Rebuilding post-secondary education as public infrastructure in BC

BC’s public post-secondary education in crisis

British Columbia’s public post-secondary education system is in the worst funding crisis in its history.

For the first time, the sector faces a consolidated deficit. Nineteen of the province’s 25 public institutions are projected to operate at a loss over the next three years. The BC government estimates the shortfall amounts to approximately $300 million annually across the province.¹

As of the end of the Spring 2026 term, BC’s public post-secondary institutions have cut or suspended over 180 programs and laid off more than 1,300 faculty and staff.² This count excludes the likely equal or higher number of contract instructors whose contracts have not been renewed and the hundreds of course sections that have been eliminated.³ More than 45 student services have been shut down, including counselling, academic advising, Indigenous student supports, international student supports, library hours and cafeteria access.⁴ BC’s public colleges and teaching universities have been hardest hit.

Program cuts and suspensions

Program cuts and suspensions at public colleges and teaching universities ⁵.

Click on the institution name to view the full list.

Federal caps on international student study permits

The immediate trigger for this crisis was a sudden shift in federal immigration policy.

After decades of issuing an increasing number of international student study permits with seemingly no ceiling, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced the first-ever cap on international student permits starting in January 2024 and intending to cut new approvals by 35% from 2023 levels and by a further 10% in 2025. The announcement included stricter eligibility requirements for both post-graduation work permits (PGWP) and work permits for international student’ spouses and common-law partners.⁶ Later, in October 2024, the federal government announced reductions to its overall economic immigration targets, suddenly putting permanent residency out-of-reach for many international students expecting to stay in Canada.⁷

The federal government justified its international student cap as a necessary “stabilization” measure, arguing that rapid population growth was straining Canada’s housing and healthcare infrastructure, while the study permit model was enabling predatory exploitation by private colleges. Minister of IRCC Marc Miller argued that the effort aimed to restore “system integrity” and address mounting pressure to reduce the temporary resident population. However, even Minister Miller had previously described this approach as “doing surgery with a hammer.”⁸

The policy unfairly scapegoated students for structural housing issues that have been decades in the making and that scholars argued was “neither accurate nor fair.”⁹ The caps, in effect, punished students for the behaviour of predatory institutions, particularly private and for-profit institutions, rather than targeting the institutions themselves—especially given that companion measures like restricting post-graduation work permits applied to students and their partners, not to colleges. The Canadian Union of Public Employees warned these were “dog whistle tactics that could amplify xenophobia and racism.”¹⁰

While international students only make up about a fifth of the student population in public post-secondary education, they provide 47% of tuition fees and 18% of sector revenues.

Ultimately, implementing the caps proved far more drastic than the IRCC’s targets. While BC was expected to see an 18% drop in study permit approvals in 2024, the actual decline was 66%.¹¹ Part of the problem, many in the sector argue, was the study permit (or Provincial Attestation Letter) distribution formula was based on provincial population rather than on existing enrolment, which meant BC and Ontario—thath together hosted three-quarters of all international students—received only about a third of the attestation letters. BC’s provincial allocation for 2026 is 32,596 study permits, down from roughly 97,000 approved applications in 2023.¹² Alberta, on the other hand, received more attestation letters in 2024 than it had had applicants the year before.¹³

Because international student tuition has represented all new funding to the BC sector since 2008,¹⁴ and international student tuition is roughly five times the cost of domestic tuition¹⁵, crisis-level shortfalls appeared in the province overnight. While international students only make up about a fifth of the student population in public post-secondary education, they provide  47% of tuition fees¹⁶ and 18% of sector revenues.¹⁷ When permit approvals fell, so did the revenue line that institutional budgets had come to depend on.

By Fall 2025, Okanagan College saw a 70% drop in international student enrolment;¹⁸ Kwantlen Polytechnic (KPU) reported a 60% decline and projected a $49 million loss in tuition revenue.¹⁹ At Thompson Rivers University (TRU), international enrolment fell by 56% and is projected to drop even further for a loss of up to $14 million in tuition.²⁰ As a result the university is cutting $20 million in spending and may close its Williams Lake satellite campus by 2028.²¹ Vancouver Island University (VIU) reported a ”60% drop in international graduate enrollments and a 48% drop in international undergraduate and developmental programs in the 2024-25 school year” with more than $10 million in lost tuition.²² International enrolments were down 46% at Langara College,²³ 37% at Camosun College and 30% at North Island College (NIC), with NIC projecting an $8.4 million revenue shortfall by 2027.²⁴

Service cuts at public colleges and teaching universities

List of service cuts at public colleges and teaching universities²⁵

Click on the institution name to view the full list.

Decades of chronic underfunding

While the impacts of the federal international student caps on BC’s public post-secondary sector felt sudden, this crisis did not arrive without warning. Institutions, faculty associations, the sector’s labour organizations, student unions and the BC Federation of Students (BCFS) had been sounding the alarm for years. The BCFS warned the provincial government repeatedly that the system’s reliance on international tuition was unsustainable.²⁶ The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) called it “an open secret.”²⁷

As faculty, students, institutional leaders, labour organizations and even the Province’s own (subsequently buried) 2022 funding review have all concluded, the fragility of the sector is due to decades of chronic public underfunding that pressured institutions into structural dependence on international student tuition as a substitute. The current shortfalls from the loss of international student tuition revenue come on top of a sector that was already deemed to need at least $200 million in additional annual funding for stability.²⁸ The federal government removed the stopgap revenue source, but the provincial government created the conditions that made institutions dependent upon it.

Despite this, BC Budget 2026 added no new operating funding for the sector and the 2025/26 sector²⁹ sustainability review opened with the explicit caveat that no new funding would be on the table.³⁰

“…the fragility of the sector is due to decades of chronic public underfunding that pressured institutions into structural dependence on international student tuition as a substitute.”

The consequences are uneven. 

The University of BC (UBC) is in a category of its own, weathering the storm through global brand recognition and a multibillion-dollar endowment built partly from extracting lease, rent and other development revenue on its government-granted stolen lands. The other research universities may have more cushion than colleges and teaching universities, but they have not been spared. And the gap is set to widen with the IRCC focusing on recruiting international master’s and doctoral students. International doctoral students provide cheap academic labour to research-intensive institutions as teaching and research assistants while expensive professional master’s degrees are a highly lucrative revenue stream. Colleges and teaching universities, however, that serve the majority of BC students, particularly those from working-class, rural, Indigenous and racialized communities, will have no comparable replacement for the lost undergraduate international tuition. As one college faculty association president put it, “the bottom half of this sector is beginning to feel very under-appreciated and very frustrated.”³¹

For Vancouver Island, rural and northern BC, the crisis threatens the fundamental mission of providing equitable educational access across the province. The marketization of the public post-secondary sector had already eroded that mission, leading to many campus closures over the last 30 years, including in Indigenous communities. The recent cuts signal a further abandonment of communities that were promised equitable access to post-secondary education.

