000 top international researchers to Canada, with the budget injecting up to $1.7-billion into a suite of recruitment measures.

That’ll be tough if universities see their income crater.

Unless its more than free that’s not affordable to most

Ontario is just over $6K for most programs, $9K for engineering and B.Comm coops.

US, many times that.

There are lots and lots of Universities all over the world pushing out hard working, intelligent people for which there are not even close to enough jobs. Make it make sense.

As clearly this thread has no clue what goes on at universities, or even knows the difference between universities and colleges, I’ll explain the OPs point.

$1.7B for 1000 scientist is $1.7M each, for 5 years in total. For senior scientists, this covers salary. But now we have 1000 extra grant applications in a system that is funded at 20% the level of the US per capita. This means we will try and recruit Americans, but tell them they will have an under 10% chance of getting any grant money, and that grant size is half a typical NIH or NSF grant. Large projects? Zero. This research has to be done somewhere, which costs universities money. The same universities getting squeezed by frozen tuitions the last 6 years.

So it is a designed bullshit line item. No one will access this because by the time it rolls out to real funds, the US will have reverted funding and going back to trouncing this banana republic. Excellence, why would an established scientists move to a poorly funded system? They will get more done of they just ride the storm in US.

This money goes to cancer and disease research, like lipid nanoparticles that saved millions of lives with COVID vaccines (yes, that came from Canada), or neural network algorithms driving trillions in investment, also from Canada, but we just pissed away that IP to the US for a handful of shiny rocks.

If Carney is serious about CDN productivity, he needs to fund R&D at per capita levels closer to US or China and make sure the result of this research is developed in Canada, not just sold off cheap to the US as per the last 60 years. A decent economist would realize there is tremendous potential return on investment, far higher than subsidies for pickup truck production to US corporations, and certainly more than the 100-150x more we waste on military spending which does nothing for the CDN economy.

This does not affect colleges. They don’t do research and are for vocational training.

University is only for the middle class and wealthy, the poor don’t get to play

It actually can be for many due to bursaries and very very easy to pay off loans. Few locals graduate with debt.

Few locals graduate with debt.

[citation required]

Guy. You’ve been all over the place with your uninformed criticisms. I don’t think you really even understand what it is that has you so upset at universities, but there is something playing out before us.

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The amounts are more than I expected but it doesn’t breakdown by if the student is local, national, or international which matters. Figures however are not very high in terms of overall debt burden compared to the US and they are lower than the national figures

I’ve worked in hospitals and have seen first hand how much money goes to the top while the rest of us struggled and some of us literally died. If you have no issue with how much money is being spent at the top, that speaks to you and your views.

Im for free education

Great. You’ve worked for hospitals. But surely you can see, if you take a step back, how it kind of proves my point if that is what is informing your opinion about fucking universities.

You get that universities don’t get to decide whether or not education is free, right? You’re pissed off at the wrong people, YET AGAIN.

I don’t know anyone who graduated without debt and I know several people struggling to deal with their student loans, which don’t even go away with bankruptcy.