Analyzing Ontario Colleges and the Growth of International Students

Ontario Colleges have been the subject of much discussion because of how these institutions have managed foreign students. In Ontario, foreign students pay substantially more tuition than domestic students. University and College administrators have long claimed that reduced government funding has left them no choice but to look for other funding sources so that they can train the next generation of Ontarians. Critics point out that these administrators – especially college administrators – have lost sight of their social purpose and, instead, have embraced a revenue-generation strategy without regard for the quality of education or the province's economic needs.

Unlike in the USA, colleges and universities are very different institutions in Canada. Universities generally produce more ‘white collar’ workers with degrees – people with training in engineering, the sciences, the arts, and social sciences. Colleges, by contrast, are more skills-based. They provide diplomas and skills training in electronics, mechanics, HVAC, plumbing, etc. There can be an overlap between the subjects covered, but universities are charged with pushing the boundaries of knowledge through advanced research. (This is especially true for the U15 research-intensive universities in Canada, but this topic is beyond the scope of the current analysis.) Colleges are in charge of certifying new entrants for apprenticeships into the skilled trades – jobs in which Canada has an acute shortage of workers.

In this research, I focus exclusively on Ontario colleges because they have been widely blamed for failing to train the next generation of skilled workers, instead opting for a growth strategy of selling diplomas to foreign students. Of course, any analysis is only as good as the data one can collect. In this case, I focus on two primary data sources.

The first is the Ontario Sunshine List –the popular name given to the list the Ontario government compiles every year of civil servants who make more than $100,000 Canadian dollars. This list is controversial because the nominal cut-off of $100,000 is not adjusted for inflation, so more and more civil servants have their name, job titles, and salaries published yearly. The Sunshine List shows us how a large portion of college administrators are paid and can give us some sense of the degree of kingdom-building that could be taking place in these public institutions.

The second major data source is also from the Ontario government. The government releases these open-data spreadsheets concerning various aspects of Colleges, including student demographics and educational outcomes.