Going forward, the provincial government seems to have two paths to choose from: treat this crisis as the predictable consequence of 40 years of deliberate public disinvestment in post-secondary education at both the federal and provincial levels and work to reverse course; or use the crisis—as many in the sector fear—to permanently narrow who public post-secondary education serves and what it aspires to be.³² The signs of this narrowing are already emerging. Without new funding and with fewer international students to rely on for revenue, there are signals the Province plans to reverse the longstanding 2% cap on annual tuition increases.³³ Institutions are already exploiting loopholes around the cap by closing programs and reopening them under new names.³⁴ Increasing tuition costs will actually create a deeper divide across the province regarding who gets access to education and the kind of education they can pursue. To avoid this outcome, the province urgently needs a coherent, research-backed mission for what education should be and how to sustainably deliver it. 

This report establishes the case for the first path. It begins by tracing a half-century of policy decisions—federal funding cuts, provincial disinvestment, the stratification of the sector, its marketization and the deliberate engineering of international tuition into a structural funding stopgap—that turned BC’s public post-secondary system into something a single change in immigration policy could break. It then turns to who is absorbing the cost: students whose programs have disappeared and whose graduations are stretching out; faculty and staff facing layoffs, non-renewals and intensified workloads; and the rural communities and marginalized students whose access has been narrowed yet again. A look at submissions to the Province’s two recent sector reviews—the 2022/23 funding review that the government abandoned and the 2025/26 sustainability review designed to exclude new funding—reveal that the sector told the government what it needs and it has been ignored. The final section outlines an alternative direction: rebuilding post-secondary education as public infrastructure, anchored in decolonization with restored public funding and community-driven governance.

How we got here

Understanding the current sector collapse requires tracing a series of policy decisions that, over decades, transformed public post-secondary education from a well-funded public service into a marketized sector dependent on egregious international student tuition for its survival.

Pre-war

BC’s post-secondary system was, for much of the 20^th century, essentially just UBC and the former Victoria College (now University of Victoria). Both institutions originally operated as McGill University affiliates, from 1906 and 1903 respectively. The BC University Act (1908) established UBC as an independent university in 1915 followed by the reopening of Victoria College in 1920 as a UBC affiliate. The system was small, elite, generously funded and deeply exclusionary along race, class and gender lines.³⁵  

Post-war

Following WWII, the Province established 10 vocational schools and provided financial support to returning veterans. Concurrently, the federal government started to provide direct aid to all universities in the country until the 1950s when direct funding was replaced with per-capita grants distributed to provincial governments.³⁶ 

1960s

In the early 1960s, UBC president John B. Macdonald, inspired by Clark Kerr’s University of California system, proposed a stratified higher education system—an elite research institution at the top, with lower-tier institutions oriented toward immediate economic needs for working-class students. While BC never formally adopted Macdonald’s pyramid, it effectively replicated it.³⁷ 

With the national Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act of 1960, 

“The federal government agreed, for up to six years, to reimburse each province 75% of the cost of new buildings and equipment to a limit based on the population, and thereafter at 50% of cost. The 1960s became the key decade for the founding of vocational schools.”³⁸

The new Universities Act (1963) and amendments to the Public Schools Act led to the creation of two new research universities (Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria) and the melding of the vocational schools into community colleges.

By the 1970s, the college system expanded to 14 community colleges to meet demand for short-term certificates and diplomas, paralleling the credentialization of jobs that had previously relied on on-the-job training.³⁹

1970s

Before the 1970s there was no systematic basis for differential fees for international students who up to this point were not classified as a separate category of learners. But in 1976, the federal Immigration Act formally classified international students as temporary residents for the first time, assigning them special Social Insurance numbers that made them identifiable and chargeable as a distinct group. International students were also barred from off-campus work—a ban that lasted until 2006.⁴⁰

The neoliberal turn (1980s)

In 1982, the conservative Social Credit government introduced a mid-fiscal-year budget cut of roughly 10% to universities. The following year’s budget triggered the Solidarity protests, which nearly became a general strike. For post-secondary education, this marked the end of generous public funding and the beginning of the “user fees” ideology.

The government authorized institutions to charge international students differential fees and UBC and Simon Fraser University (SFU) immediately did so for the first time. This is the origin of the international-student-as-revenue-source model though it remained a slow burn for two decades. Additionally, corporate tax reductions shrank the provincial tax base,adding to the pressure for user-fee models and public-private partnerships across the sector.⁴¹

Federal transfer restructuring (1980s-mid 1990s)

Federally, then-prime ministers Brian Mulroney followed by Jean Chrétien restructured social transfers to the provinces in a way that led to less funding for BC post-secondary. Mulroney capped and reduced transfers, while Chrétien’s 1995 budget merged them entirely, with health, education and social assistance all under the new Canada Health and Social Transfer. This forced the public post-secondary education sector to compete against health care for limited public funds.⁴² “Between 1988/1989 and 2005/2006, the total transfer of federal funds for PSE decreased by 40 percent.”⁴³

Bill 22 and the university college experiment (1994)

To expand degree access to the interior and to Vancouver Island the Social Credit government had, between 1989-1991, designated some of the community colleges as “University Colleges” acting under a partnership framework with universities where students took classes at the college, but the actual degrees were issued and rubber-stamped by UBC, SFU, or the University of Victoria (UVic).

Under the BC NDP government of Mike Harcourt, Bill 22 gave university colleges full degree-granting authority and established education councils, giving these colleges more independence and democratic governance. But the legislation did not move these institutions into the university designation, did not give them a distinct funding model and did not account for the costs of actually running degree programs—such as labs, libraries, research infrastructure, teaching assistants. The university colleges were expected to remain “comprehensive,” keeping adult basic education, trades and college programming while also building university capacity, without additional resources nor access to the “economy of scale” of urban research universities.⁴⁴

The BC NDP tuition freeze (1996-2001)

During this period, the BC NDP froze tuition fees, which students championed. After a five-year freeze, tuition fees were cut by 5% in 2001/02, making BC tuition fees considerably lower than those in Alberta and Ontario. The policy was a response to a decade of high tuition increases (190% for universities, 254% for colleges) that far outpaced inflation. The freeze contributed to increasing the participation rate in post-secondary education from the second worst in Canada in 1991 to the second best by 2001.⁴⁵ This was an evidence-based equity-driven approach to education as a public good.

