Yet another post-secondary institution in Ontario is moving ahead with significant clawbacks in light of funding woes, suspending a spate of its programs and drawing concern from — and signalling the state of — Canada’s academic community.
York University, which has three campuses across the GTA and is among the three largest schools in the country by enrollment, will no longer be accepting students to 18 of its programs across the sciences, arts, and humanities.
While a number of language majors are affected, disciplines such as classics and classical studies, Indigenous studies, religious studies, and gender and women’s studies are also on the list, as are environmental biology and biomedical physics, sociology, global history and justice, and even English.
The school has said that the cuts reflect swift and unanticipated policy changes in Ottawa, and affect study areas that have had less robust enrollment levels than others in recent years. They are temporary and will be in effect starting from the 2025/2026 academic year.
Lower international student caps, new criteria for post-graduation work permits and other amendments to study permits in Canada have been the key culprit behind similar decisions at schools like Centennial, Mohawk, Sheridan, Algonquin, and Seneca Colleges.
The latter school directly cited “recent decisions by the federal government related to international students” in its justification for temporarily shuttering its Markham campus at the end of last year.
But, many feel that the province’s campuses have come to depend too heavily on revenue from people coming to study from abroad.
Some examination of York specifically reveals how the institution has been making some questionable financial decisions in the eyes of experts for a number of years.
Ontario colleges that relied on international students keep cutting programshttps://t.co/r6Cs3a6V3T
— blogTO (@blogTO) January 23, 2025
In a 2023 value-for-money assessment of York specifically, the Auditor General of Ontario found that the school has “continued to offer many academic programs with low demand and enrolment, despite continued financial deficits.” A shocking 23 per cent of undergraduate programs over that year were documented to have 20 or fewer students.
Ultimately, the report suggested York “adjust or restructure its program offerings to improve financial sustainability” — advice that executives are now finally appearing to heed.
The Auditor General also cited a startling figure regarding international students: that despite the demographic comprising only 18 per cent of York’s student body, it accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the university’s tuition revenue. Within that segment, most students are also from only two countries, which leaves the institution more at risk, they wrote.
Explaining the new rules around student visas that so many schools are now bemoaning, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained last fall that “in the last two years, our population has grown really fast, like baby boom fast… So we’re doing something major.”
“Bad actors, like fake colleges and big chain corporations, have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests,” he continued, adding that under his leadership, the government has “made some mistakes” with its immigration policy. “That’s why we are taking this big turn,” he said.
Early last year, the Province of Ontario earmarked around $1.3 billion in additional funds to help “stabilize the province’s colleges and universities” while allowing them to maintain the ongoing domestic tuition freeze.
