“Universities are under enormous funding pressures,” the president of Ontario’s public sector teachers’ union that represents high school educators across the province told The Pointer.
As graduating students prepare their applications for universities and colleges across Ontario, the teachers who prepare them for the next stage in their educational path are increasingly worried about the conditions that await them.
Martha Hradowy, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), was highlighting a new report published by her union on November 5. It examines the experiences of support staff at six Ontario colleges and universities, including Algoma University, which operates its largest campus in Brampton.
Post-secondary education in Ontario continues to struggle as the Doug Ford PC government has, throughout its eight years in power, frozen funding for the province’s colleges and universities.
The report captures the fallout.
“Universities have been so chronically underfunded that they were recruiting international students at higher tuition rates to make up for those funding gaps. And that’s absolutely just wrong,” Hradowy said.
The exploitation of international students was felt most acutely in Peel, where post-secondary institutions such as Sheridan College and Algoma felt pressured to rely on highly inflated fees, mostly from students who were recruited from India, largely due to the region’s huge South Asian population. As the PCs continued to underfund the sector, international students, often blatantly exploited, became the only solution for some institutions.
The worst actors, including Algoma, with its footprint in Brampton, saw international students as a cash cow.
Hradowy places the blame for what Peel is going through now, as Ottawa drastically cuts international student enrolment, leading to a revenue crunch, lost programs and fallout across communities, squarely on the PCs.
“This government should be funding their public institutions so every student in Ontario can get an equal footing as they head into the workforce to be productive citizens. And again, if you have strong publicly funded education, that is a strength to Ontario’s economy.
“Instead, they’re doing the opposite.”
Many holding Ontario’s universities together are reaching a breaking point.
The new study examined the working conditions of university support staff across the province, describing a system under extraordinary pressure, with growing workloads, staffing shortages and declining organizational resources that have become increasingly difficult to manage. The findings point to a crisis extending beyond the employees responsible for keeping campuses operating and raise questions about the financial decisions that have shaped Ontario’s post-secondary education system, and the consequences those decisions have created for students.
The study draws on 603 survey responses and six focus groups. Researchers identified significant problems with workload demands, organizational recognition, leadership, workplace fairness and institutional trust. More than one in five university support staff surveyed reported working six or more unpaid hours every week, while 80 percent reported staff shortages at their workplaces and 67 percent reported hiring freezes.
The findings point to a system where employees are increasingly expected to maintain services despite insufficient resources and staffing. For Hradowy, the consequences are becoming increasingly difficult for Ontario’s education workers to ignore, extending down into the secondary level, where students and educators struggle with decreased funding for OSAP and increased stress around the lack of resources once they get to college and university.
The report argues that the conditions experienced by university support staff cannot be separated from the financial circumstances of the institutions employing them. When universities have insufficient operating resources, they are more likely to freeze hiring, reduce staffing and place additional responsibilities on existing employees.
The study also identifies a financial model that has increasingly relied on international student enrolment and higher international tuition fees to compensate for inadequate public investment.
According to the report, provincial grants represented approximately 80 percent of a typical university’s operating budget in 1980. That proportion had declined to approximately 50 percent by 2004 and 38 percent by 2017.
As domestic tuition became increasingly restricted by provincial policy, institutions had fewer opportunities to increase revenue through the students they traditionally served.
International tuition became one of the most significant alternatives.
Unlike domestic students, whose tuition is regulated by the province, international students have generally been charged substantially higher rates, creating an opportunity for institutions to collect considerably more money from each enrolment. The result was a system in which international students became more than an important part of Ontario’s post-secondary communities, and for most institutions, they became essential to financial survival.
Hradowy said that approach represents a failure by the provincial government to adequately support public education.
The financial pressures have become particularly visible in Peel, where international student recruitment transformed the post-secondary landscape in Brampton and Mississauga which led the GTA’s ballooning and unsustainable international student population before 2024, when Ottawa finally stepped in and cut the numbers roughly in half.
The rapid international student expansion for about a half-decade prior provided institutions with desperately needed revenue at a time when domestic tuition and public operating grants were constrained by the PCs. But the growth also created demands for housing, academic services and community supports that were not met.
Hradowy questioned the PC agenda.
“It’s about priorities. A tunnel under the 401, nobody asked for, a luxury spa, nobody asked for, Billy Bishop Jets, nobody asked for that. Nobody has asked for any of these things. They’re asking for properly funded education and properly funded healthcare.”
Ontario’s post-secondary funding structure underwent several significant changes over the past decade, including the introduction of performance-based funding agreements, restrictions on domestic tuition increases and reductions in provincial operating support relative to the size and cost of the education system.