However, the government provided no compensatory funding to institutions. Prior to the freeze, institutions had been receiving roughly 10% annual tuition-fee increases and that revenue stream simply evaporated. This is when the funding slide began in earnest for smaller institutions.⁴⁶

The BC Liberals’ radical restructuring (2001-2008)

The BC Liberal government under premier Gordon Campbell enacted a cluster of changes that set institutions on a collision course with insolvency. They moved from program-based to block funding, which allowed the government to freeze and cut funding without transparency—they could increase enrolment expectations while keeping budgets flat, creating hidden per-student cuts. They completely deregulated tuition fees, leading to 200-300% increases at some institutions between 2002 and 2005. Then in 2005, when they re-regulated fees with a 2% annual cap, they froze institutions at whatever level they happened to be at—punishing those that had been more restrained during the deregulated period with a permanently lower funding base.⁴⁷

The Liberal government also dismantled the cooperative consultative structures within the Ministry of Advanced Education—committees on educational technology, prior learning assessment and transfer system optimization. Institutions were forced to compete with each other and to individually replicate services that had been provided system-wide. Private education was significantly expanded.
Between 2006 and 2008, the remaining university colleges were converted into special purpose teaching universities. None received additional funding. And all were governed under a new act rather than the full university legislation, meaning their faculty became among the lowest-paid in Canada. They onboarded the direct and indirect costs of being a university—governance structures, library resources, labs, graduate programs—on a college funding base.⁴⁸

The international student solution (2005-2019)

By 2005, institutions successfully lobbied the federal government to allow international students to work off-campus. Between 2005 and 2008, the post-graduate work permit (PGWP) was introduced and enhanced, creating the clear “study, work, immigrate” pathway that dramatically expanded international student demand for Canada. In 2008, EduCanada was created as a global advertising brand, explicitly promising immigration pathways. The Conservative government of prime minister Stephen Harper introduced the 2012 strategy, “Harnessing Our Knowledge Advantage,” which called for Canada to double the number of international students from roughly 225,000 to 450,000 by 2022. Canada surpassed the target early, reaching 500,000 in 2018. The Liberal government of prime minister Justin Trudeau undertook the 2019 strategy, “Building on Success,” which continued the trajectory with undisguised satisfaction.⁴⁹

Parallel to federal policy, BC was building its own immigration pipeline. The BC Provincial Nominee Program, signed in 1998 and operationalized in 2001 under the new Liberal government, gave the province its own mechanism for selecting permanent residents. By the mid-2000s, BC had created an “International Graduate” stream—graduates of recognized BC post-secondary institutions could apply for permanent residency with no prior work experience, only a job offer. ⁵⁰

In 2012, the province passed its first International Education Strategy, echoing the federal government’s explicit economic framing of international education as a service export. The 2010 Canada–BC Immigration Agreement included a dedicated section on international students. BC launched its International Post-Graduate (IPG) pilot the same year, allowing master’s and PhD graduates in science fields to apply for permanent residency without a job offer. Admission to a BC graduate program had effectively become an immigration pathway, with post-secondary institutions positioned as de facto immigrant selection agents.⁵¹

The IPG became permanent in 2013. BC pioneered recruitment of master‘s-level international students for immigration purposes a full decade before federal policy began moving in the same direction. In 2015, BC’s Minister of Advanced Education stated directly to the BC Federation of Students that making a profit from international students was designed to be a major component of the funding model for BC’s public post-secondary system. ⁵²

Post 2018, the number of Chinese international students declined in BC and were replaced primarily by Indian students, particularly from Punjab. These students attended different institutions from their Chinese predecessors, had less economic capital and were more explicitly interested in the immigration pathway. They were doing exactly what the system was designed for, but they were not the kind of students Canada had imagined: they were not wealthy, they were visibly working hard in the economy and they faced significant racism.⁵³

The caps (2024-2026)

Federal caps on international student applications were introduced in 2024, framed as a 35% cut, but they were far deeper for BC and Ontario because attestation letters were distributed by population share rather than by existing enrolment. BC, which used to receive up to 30% of Canada’s international students, now gets only about 10% of attestation letters.⁵⁴ The government also severely restricted spousal work permits, limiting them to spouses of graduate students, and closed the PGWP pathway for two-year diploma programs, devastating colleges and smaller institutions. The rollout was chaotic, with provinces given weeks to design attestation letter systems.

The result was the collapse of international student numbers at the very institutions the system had made most dependent on them. The elite institutions, with diversified revenue and global reputations, were largely insulated. The teaching universities and colleges were not.

International students as funding stopgaps: the marketization of post-secondary education in a settler-colonial context

BC initially attempted to offset the drastic drop in federal funding for post-secondary education with slight increases in per-student funding through the 90s and early 2000s. However, in short order, the overall proportion of university operating revenues provided by the government shrank considerably, shifting the burden onto tuition fees.⁵⁵ When adjusted for inflation, provincial per-capita spending on post-secondary education dropped 20% after 2001.⁵⁶ Starved of stable public funding, institutions were forced to adopt entrepreneurial survival strategies. Chief among these was the aggressive recruitment of international students, a practice bolstered by provincial and federal policies that leveraged post-graduation immigration pathways as de facto marketing tools.⁵⁷

This shift was not unique to BC.Since the 1980s, public universities in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have undergone “neoliberal makeover”: a sweeping structural and ideological transformation that has reshaped public universities into market-driven, corporate entities.⁵⁸ This makeover has been characterized by deep funding cuts, tuition hikes that transfer cost to students-as-customers, the casualization of academic labour, corporate management cultures and a redefinition of education as a globally tradable commodity rather than a locally situated public service.⁵⁹

• Austerity: purposeful, deep cuts to state funding for public universities. To maintain operations and balance budgets without raising taxes, institutions embrace a “user-pays principle,” transferring the financial burden onto students through substantial tuition increases and the normalization of massive student debt.
• Commodification: heavily marketized education. Students are rebranded as “customers” purchasing a service.
• Flexibilization: To contain costs and maximize revenue, universities erode academic tenure for professors and rely heavily on cheap, casual, short-term contract academic staff.
• Corporatization: adopt the language, ethos and behaviours of corporate business. This includes extending managerial control over academic labour, paying excessively large salaries to senior administrators and fostering an institutional culture of entrepreneurialism.
• Instrumentalism: Neoliberal ideology that frames education primarily as a tool for economic growth, global competitiveness and job-readiness.

This consumerist vision is particularly evident in the treatment of international students, positioned as customers in a global market yet objectified as “cash cows” recruited to offset domestic funding shortfalls.⁶⁰ This attitude is a departure from earlier policy that viewed international education through the lens of development aid, an approach largely driven by Cold War geopolitical interests.⁶¹

The federal government formally suggested that provinces could generate additional revenue by implementing differential tuition fees for international learners during the 1976 federal transfer payment negotiations.⁶² “Both the aid and customer-oriented framings, however,” writes higher education scholar Sharon Stein, “reflect the racialized positioning of international students as “other,” or outsiders, within the context of Canadian public PSE institutions (Stein and Andreotti 2016).”⁶³ 

“By the mid-1980s,” she continues, “BC post-secondary institutions were charging higher fees for international students than domestic students.”⁶⁴ The provincial government quickly organized to capture this revenue, establishing dedicated provincial bodies and urging institutions to draft formal plans to capitalize on new global market opportunities. By 1993, the province’s first international education strategy made the justification explicitly economic: international student recruitment was now a tool to guarantee BC’s global competitiveness and foster lucrative trade relations.⁶⁵

Built on colonial logic

The ease with which international students could be so readily instrumentalized rested on established colonial foundations—racialized hierarchies of knowledge, assumptions of Western superiority and economic dependencies between the Global North and South that made extraction appear natural.⁶⁶

BC’s higher education sits inside what remains “a settler-colonial state actively engaged in ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples.”⁶⁷ Universities were built on unceded Indigenous territories and continue to enforce Eurocentric knowledge structures.⁶⁸ International student mobility is layered onto this foundation. While the standard narrative traces today’s flow of international students to medieval European universities, which were shaped by empire: students from colonized nations travelled to imperial centres for colonial powers to train sympathetic administrative elites.⁶⁹ After the Second World War, the same student flows were rebranded as “humane internationalism”—development aid through which Western nations brought students from the Global South to impart democratic and capitalist values.⁷⁰

Federal policy makers described these students as “sojourners by nature, present in Canada due to the benevolence of a generous government.” They were seen as vessels for Western ideology who would “return to their home countries, taking with them the intellectual and cultural rewards of their time in Canada.”⁷¹ International students continue to be “dehumanized in [policy] materials, valued only to the extent that they can develop Canada’s economy.”⁷² As international education scholar Dale McCartney found in an exhaustive archival analysis, Members of Parliament (MPs) “persistently discuss international students as outsiders and as vehicles for Canada’s economic and foreign policy goals.” Only once between 1984 and 2019 did an MP articulate the intrinsic intellectual value of international students.⁷³

Canada’s international education strategies use “the language of competition,” engaging “new and emerging markets” to attract “the best and brightest international students” through “branding Canada to maximize success.”⁷⁴ Education is positioned as a service export and international students as both the commodity and consumer. Dominant approaches to internationalization either perpetuate “business-as-usual competition for resources and positioning” or offer only modest reform through “knowledge transfer from North to South, framed as international aid”—risking the naturalization of “already uneven geo-political, economic, and epistemic relations.”⁷⁵

At the same time, international students were also being recruited as part of Canada’s longstanding economic dependence on immigration. Where economic immigrants were once directly recruited from abroad in a ‘one-step’ process, the federal government increasingly drew immigrants from a pool of temporary residents living in Canada. For this, they used a ‘two-step’ process, with the rationale that applicants with Canadian credentials and local work experience tend to integrate faster and earn more over time.⁷⁶ Migrant studies scholar Lisa Brunner has named the version of this system targeting international students edugration⁷⁷: “Edugration refers to a specific form of two-step immigration targeting international students, who are seen as ideal immigrants due to their relatively young age, official-language abilities, and high skill levels,”⁷⁸ Brunner writes. In this iteration, immigration is really a three-step process in which students “(1) gain admission to, and graduate from, a qualifying higher education institution can (2) compete in the labour market for a limited time on a post-graduation work permit, during which those who gain sufficient qualifying work experience can (3) remain permanently as immigrants and, eventually, citizens.”⁷⁹

The category “international student” was itself invented in policy talk that catalogued, classified and assigned them economic and diplomatic value before they had set foot in Canada.

Edugration crystallized in the 2000s when off-campus work eligibility and the PGWP came online and IRCC and Global Affairs Canada explicitly promoted permanent residency as a selling point of Canadian higher education. So, for many international students at BC institutions without major global reputations, the academic credential was not the primary draw, permanent residency was.⁸⁰ High tuition functioned as the entry fee to a multi-year competition for permanent residency (PR) spots, with post-secondary institutions serving to “essentially screen and train future Canadians.”⁸¹

In BC today, international students from the Global South are channelled into a system that follows a “neo-imperial pattern of moving human resources from non-Western economies into Western knowledge economies,” a pattern that “would seem to do little to redress patterns of dependency and uneven development.”⁸²

This border imperialism—the structuring of mobility and value through citizenship hierarchies—is “legitimized by its incorporation into legal frameworks of citizenship and migrancy.”⁸³ International students were available for this form of extraction to BC post-secondary institutions because the legal categories had already made them so. When international students were classified as temporary residents in 1976 they were “made into a category of migrant, permanent outsiders to the Canadian nation.”⁸⁴ Students cannot vote, cannot easily organize across institutions and are positioned as outsiders whose presence is contingent on economic utility. The category “international student” was itself invented in policy talk that catalogued, classified and assigned them economic and diplomatic value before they had set foot in Canada.⁸⁵ As researchers Brunner and McCartney write, using the term is “more than a description. It is a decision to reproduce imaginaries of the nation-state as the natural arbiter of rights.” ⁸⁶

Post-secondary institutions in turn have instrumentalized their position as pseudo-border agents by actively framing themselves as essential to Canada‘s nation-building project through immigrant recruitment.⁸⁷ As the president of Universities Canada put it in 2016, universities had become “the Pier 21 of the 21^st century,” likening themselves to the early-twentieth-century ocean liner terminal through which a million immigrants entered the country.⁸⁸ Rather than asking the state to fund education for its democratic and civic value, institutions began asking governments to fund education because it was now a key immigration pipeline.⁸⁹

