Visa cuts compound financial woes for Queen’s University

“We’ve all sort of colluded in a language about education that privileges the instrumental, neoliberal view that you pointed to. I think we’ve actually played a role in this, which has been damaging to the cause of universities and potentially to our future.” – Patrick Deane, principal and vice-chancellor of Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

“It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” said Patrick Deane, principal and vice-chancellor of Queen’s University, referring to the government of Canada’s recent announcement that it will reduce the number of international student visas by 35%.

The move is part of government efforts to help ease a housing affordability crisis gripping the country and to prod the provinces into closing private colleges that Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller has described as little more than “puppy mills”.

“The ramifications will be felt across the country but particularly in Ontario because of the high concentration of international students here. We’ve got half of the [one million] international students in the country in this province,” he said during an hour-long interview on 2 February 2024.

The importance of international students to university and college funding across the country, but especially in Ontario, has become un scandale. In her 2021 report Value-for-Money Audit: Public colleges oversight, Bonnie Lysyk, then Ontario’s auditor general, warned that several of the province’s colleges were dangerously overexposed to the vagaries of the international student market because the vast majority of their tuition came from international students.

Just a few months ago McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in its 2022-23 financial report that the increase of CA$8.4 million (US$6.2 million) in tuition fee revenue was “solely due to increased international enrolment and international tuition rate increases”.

Going forward this will no longer be possible, as visas will be apportioned on a per capita basis. Instead of Ontario’s colleges and universities being able to enrol as many international students as they could, they will have to share 39% (Ontario’s portion of Canada’s population of 40 million) of 640,000 (230,400) of international students.

The cut will undermine the finances of many of the province’s 24 publicly owned colleges and universities because they enrol large numbers.

Unsustainable deficit

International students never made up more than 15% of Queen’s undergraduates, as they did in 2019. Their numbers never recovered from the COVID-caused decline and the proportion now sits at 7.5%.

What Deane refers to as a “major tuition hit” – the loss of more than CA$80 million (using today’s international student tuition income) is a significant contributing factor to the budgetary challenges faced by Queen’s, a university of some 25,000 students.

Queen’s University's financial woes became public a few days before 26 January, the day I had scheduled an interview with Deane, who has directed the university since 2019.

That interview was cancelled because Deane and the university’s executives were required to work on responding to news reports that late last year the university’s provost, Matthew Evans, speaking to the faculty of arts and science, said: “I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Because unless we sort this out, we will go under.”

About the time we were scheduled to speak, Deane issued a statement that began by saying: “It is unusual for a leader of a university to post a statement publicly regarding coverage of the institution in national news. That being said, it is imperative at this point for me to set the record straight. Anyone reading this will likely have seen headlines suggesting Queen’s is losing its position as a top tier institution and may be under threat of financial ruin. I can assure you none of this is true.”

He went on to say: “At Queen’s our priority must always be the academic mission, nurturing state of the art research and providing an outstanding experience for our students. Doing that is no easy feat, but we stand among the best institutions in the world and that is not going to change. What we need and are pursuing is a strategy for sustainability, but what we are not doing and never will do, is to undertake this task at the cost of the academic mission.”

In addition to foregone tuition that would have accrued to Queen’s had its number of international students recovered to their pre-COVID level, the unsustainable deficit is due to two decisions made in 2019 by the newly elected Conservative government of Doug Ford, Deane explained.

Rather than increase student aid, in what was billed as a populist move Ford’s government cut tuition by 10% – where it has remained. The second decision was to cut the grants the government made to colleges and universities.

“Queen’s is a financially conservative institution and by 2019 [its faculties] had built up pretty healthy surplus balances. Then, we had the 10% reduction in tuition imposed by the government, and then a freeze on tuition.

“If you think about the period from 2019 to this academic year, the cost to Queen’s of foregone revenue is in the order of CA$180 million (US$134 million). By next year, because of the carry forward effect, the forgone revenue will be in the region of $230 million. That’s a huge hit to the operating budget of the institution and particularly the faculty of arts and sciences which represents half of the place,” said Deane.

“The faculties have been drawing down the carry forward balances. And, back in November, when the provost [Matthew Evans] made his gloomy statement to the faculty board of arts and sciences, he was talking about the likely situation in which the faculty of arts and sciences would run out of the reserves necessary to cushion itself against these shortfalls.

“This is projected to be sometime in the next academic year unless action is taken to put the budget on a better footing closer to the structural balance,” he added.

A further aspect of the provincial funding model that has exacerbated the funding crises is the way Ontario structures its grants – a technical point that has been all-but-absent from news reports about the chronic underfunding of the province’s post-secondary sector.

Central to Ontario’s funding model is what is called ‘corridor funding’. Under it, each programme in every university and college in the province is told by the Ministry of Higher Education the number of students for which the ministry will provide grants.

Its proponents argue that corridor funding provides stable funding and helps the province nudge universities towards aligning the number of graduates with what the province predicts will be the labour market.

Universities and colleges can enrol, for example, more sociology students than the province authorises. However, each student above the province’s number is unfunded by the province, meaning, there is no provincial grant to help defray the myriad of costs not covered by the student’s tuition.

“There are 20,000 domestic students in the province,” says Deane, “who are unfunded by the government. Were they funded by the government, that figure would be about CA$175 million more coming into the [post-secondary] sector [each year].”

