Brampton & Mississauga devastated by Sheridan College’s mass program suspensions: the fallout of Doug Ford’s mismanagement

The grim consequences produced by greed and mismanagement of Ontario’s post-secondary education system are illustrated by Sheridan College’s massive restructuring of its programs. 

“We are suspending some programs and placing others under efficiency reviews. All current students in these programs will have the opportunity to graduate, but we will not be enrolling new first-year students moving forward,” the college announced this week. 

A stunning forty programs are being suspended. Others are being placed under an “efficiency review”.

Thousands of students and faculty members will be impacted, mainly in business and science programs. 

The local economies in Brampton and Mississauga, as well as Oakville where the college’s three campuses are located will be hit hard. 

Local businesses, property owners who rent to students and other commercial enterprises will lose millions of dollars in revenue.

How did we arrive at such a situation?

While the Liberals before him had already stopped funding increases to the sector, Doug Ford has only made the situation worse, when it was clear that per-student funding desperately needed to be boosted. He froze tuition fees for in-province students and capped increases for out-of-province Canadians, without increasing per-student funding.

This has resulted in the explosion of international students in Ontario who have been grossly exploited by institutions such as Brampton’s Algoma University, whose enrolment in the city skyrocketed by almost 900 percent in just three years, from the spring of 2021 to 2024 thanks to students from India who were contributing more than 80 percent of the university’s tuition revenue, to save it from financial ruin due to mismanagement only a few years earlier.

Some colleges in the province charged international students more than four times what their domestic counterparts paid.

Instead of spending the money on those who provided it, the greed on display included shameful conditions, as international students had few supports, were not provided with subsidized campus housing and endured deplorable educational offerings in many cases, often learning online with little exposure to professors or instructors. 

The blatant exploitation and mismanagement has caught up to them. Social media is awash with posts warning students from countries like India to avoid Canadian post-secondary institutions and Ottawa finally realized the pressures created by out-of-control colleges and universities, capping and cutting the numbers of international students to rein in institutions such as Algoma and Sheridan. 

University and college administrators, meanwhile, have enriched themselves with high salaries, perks and more than adequate benefits, even stubbornly resisting the reasonable collective bargaining aspirations of their unionized employees. It needs to be noted how colleges for at least the last 15 years have been staffed, especially in the use of part-time and contract employees rather than full-time employees. For example, at Humber College in the mid 1980s, 80 percent of faculty were full-time, the rest were part-time. Now, approximately 75 percent are part-time. Virtual learning for many students has also deeply impacted the quality of their education.

Ontario is now paying the price for the irresponsible actions of politicians at Queen’s Park and for similar decisions made in Ottawa, where the Liberal government has been asleep at the wheel. 

The colleges and universities that failed to use creative solutions, protect key educational areas and safeguard the foundational principles of higher education, abandoning so many students, also deserve the situation they now find themselves in. 

The Labour Movement must allocate far more of its resources to educating its members and uniting unions to ensure post-secondary institutions will no longer sacrifice their core mandate.

Unless there is an educated public and an informed working class, the present crisis in post-secondary education will continue and expand, affecting all of us. We are already suffering due to the ongoing healthcare crisis. It will only be compounded if we do not move quickly to turnaround the recent turmoil in our college and university system.

Joe Grogan is a Peel resident and former professor at Humber College, School of Business and School of Liberal Arts. He is a retired member of OPSEU’s faculty union.