Competition over cohesion

“We talk about collaboration, but we’re actually set up to compete.”⁹⁰

Chronic underfunding, marketization and colonial logics combined to produce a sector in which institutions compete for international students, sometimes at the expense of delivering on their public mandates. Deprived of stable government funding, BC’s public post-secondary institutions have expanded into each other’s catchment areas, duplicated programs and spent countless public dollars on marketing. In Metro Vancouver, Douglas College and Vancouver Community College advertisements sit side by side on transit platforms, each aiming to recruit from the other’s community.⁹¹ Across the province, “multiple nearby institutions [are] offering similar business degrees largely designed to attract international students.”⁹² As North Island Student Union’s (NISU) Executive Director Carissa Wilson put it, “Our institutions have been working in silo a lot. There’s a lot of competition for students. We’re preaching to the same choir, and it’s not that big.”⁹³

The early 2000s shift in BC from a partly, need-based funding model to a predominantly, block-funded, per-student model was framed as a way to provide greater flexibility to institutions to meet regional needs and achieve parity. Although supposedly intended to provide flexibility, the model meant that when costs outpaced per-student grants, institutions, rather than the Province, had to manage the deficit. With no real funding increases for decades, the funding model overhaul ultimately replaced a system that funded for breadth of programs with one that funded for volume of students, which financially incentivized popular, large-scale programs over smaller, specialized ones.⁹⁴

The same period saw the dismantling of cooperative ministry structures—committees on educational technology, prior learning assessment and transfer system optimization. As part of the BC Liberal government-wide “Core Services Review,” these agencies had their funding eliminated and were shut down. This included the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2) and the Centre for Education Information Standards and Services (CEISS), which were created in 1996 to coordinate system-wide services, and were defunded and ultimately closed in 2003. The Industry Training and Apprenticeship Commission (ITAC) was also phased out in 2003 and subsequently replaced with the employer-dominated Industry Training Authority (ITA).⁹⁵

The mid-2000s conversion of colleges to universities, without additional funding, intensified the competition by creating institutions with university aspirations on college budgets, all pursuing the same international student revenue to close their funding gaps. 

“International students were made to bear the visible cost of a system that had long been set up to fail.”

As many have put it, the federal government’s 2024 decision to cap international student permits was a blunt instrument applied to a problem that required precision.⁹⁶ International students were made to bear the visible cost of a system that had long been set up to fail. Media coverage of international students in BC reacting negatively to the caps reinforced the image the federal government seemed to want to project as the Conservative Party opposition demanded toughness on immigration. Northern Lights College (NLC) faculty member Rob-Roy Douglas said, “they were being cruel. And I think that was an important part of this.”⁹⁷

The PGWP restriction on college diplomas was particularly damaging. It hit the institutions most dependent on international tuition revenue—the teaching universities and colleges that had followed every incentive the government set. As BCFS chairperson Debi Herrera Lira argued, the change had “a larger impact on international students attending colleges, and also a larger impact on colleges’ budgets, because the enrolment faltered even more at colleges.”⁹⁸

Even if Ottawa reversed course tomorrow, recovery would take years, some suspect.⁹⁹ Canada’s reputation has been badly damaged abroad. One labour sector advocate estimated it would take “at minimum, 10 years to restore our reputation if we started tomorrow. And we are not starting tomorrow.”¹⁰⁰

Who is affected?

It is easy to lose sight of the human element when confronted with the sheer scale of the crisis outlined earlier in this report: more than 180 suspended programs, 1,300 formal layoffs and 45 eliminated student services recorded by spring 2026. Behind these staggering statistics—and the invisible toll of thousands of non-renewed contract workers—are the actual people who constitute a post-secondary institution.

A university or college is a complex, interdependent ecosystem. It is driven by a deeply diverse student body encompassing young and mature learners, continuing education and students upgrading their skills, trades apprentices, artists, scientists, international scholars and graduate researchers. Supporting them is an equally diverse academic workforce: tenured and contract faculty, industry-professional vocational instructors, teaching and research assistants, librarians and lab technicians. Beyond the classroom, the institution’s survival relies heavily on a vast network of support and administrative staff. This includes academic advisors, financial aid officers, mental health counsellors, accessibility coordinators, IT professionals, cleaning staff, maintenance workers, food service employees and campus security.

These individuals do not exist in a vacuum; they represent a cross-section of rural, urban, domestic and international life. Post-secondary institutions serve as vital local community hubs and essential economic drivers. Therefore, a post-secondary sector in crisis is not merely a localized problem for the students and staff on campus today. It is a crisis that will ripple outward, compromising the social, intellectual and economic future of the province for decades to come if a dramatic shift in approach is not made soon.

The student body

The post-secondary education funding crisis in BC is first being absorbed by students. Program cuts, suspended courses, lost services and staff layoffs are extending degree timelines, deepening debt, closing off high-demand fields and pushing the most precarious students (international, Indigenous, racialized and low-income) further to the margins.

When colleges and universities cut programs, suspend offerings or thin out staffing, students do not graduate on time. As BCFS’ Herrera Lira put it, “students are no longer graduating at two, maybe four years. They’re taking a lot longer to graduate.”¹⁰¹ Beyond announced program cuts, the “silent erosion of course sections,” in Herrera Lira’s words, is making it “nearly impossible for students to be able to get their required courses, to get the credits that they need.”¹⁰² BCFS represents more than 170,000 students across the province, students at every campus they have visited report waitlists and missing upper-level course offerings. 

Graduation timelines are lengthening, and with every additional semester comes additional tuition, rent, food and opportunity cost. “If a program is offered every other semester or every other year, that’s one more semester of groceries, one more semester of tuition, of rent,” Herrera Lira said.¹⁰³ Financial barriers are the number one reason BC youth do not pursue post-secondary education, exceeding lack of interest. On average, BC students pay close to $27,000 in tuition over the course of an undergraduate degree and graduate with nearly $33,000 in debt; domestic tuition has risen 1,137% since 1972.¹⁰⁴ As many report, the 2% annual tuition cap is being routinely circumvented.¹⁰⁵ Institutions “repackage” programs, make minor changes and reintroduce them with higher fees, with some programs reportedly nearly doubling in cost from one year to the next.¹⁰⁶ Ministry oversight is effectively absent when it comes to these manoeuvres and accountability sits with internal bodies (Educational Councils, Senates, Board of Governors) without independent scrutiny.¹⁰⁷

Ancillary fees add to costs. Institutions add fees for things that should be covered by operating grants, like maintenance and technology, because the grant is insufficient. UVic closed its weight room, dance studio and an athletic centre but kept charging the fees that funded them.¹⁰⁸ Parking fees, cafeteria earnings and on-campus housing are also increasingly used as revenue streams. 

