The province needs to invest significantly more in post-secondary education, a member of the students’ society said, after the University of Victoria announced a $13-million budget cut.
Cleo Philp, director of campaigns and community relations for the University of Victoria Students’ Society, said the society has raised concerns for years with the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills about the university’s unsustainable reliance on international-student tuition for revenue.
“Every single one of my predecessors has highlighted this is what is going to happen. And here it is happening. The ministry seems to have literally no plans on changing anything about it, which is upsetting,” Philp said.
UVic cited declining international enrolment in its statement announcing budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. International tuition has an “outsized” impact on tuition revenue, UVic said, because it is not subsidized by the provincial government as domestic tuition is.
The university’s main sources of revenue are government grants, accounting for 54 per cent of revenues in the current school year, and tuition, which amounted to 35 per cent, UVic said in an email. It did not provide sources for the remaining 11 per cent of revenue.
Tuition from international students was approximately 33 per cent of total tuition revenue this year, UVic said, making it nearly 12 per cent of overall revenue.
Enrolment of international students is the lowest it has been in more than 10 years, the university said. It previously forecast 1,587 international undergraduates this year, down by about 1,000 from 2019-2020.
The university’s $488-million budget for 2023-2024 represented a four per cent cut from the previous year, which was implemented evenly across all departments. This year, while the overall reduction will total four per cent, departments will face different reductions based on decisions by the university’s vice-presidents.
Philp said it is unsurprising that UVic is forced to make significant cuts for a second year, pinning the blame on the province for underfunding post-secondary education.
“It’s incredibly disappointing to see that it’s impacting students again,” said Philp, who is worried about the effect of reduced faculty and staff on the quality of education for students and on accessibility for students requiring learning accommodations.
UVic does not plan to raise tuition to offset its revenue shortfall, and will work with unions to minimize involuntary layoffs, it said.
Last spring, a group of post-secondary unions representing UVic, Vancouver Island University, Royal Roads and North Island College penned an open letter to the premier and minister responsible for post-secondary education urging increased funding to offset budget cuts that resulted in job losses.
The unions said colleges and universities have become over-reliant on tuition fees, particularly from international students, and significantly increased government funding was the “only viable long-term solution.”
The federal government recently announced changes that aim to limit Canada’s international student program, including a temporary reduction in the number of new student visas by 35 per cent.
UVic said this change, along with increased competition globally for international students, a backlog of study-permit requests in 2022 and delays in 2023, and “diplomatic disputes” are all contributing to the decline.
The university is seeing a significant drop in applications from India, typically one of the top-three countries for recruitment, it said.
Tensions were strained last year between Canada and India after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau linked agents of India’s government to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey.
Premier David Eby, at a news conference on the rental protection fund on Thursday, said it’s premature for “UVic or any other school to be hitting the panic button yet.”
“We’re going to work with the federal government, we’ll work with UVic and others, to address the federal government cap [on international student visas] and to make sure that the high-quality public education that they deliver and others deliver continues.”
— With files from Cindy Harnett
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