It is doubtful whether many members of the university community in Ontario – whether the alumni of its 23 publicly assisted institutions or the faculty members and staff working for the good of current students and the advancement of knowledge across the province – will look back on 2024 as a year of hope and promise. While the mission of higher education is itself always inspiring and heartening, the circumstances within which that mission had to be prosecuted over the last year have been unpromising to say the least. To the extent that students have grown, thrived, and graduated, and that researchers have continued to break new ground, we can and should celebrate the excellence of the university sector in this province.
But the financial challenges that brought Queen’s to the front pages in 2023 are now broadly affecting all but a very few institutions in Ontario. These challenges should be better known and understood than they are: chronic underfunding by government, tuition levels reduced and frozen since 2019, a corridor enrolment system that limits the number of students per university fundable by government, and most recently federal government caps on the number of international students permitted to apply for a visa to study in Canada. That last policy change was discussed in a previous issue of the Queen’s Alumni Review, so I will say no more, except to note that Ontario’s universities are currently estimating the effect to be a loss of $300 million in revenue in the coming year.
Despite a term-limited funding package announced by the province almost a year ago, financial distress continues to be felt. The Council of Ontario Universities reports that 10 universities in this province expect to report a total deficit of $300 million for 2023–2024, a figure likely to be considerably higher when the effect of the federal government’s international student caps registers in 2024–2025. What is particularly concerning is the extent to which some of these policy decisions directly affecting the long-term viability of universities are tied to the volatile world of shorter-term federal and provincial politics: the link between international student caps and recent debate about the housing crisis in Canada is well known.
What is to be done in these circumstances, perhaps the most serious for higher education in this province in decades? Anyone with a stake in their university – and that would include alumni, for whom the continuing excellence of their alma mater bears upon the value of their degrees – should lose no opportunity to make this situation widely known, and more important, to communicate its deleterious impact on generations to come as well as on the quality of our society and economy at the present time.
Inside the university, though, we need to cease lamenting and begin planning, not just for the next year or two, but for the much longer term. We are all too aware of the unpropitious government policy framework and demographic trends within which we currently operate, and we can reasonably well predict the extent to which they will continue in the coming years. In a spirit of pragmatism, we need to acknowledge that reality, but at the same time begin to think in the most ambitious possible terms about Queen’s future. In 2041, the university will conclude its second century. As it moves into its third, what will it need to look like and how will it need to have reconceived its role and operations in order to excel in its educational mandate, foster higher levels of groundbreaking research, and elevate itself in the ranks of its national and global peers?
These questions stand at the heart of Queen’s Bicentennial Vision, the development of which moved into a broader and more active phase at the start of 2025. I hope all members of our university family will take advantage of the opportunity to contribute to this process.