Students report skipping meals because campus food is too expensive. Many work two or more jobs, in addition to their studies, to make ends meet.¹⁰⁹

Equity dimensions

When institutions face budget pressure, the most vulnerable students are the first to feel it and the last to recover. For rural and remote institutions, the crisis threatens the fundamental mission of providing equitable educational access across the province. The consolidation of programming toward urban campuses and main sites has increased over 

decades, but the current revenue crisis threatens to intensify the trend.

As North Island College Faculty Association (NICFA) president Jen Wrye describes, “there was a campus on Alert Bay and they closed it. There was a campus in Port McNeil and Port Hardy and now there’s just Mix̱alakwila […]. The government funding formula has resulted in long and slow and certain consolidation toward Comox.” Courses that were once taught across multiple campuses, such as introductory sociology in Campbell River and Port Alberni, were cut during the COVID-19 pandemic and “have not been reintroduced in those communities.”¹¹⁰

Similarly, at the College of the Rockies, the reduction in university studies offerings, “just chips away at the choices students have in this area,” a source explained, “Our students really have to move away to do university studies,” warning that without deliberate intervention, the institution risks unintentionally drifting into a strictly vocational college.¹¹¹

This consolidation has particular consequences for Indigenous communities. Indigenous enrolment is significantly higher at rural colleges compared to urban research universities. Many Indigenous learners face compounding barriers related to income, rurality, caregiving responsibilities and proximity to campuses. “This is a basic form of equity,” Wrye argues, describing how the slow withdrawal of in-person programming from remote campuses erodes access for First Nations communities where “the proportion of the population is high.” One of the few surviving cultural programs in the area—a land-based adult basic education program for First Nations students—exists only because it is endowed, not base-funded. ¹¹²

As the BCFS reports, arts and Indigenous programs are being eliminated disproportionately. The College of New Caledonia cut or suspended five Associate of Arts programs, including Aboriginal Studies. North Island College cut its Fine Arts Diploma and its metal jewelry design certificate. Students at those institutions see a clear message in what is being protected and what is not, which Herrera Lira connects to a broader narrowing of human capacity, “why would we not want a nurse who’s also excelling in being able to know how to communicate?”¹¹³

Service cuts compound the harm of program closures. At Douglas College in New Westminster, four counsellors were laid off, leaving Indigenous students without a single counsellor on campus who shared their lived experience.¹¹⁴

Adult Basic Education, English language training, upgrading and bridging programs are essential equity infrastructure. These pathways are relatively low cost compared to the social return yet they are among the most vulnerable during fiscal constraint. They are the programs that serve newcomers, refugees, adults with interrupted education, people with disabilities and second-chance learners—the populations for whom post-secondary education is the pathway to participation in the economy and the community.

Students with disabilities face particular consequences. Specialized programs serving students with cognitive disabilities generate the largest per-FTE deficits—up to $155,000 for a single program serving 11 students.¹¹⁵ The marketized logic of fiscal constraint has led to these programs being among the first to close, despite institutional equity mandates. In 2022, Vancouver Community College (VCC) delivered classes for 14% of all Adult Special Education students in BC.¹¹⁶ VCC may be the only remaining college offering these programs at no cost.¹¹⁷

As Herrera Lira puts it, “A system that only works for well-resourced, traditional students is not socially or economically sustainable. BC’s post-secondary system is strongest when it lifts up those who have historically been left out.”¹¹⁸

International students

“As temporary residents, international students are vulnerable to exploitation yet have limited recourse and political representation. They have long been used as a solution to a multitude of Canada’s public policy problems. But international students are not just numbers. They are people taking big risks at the start of their adult lives. Just like any student, they are trying to plan their futures while navigating a complex, inequitable world.”¹¹⁹

For international students, systemic inequities are amplified by political scapegoating and acute financial extraction. Federal immigration policy increased study permit volumes while underfunding the housing, social services or post-secondary capacity they would inevitably depend on. Lacking protection under the provincial Tuition Limit Policy, access to most financial aid and many citizen or permanent resident rights, international students are highly vulnerable. One source noted, “some institutions were referring to international students as RGUs—revenue generating units.”

Education researcher Kumari Beck has identified what she calls the “culture trap”—the uncritical celebration of cultural diversity that simultaneously erases structural racism. International students are enticed to Canada told they will be valued as “the bearers of culture, the bringers of economic prosperity.” But as soon as they land, the framing shifts: “What’s wrong with you? You’re gonna have to learn the language, you’re gonna have to assimilate.” Students consistently express a desire to “be seen as students of their discipline rather than ‘the international student’.” They report being the last picked for group work, being blamed for “hanging out with people of their own background” while no one opens up to befriend them and internalizing a deficit discourse that begins with repeated standardized test failures and follows them through their education.¹²⁰

One source noted, “some institutions were referring to international students as RGUs—revenue generating units.”

These social pressures are compounded by immense financial strain. Families often mortgage farms or pool the savings of extended relatives to afford international tuition.¹²¹ Yet, students frequently arrive without fully understanding the hidden costs: new ancillary charges, textbooks at $250 per course and opaque “international student service fees.” Because federal rules cap their legal off-campus work hours, many are pushed into precarious, under-the-table jobs.¹²² To survive, they skip meals and crowd four to six people into small one- or two-bedroom apartments. As NISU’s Executive Director Carissa Wilson describes, they are “getting chewed up in the churn.”¹²³

Ultimately, international students are paying for a system that built itself on their tuition fees without building the social infrastructure to support them. As a result, trust has completely collapsed. With the very international education departments that were supposed to support them now being gutted—at one university, the entire department was dissolved and dispersed—students are left adrift. Some wait in limbo for their immigration status, uncertain if they can even finish their studies. Others are returning home, actively advising friends and family not to come to Canada.¹²⁴

And yet, as Beck notes, these are people of remarkable resilience whose strengths the system refuses to see.¹²⁵

For nearly two decades, Canada actively recruited international students with the explicit pledge of a pathway to citizenship. As late as 2021, then-IRCC minister Marco Mendicino made the offer unambiguous: “Our message to international students and graduates is simple: we don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here.”¹²⁶ The students who answered that call—arriving between 2021 and 2023, paying inflated tuition, taking on debt and mortgaging family assets on the expectation they could remain—are now precisely the students being scapegoated, framed as expendable and kicked out of the country.¹²⁷

What is happening in Canada today happened in Australia years before. There, the education-immigration nexus created identical problematic imbalances. This contributed to safety and security concerns for international students, who became victims of assaults and were exploited in the housing and employment sectors. This eventually resulted in diplomatic embarrassment for Australia with both the Chinese and Indian governments. Yet despite warnings over a decade ago, Canada did not learn from Australia’s mistakes.¹²⁸

In March 2024, the federal government announced its intention to reduce Canada’s temporary resident population to 5% of the total population and the fall 2024 Immigration Levels Plan subsequently cut permanent residency targets for the following three years.¹²⁹ This positioned international students, their spouses and post-graduation work permit holders—all of whom are temporary residents—as a problem in the eyes of the federal government.¹³⁰ With the federal government wanting them to leave to reach their 5% target, there are no longer many realistic pathways to permanent residency for most international students. This could mean that upwards of a million current and former international students who came to Canada expecting to remain will have to leave.