In 2019, the Ford government introduced a 10 percent reduction in domestic tuition, followed by a freeze along with restrictions on future domestic tuition increases. While the province presented the changes as a way to make education more affordable, it also removed a source of revenue for institutions already facing financial constraints.
The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO), an independent legislative watchdog, found that provincial operating funding for universities and colleges remained among the lowest in Canada.
Its September 2026 spending review found Ontario provided $9,460 per domestic student at public colleges in 2023-24, compared with a national average of $15,187. Ontario had the lowest provincial funding per domestic student for public colleges.
The province’s 2023 Blue-Ribbon Panel report on post-secondary financial sustainability also identified the sector’s dependence on international students as a significant financial risk. The panel acknowledged that colleges and universities had come to rely on international tuition to the point where revenue from international students had become fundamental to the sector’s financial sustainability.
Rather than establishing a funding structure that could sustain institutions through predictable public investment, Ontario allowed a growing portion of institutional finances to depend on tuition revenue from students whose ability to enter the country was ultimately controlled by federal immigration policies.
The federal government introduced a cap on study permit applications, citing concerns about the rapid expansion of the international student population and the pressure it was placing on housing, healthcare and other services.
The federal government announced in November 2025 that Canada expected to issue up to 408,000 study permits in 2026, including 155,000 for newly arriving international students. Ontario was allocated 70,074 study permits for applicants requiring provincial attestation letters.
Algoma University’s Brampton campus experienced one of the most dramatic examples of international student expansion in Ontario.
The campus grew from approximately 540 students in the 2020-21 academic year to 5,372 students by the beginning of 2024, an increase of nearly 900 percent in three years. The overwhelming majority were international students from India, and this placed extreme challenges on the university as they struggled to find appropriate housing and adequate classroom sizes, deferring some to be placed in online classes instead.
The university’s expansion came after it experienced financial difficulties, examined by Ontario’s Auditor General in a 2022 audit of university financial management. The Auditor General identified Algoma’s growing reliance on international tuition revenue and raised concerns about the institution’s dependence on students from a small number of countries.
In 2021-22, international students made up approximately 90 percent of enrolment at the Brampton campus, which generated 65 percent of the entire university’s revenue and represented 51 percent of its total enrolment.
The difference between domestic and international tuition was the difference between the severe debt Algoma had been struggling with a few years before and the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash balances the university was swimming in after the international student strategy took over.
At the time, Algoma charged international students approximately $10,000 per semester, compared with $2,932 ($20,000 for a full year compared to $5,864) for Canadian and American students, excluding additional fees.
As previously reported by The Pointer, the overnight change in the cash balance of the university was staggering.
Thanks to those who had arrived from India, who made up approximately 92 percent of Algoma’s Brampton student body, the university’s bleak financial fortunes were completely turned around. According to its own annual financial disclosures, Algoma went from $5,806,372 in total cash assets in 2016 (when, according to Ontario’s Auditor General, the university was over-burdened by debt) to $227,985,000 in 2023, a 3,800 percent increase in seven years.
As the sudden cash infusion brought the university back to life, students in Brampton raised concerns about the lack of academic support, transparency surrounding grades, the widespread use of virtual courses and the limited resources available at the campus. Simranjit Singh, an Algoma student enrolled in the Human Resources and Business Management program at the Brampton campus, described the experience two years ago as one in which the financial investment he made did not deliver the education he expected.
“They are ripping us off as much [as] they can,” Singh told The Pointer in 2024.
He described taking on loans to finance his education and facing the prospect of returning to India before he could make the investment worthwhile.
“It’s a trap…and I got [stuck] in it,” he said.
The Auditor General’s findings also raised questions about admissions practices and the university’s reliance on international recruitment. The university’s international undergraduate graduation rate was 55 percent in 2022.
In its 2024 follow-up audit, the Auditor General found Algoma continued to rely heavily on international students from a small number of countries. Its 2024-25 budget identified that international students represented 95 percent of enrolment at the Brampton campus. The report also found that almost 90 percent of Algoma’s international degree students from its top 10 countries came mostly from India and then Nepal.
The pressures have also extended to Sheridan College’s Davis Campus in Brampton, where international students have faced financial and social challenges while trying to establish themselves in Canada.
In December 2023, Sheridan, the City of Brampton and other local stakeholders signed the Guiding Principles of the Brampton Charter for Improving the International Student Experience, meant to address ethical recruitment, academic and community supports, affordable housing, financial stability and reliable employment.
The charter followed concerns raised by international students and community organizations about the conditions many faced after arriving in Peel.
Jobanjeet Kaur, an international student who experienced employment exploitation and wage theft, described being forced to leave the college she originally came to attend and pursue a less expensive program to maintain her immigration status.
She described taking a job that only paid $6.25 an hour, but said she was not paid for the work.