‘Budget strategy’

Deane’s public letter said that he had tasked the provost and vice-principal (finance and administration) with developing a “budget strategy”, the sort of phraseology that is often code that telegraphs the sort of cuts that took effect last September at Guelph University, a three-hour drive from Queen’s on Ontario’s main highway, the 401: 11 undergraduate programmes, including environmental biology and nanoscience, art history and European studies, as well as five MA programmes, including Latin American and Caribbean studies, art history, family relations and applied nutrition.

Indeed, as if to prove the point that financial difficulties facing universities across North America are leading to draconian cuts, the day before Deane and I spoke, the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) cut eight undergraduate programmes, including anthropology and religious studies and 12 graduate programmes, including drama, applied geography, and languages, literature and cultures.

Queen’s was not, Deane underscored, undertaking a thorough curriculum review that could gut the humanities.

“The essence of the institution has been linked to the liberal arts, with 50% of the institution given over to the [faculty of] arts and sciences,” Deane said in a tone that bespoke his career as an English professor.

Later in our Zoom call, he pointed to a number of books with striking blue covers that were just far enough away that I could not make out their titles, until he told me that these books, which held pride of place on his bookshelf, were the collected works of his favourite poet: WH Auden.

He responded to my question about whether literature and other liberal arts courses could be reduced to little more than feeder courses that stream into STEM, by admitting that there is “pressure” for this to happen.

“It’s been a growing problem of long standing. Governments want to see from institutions that kind of concentration. Good heavens, I mean, the premier makes this very clear all the time … that it’s the university’s relationship to the labour market that justifies where the support will be placed.

Queen’s University's budget crisis can be managed, Deane believes, by restructuring ancillary functions.

“It’s a very decentralised place,” he says of Queen’s. “So, you have a central human resources [HR] operation and then every faculty has its own HR operation. You have a central EDI [Equity, Diversity and Inclusion] office and then we have EDI offices paid by the deans of each faculty.” As well, he said, deans are looking at class size and questions are asked about programmes that have only one or two students in them.

Measures that have already been found have, Deane said, cut CA$20 million off of the projected CA$68 million deficit.

Global context

Towards the end of our interview, Deane, who is also vice-president (treasurer) of the International Association of Universities and president of the Governing Council of the Magna Charta Universitatum, discussed the financial situation of North American universities from a global perspective.

After noting that generalising is difficult, he said: “At the moment the government of the Netherlands is profoundly supportive of university and broad education. But you could have a change of government that could put them on the same road that we are on here in Ontario right now.”

Further, he said that while national contexts differ, “the dominant trend is this kind of mercenary orientation to the labour market and the sense of the instrumentality of education”.

Then, I asked, given that for the most part Western economies are doing well – the day before we spoke, the United States commerce department reported that the US economy had added more than 353,000 jobs, the 40th straight month of job gains – what explains the round after round of cuts to post-secondary budgets?

“That’s a good question, and implicit in it is that there’s some strange sense of philosophical predisposition. It’s linked to what you see in public opinion surveys … the sort of waning confidence in institutions, and [to what you see] in social media … [It’s linked] to the whole issue of [the] questioning of expertise: ‘Is expertise what the world needs?’

“I think it’s a confluence of trends that is curiously undermining some of the fundamental assumptions about what universities exist to do. If you undermine these assumptions, it follows that you will undervalue them in practice and policy,” he stated.

Avoiding the language of government

Echoing studies, Deane still believes that a liberal arts education equips individuals for the rapid transformation that is occurring in the workplace. However, he cautions that supporters of the humanities have, unwittingly, weakened their own position by couching the defence of the liberal arts in instrumental terms meant to impress neoliberal politicians and business leaders: critical thinking, self-assessment of information and the like.

“This language has become tired and is viewed with cynicism and scepticism by people in government.”

He recalled a conversation he had with a colleague at Universities Canada, the association of Canadian universities, in which the colleague discussed the danger of adopting “the language that the government uses to talk about things”.

Instead, this colleague, who now heads a major Canadian university, insisted that universities should defend themselves with their “own” language.

“We’ve all sort of colluded in a language about education that privileges the instrumental, neoliberal view that you pointed to,” said Deane. “I think we’ve actually played a role in this, which has been damaging to the cause of universities and potentially to our future.”

Relationships with culture

As our Zoom call time ran down, Deane responded to a question about why, for example, during their long years of imprisonment on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela and the other African National Congress prisoners were assiduous readers of Shakespeare or why, during the darkest days of COVID, people by the millions watched YouTube videos of professors talking about the painting of the Black Death (1346) or Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1349-53).

Pointing to the collected Auden on his shelf, he said: “There’s a great passage in Auden in which he talks about your relationship, specifically with literature, but you could make the point about the relationship with culture in general.

“He [Auden] basically says that your encounter with literature is an ongoing rehearsal for life. The negotiation you have with a text and, I suppose, you could say the same with a film or painting, is a negotiation that is translatable into other ways, other things you have to do in life.”

A few moments later, the former English professor, who was born and raised in South Africa, who knew he was speaking to another former English professor, said: “The North American attitude towards culture in everyday lives is always a puzzle to me.

“If you go to London or Wales, you will see a very different attitude towards cultural life. My wife, Sheila, is from the UK and her uncle used to talk about hearing, I think it was a group of farmers in Wales discussing poetry and debating cultural issues.”