Faculty and staff

The post-secondary workforce has been under stress for decades. Chronic underfunding and the relentless push towards precarious employment contracts has eroded working conditions across the sector. 

The number of assistant professors in BC dropped by 26.6% between 2006 and 2019, a steeper decline than the nationally, 17.9%.¹³¹ Over the same period, positions below assistant professor in BC—such as lecturers, instructors and other teaching staff—grew from roughly 10% of full-time faculty appointments to about 30%.¹³² Nationally, 54% of academic appointments are now limited-term, mostly contracts of four to eight months.¹³³ Universities also rely heavily on the teaching and research work of graduate students and “disproportionately rely on international PhD students’ specialized research and teaching skills.”¹³⁴

The international student revenue collapse has led to outright job losses and consequently intensified workloads for those who remain. And the workers who absorbed years of the sector’s reliance on contingent labour were the same workers cut first, as Camosun College Faculty Association president Lynelle Yutani put it, “sessionals, or our precarious workers, have very few rights to future work. In fact, that’s the reason why it’s so easy to end their work by simply not offering those programs or courses.”¹³⁵ Before layoffs were announced, many of BC’s public post-secondary institutions had already effectively terminated many sessional instructors and contract workers through the quiet non-renewal of contracts. Another faculty association leader said that administrators “keep talking about, ‘we haven’t laid off anyone.’ But we’ve had all these people that had but we’ve had all these people that have been with us five, 10, in some cases 20 years, that their contracts ended, and they were just gone.”¹³⁶ At several institutions, workers on the verge of achieving continuing or permanent status saw their work terminated just before they could cross that threshold.¹³⁷

FPSE projects that by the end of the 2025/26 fiscal year, the sector will have lost “upwards of 10% of full-time regular faculty jobs.”

VCC’s Faculty Association President Frank Cosco estimates that the institution lost at least 100 staff this way on top of an announced 150 layoffs.¹³⁸ FPSE reported that across its member institutions, “the non-regular cohort of faculty has been virtually eliminated on some campuses.”¹³⁹

Regular faculty layoffs followed more formal processes—financial exigency at one institution, Section 54 processes at another. FPSE projects that by the end of the 2025/26 fiscal year, the sector will have lost “upwards of 10% of full-time regular faculty jobs.”¹⁴⁰ With so many positions eliminated, tenured and continuing faculty who have retained their positions have seen their workloads intensify because of larger classes, fewer teaching assistants, research assistants and sessional supports and added administrative duties. 

Beyond teaching staff, institutions are also cutting student advisors, financial aid officers, accessibility coordinators, IT and library workers, recruitment officers, counselors and the professional staff who keep day-to-day campus operations running. The international education workforce has been hit particularly hard. The recruitment, advising, immigration support and settlement functions that grew around two decades of ‘edugration’ were staffed by teams of international student advisors, program coordinators and credential officers. Subcontracted workers—such as in food service, maintenance and janitorial crews—are also impacted. As one labour organizer noted, “there is also all of the people who are running the Tim Hortons that the students are at 24 hours a day. There’s the people that have to keep these immense buildings clear of snow and clean. Those are a huge piece of the pie.”¹⁴¹

Compounding this widespread frustration is administrative bloat. Across the province, data show growth in administrative spending significantly outpacing faculty investments over the last decade, with exempt managerial salary increases routinely dwarfing those of frontline educators. In some glaring instances, institutions have hired new upper management while simultaneously declaring financial exigency and cutting teaching roles.

Faculty associations across the province have expressed deep frustration with their institutions’ lack of transparency and governance structures that exclude their expertise in crisis decision-making. At one college, FOI requests revealed that the basis for a major restructuring was “a single late-night email strand” that did not even include the financial officer. At another, data presented to the Senate for program closure decisions were described as “flimsy, often incorrect, and cursory.” Non-confidence votes against university and college presidents have occurred at multiple institutions.¹⁴²

And, for every one of these unrenewed contracts that result in staff and faculty layoffs there is a family facing financial strain in a contracting sector in an affordability crisis. These job losses mean more people need social supports, they can pay less in taxes and there’s less money in the local economy.

Local communities and the province’s future

Post-secondary institutions don’t exist in isolation from surrounding communities campuses sit on unceded Indigenous territories, requiring ongoing work to build reciprocal relationships with host Indigenous nations; campuses provide local residents with libraries and event spaces; they employ hundreds to thousands of local workers and students are employed in local businesses. When the institution contracts, so does the community. The crisis in BC’s post-secondary sector is fundamentally reshaping local economies, regional access to post-secondary education and the province’s capacity to staff its own future.

Northern Lights College (NLC) serves a region representing over a third of BC’s land area but with a small, dispersed population and it is one of “the last vestiges” of the founding commitment that every British Columbian, regardless of postal code, should have access to post-secondary education. Rob-Roy Douglas, NLC’s union bargaining chair, argued that international education has particular value in this context: “international education has actually a lot more to offer rural and remote communities in terms of keeping them open to the world than it really has to offer major metropolitan areas.”¹⁴³

As international enrolment at North Island College (NIC) drops, NISU ED Carissa Wilson describes what the loss looks like on the ground: “it is a big difference on campus to not have that whole cohort. Every time a semester ends, we’re losing more people.” The ripple extends into the surrounding economy, “it’s really impacting our local businesses. There are way fewer people to hire already in these communities and that’s just being hugely exacerbated.” ¹⁴⁴

“international education has actually a lot more to offer rural and remote communities in terms of keeping them open to the world than it really has to offer major metropolitan areas.”¹⁴³

Post-secondary institutions play a particularly important role as economic anchors in communities outside Metro Vancouver; “Thompson Rivers University, for example, contributes over $885 million annually to Kamloops’ economy and supports one in every 10 jobs in the region.”¹⁴⁵ In these rural and regional settings, “every single layoff of a faculty member has a really big impact on our community. We’re gonna be losing families as people have to go to other places.”¹⁴⁶ Because the entire sector is contracting, laid-off faculty often have nowhere else in the province to go.¹⁴⁷ The non-profit settlement agencies, language schools, credential evaluation services and newcomer support organizations that historically wrapped around BC’s international student and immigrant populations are also contracting under the simultaneous loss of international students and reduced federal funding.