“That is the first kind of exploitation,” Kaur told The Pointer at the time.
Her experience reflects the financial pressures facing students who must simultaneously pay tuition, rent, groceries and transportation while trying to repay loans taken out to study in Canada.
Community organizations have also seen the consequences. The Peel Newcomer Strategy Group’s International Students Needs Assessment Report identified gaps in the support available to international students, including limited access to settlement services, as colleges and universities were forced to rely on waves of international students to make up for the funding shortfalls caused by the PC government.
International students became the source of missing revenue for Ontario’s post-secondary institutions and were used to make up the funding shortfall from the Ontario government, arriving in communities where housing, campus food assistance and social services could not keep up with the sudden explosion of students from abroad.
While international students have been left navigating the consequences of an education system increasingly dependent on their tuition payments, domestic students are also facing challenges under Ford’s refusal to expand post-secondary funding.
In August, the Ontario government implemented significant changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), shifting a larger portion of student assistance away from grants and toward loans. The changes were announced in February as part of the province’s broader post-secondary funding reforms, based on the claim by government officials that OSAP funding was being illegitimately handed out.
The government later revealed they had brought in the OPP to investigate the claims and hired KPMG to complete an audit of the program, but would not make the final report open to the public.
Under the revised framework, eligible students can receive a maximum of 25 percent of their provincial OSAP funding in grants (money that doesn’t have to be repaid), with at least 75 percent provided through loans (money that has to be paid back, typically with interest), when previously eligible students would be granted 85 percent of funding, with the remaining 15 percent given as loans.
The FAO’s September 2026 review estimated that the proportion of Ontario-resident post-secondary students receiving the Ontario Student Grant would fall from 59 percent in 2025-26 to 37.3 percent in 2026-27.
The average grant for full-time students at public colleges was also projected to decline from $5,889 to $2,269, while the average grant for university students was expected to fall from $4,225 to $1,716.
The changes became a point of criticism during the November 4 question period at Queen’s Park, when Ontario NDP MPP Jennifer Stevens raised concerns about students affected by problems with the administration of OSAP.
“Angele Proulx is a 46-year-old mother from St. Catharines who went back to school to build a better life for herself and her son. She worked hard, made sacrifices and was just months away from graduating. Now she is living in a local shelter in St. Catharines after her OSAP was ripped away by this Conservative government’s mismanagement,” she said.
“This is a real human cost of this Conservative government’s failure to properly oversee OSAP. Students are facing homelessness, financial ruin and a cost of this Conservative government’s failure to properly oversee OSAP.”
Stevens questioned why students were being left to absorb the consequences of problems within a financial assistance program intended to help them access education: “When will this government stop punishing the innocent students from its own mismanagement and provide immediate financial relief?”
The financial pressures facing Ontario’s post-secondary sector have particular implications for Peel, where the expansion of international enrolment helped reshape the local education landscape.
Algoma University’s Brampton campus illustrates how an institution can become heavily dependent on international tuition revenue, while Sheridan College’s experience demonstrates how rapid international student recruitment can create demands that extend into the wider community.
The federal government’s restrictions have now introduced another challenge for institutions that built their financial plans around continued international enrolment growth.
The underlying crisis existed before Ottawa introduced restrictions. Ontario’s post-secondary institutions were already operating under years of inadequate per-student public funding, domestic tuition policies and financial pressures that spurred colleges and universities to recruit higher-paying international students who were often exploited.
For students already attending these institutions, the uncertainty surrounding enrolment and institutional finances raises questions about the resources, academic services and campus infrastructure that will be available throughout their education.
For the wider Peel community, it also raises questions about whether institutions can continue fulfilling their responsibilities to students while managing the financial consequences of a changing education landscape.
Hradowy argues that public education should be treated as an investment in Ontario rather than an expense institutions are expected to offset through increasingly expensive tuition.
“Our public institutions are definitely under attack by this government. And it’s going to take all of us to push back and tell them that we value our public services, we value public education. It’s not just a cost on a budget line; it’s an investment in Ontario’s future.”
Without sustainable public investment, universities will continue facing pressure to find alternative sources of revenue, while employees and students absorb the consequences of financial decisions made far beyond their campuses.
For Peel, the international student experience exposed the human consequences of that model. Students arrived expecting an education that would provide opportunities for themselves and their families, while institutions expected to fill the funding gap through tuition payments that would offset the decisions of the PCs.
The rapid expansion of international enrolment was not matched by resources, services and infrastructure students, both domestic and international, needed.
Now, as federal caps reduce the number of new international students and Ontario changes the financial assistance available to domestic students, the weaknesses of the PC model are becoming harder to ignore, as high school students across the province try to navigate the next phase of their lives.
Email: Benjamin@thepointer.com
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Benjamin Steeves, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer.