OPSEU Local 354

🧵 1/5 The Conestoga College Story In 2012, Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario was a modest, unremarkable polytechnic. About 10,000 students. Nine out of ten of them Canadian. A school that served its community, trained tradespeople and healthcare workers, and quietly did what community colleges are supposed to do. Nobody was watching Conestoga because nobody needed to. And then came the money. Canada's provincial governments had frozen domestic tuition for years. Funding per student was chronically below the national average — about $5,200 short per student annually. The result was that the colleges were quietly suffocating. And then Ottawa offered a lifeline: international students. No cap. No ceiling. And they paid 3 to 4 times what a domestic student paid. Conestoga saw the opportunity before almost anyone else — and went harder than any institution in the country. By 2017, they were celebrating a "record" 2,300 international students enrolling in a single month. By 2022, total enrollment had doubled to 42,000 — with nearly 30,000 of them international. By 2023, revenue hit $945 million. At peak, Conestoga alone held more international study permits than the University of Toronto and UBC combined. They accounted for over 4% of every study permit holder in Canada. A public college in Kitchener, Ontario was generating nearly a billion dollars a year — almost entirely on tuition from students who came from India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, believing that a Canadian diploma was their ticket to permanent residency. But here's the part that tells you everything about how they saw themselves: they weren't satisfied. They wanted more. And they had a plan to get it. Conestoga originally operated from a handful of campuses anchored in the Waterloo Region: Doon, Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph. By the peak of the boom, they had expanded aggressively to over a dozen locations including Milton, Stratford, downtown Kitchener, and more — a footprint that grew almost entirely with international enrollment. The national average tuition revenue per student at a Canadian public college sits around $8,000 to $9,000 domestically. For colleges outside the GTA, the average international student tuition collected runs roughly $14,000 to $19,000 per year. Conestoga, at its peak, was processing nearly 30,000 new international arrivals annually at those rates. Do the math....

BREAKING: The Ford government is taking over Conestoga College over “evidence of serious financial and governance mismanagement.” Linda Franklin has been named the college’s new administrator and the board of governors has been dismissed.

Carney's cuts are worse than under Harper