These layoffs and program closures directly contradict the Province’s stated priorities. BC’s Labour Market Outlook projects more than 1.1 million job openings over the coming decade, 76% of which will require some level of post-secondary education or training.¹⁴⁸ The provincial government has announced nursing seat expansions while colleges shut down nursing pathways; has committed to accelerating housing construction while trades programs are suspended as too costly; and has set goals for early learning and social work while the programs that produce these workers are cut.¹⁴⁹ In other words, the Province is cutting the programs it has publicly identified as workforce priorities. There are also longer-term reputational and economic costs. Statistics Canada data show that former international students who became permanent residents substantially improved their occupational alignment within their field of study; Indian STEM graduates, for instance, were retained in Canada at a rate of 86.4% by their third year post-graduation.¹⁵⁰

Faculty and researchers across the province argue that the dominant policy framework of collapsing education into workforce training is both intellectually impoverishing and economically self-defeating. “That the ministry now responsible for the sector is named “Future Skills” tells you the frame the government has chosen,” one source commented, connecting a vision of post-secondary education as a public good to material outcomes: “we want graduates who are educated, not just in a narrow workforce delivery mechanism, but in terms of the social justice. The contemplative, critical thinking and citizen judgment that we need for good governance.”¹⁵¹

“We’re losing this place where the community can coalesce around things that hit at your mind and hit at your heart and challenge people. That will be gone.”¹⁵³

NLC’s Rob-Roy Douglas echoes, “post-secondary education is a means to build and maintain and educate a literate, liberal citizenry, right? Not just the workforce. And for far too long, the emphasis of education has been on training workers. And we’re not going to solve the problems and challenges of the 21st century simply by training workers.”¹⁵² Post-secondary institutions are physical places where people gather, learn and encounter differences across class, language and generations. When humanities, fine arts and liberal studies programs disappear, institutions also lose this convening function. NIC’s Jen Wrye described the loss of the fine arts programing, which hosted hundreds for artist talks or student showcases: “we’re losing this place where the community can coalesce around things that hit at your mind and hit at your heart and challenge people. That will be gone.”¹⁵³ Another source adds that rural institutions are “the meeting place. That’s where people get together. And so to say, ‘oh, you can just move that online’, you’re then separating the community from itself.”

The provincial public post-secondary reviews

The 2022/23 funding formula review

In March 2022, the BC government announced a sector-wide review of how it funds its 25 public post-secondary institutions—the first comprehensive examination of the funding formula in more than 25 years. 

The review, led by economist Don Wright, former deputy minister to the premier and former president of the BC Institute of Technology (BCIT), was widely welcomed. It received submissions from three constituencies of the PSE sector: 24 public institution administrations, 14 labour and sector bodies, nine student unions and the BC Federation of Students. 

Despite different vantage points, the three constituencies shared a unified assessment: BC’s public post-secondary system runs on a funding model that has fallen out of alignment with its mandate, has been chronically underfunded for decades and is approaching structural failure. The public share of institutional operating revenue fell by over 90% in the 1970s to roughly 44% by 2022 and provincial operating grants remained flat in real terms for at least a decade.¹⁵⁴

A second near-universal concern was unsustainable reliance on international student tuition. By 2022, BC had the highest international enrolment share in Canada at 24%. The sector warned that geopolitical or demand shifts could trigger immediate fiscal crises, a lesson many institutions learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Student unions framed the dependence most pointedly as the exploitation of equity-deserving learners as a revenue stream, with international tuition up 485% since 1991 at some institutions.¹⁵⁵

The 2% domestic tuition cap, implemented in 2005 without baseline adjustment, drew some institutional criticism for locking in arbitrary disparities.¹⁵⁶ Colleges and teaching universities that had maintained lower tuition through the 80s and 90s started lower have been compounding from a smaller base for nearly two decades.¹⁵⁷ The tuition cap protects affordability for domestic students but transfers the fiscal stress onto institutions with no compensating mechanism.¹⁵⁸

The submissions also pointed to the way that rural, northern and remote institutions face structurally higher delivery costs that the funding formula does not recognize. Rural colleges must maintain multiple campuses and facilities spread across massive, sparsely populated regions.¹⁵⁹ This high degree of dispersion prevents these institutions from achieving the “economies of scale” enjoyed by centralized, urban institutions.¹⁶⁰

“The provincial government loaded responsibilities for reconciliation, mental health, accessibility, equity, environmental sustainability, micro-credentials and work-integrated learning onto institutions while base funding stayed flat.”¹⁶¹

This geographic disparity was part of a broader mandate expansion across the sector over the years without matched funding. The provincial government loaded responsibilities for reconciliation, mental health, accessibility, equity, environmental sustainability, micro-credentials and work-integrated learning onto institutions while base funding stayed flat.¹⁶¹ Despite paying lip-service to the importance of the trades, ITA rates had not moved since 2001 and cover roughly 31% of actual delivery costs.¹⁶² Student services are overwhelmed.¹⁶³ Labour submissions described a recruitment and retention crisis driven by high housing costs, low salaries and casualization—nearly 70% of UVic Professional Employees Association members had looked for outside work in the past year.¹⁶⁴

In their submissions to government, sector members offered a multitude of potential solutions. Labour and student union groups urged the Province to restore public funding to cover 75% of operating budgets. Institution administrations asked the Province to establish multi-year predictable funding, funds for capital needs, FTE-model reform and collaboration incentives. Student unions emphasized the importance that post-secondary education be affordable and equitable with international fee caps, expanded BC Access Grants and dedicated funding for services to support students. Universally, the suggestion for performance-based funding was seen as counter-productive and the practice of one-time targeted grants as a poor substitute for stable base increases.

The shared ask was for a modernized formula that funds actual delivery costs, recognizes mandate diversity, rewards collaboration over competition and provides multi-year predictability. And all of this needs to be backed by a real-dollar increase in public investment, not a redistribution within an inadequate envelope, sector membership advised.

But the government abandoned the review before phase two was started, without public explanation. It never published the engagement findings, in what FPSE called a “bizarre decision to ghost our members”. ¹⁶⁵

The BC Federation of Students obtained the review documents through an FOI request (for $240).¹⁶⁶ The draft What We Heard Interim Report and Don Wright’s January 2023 briefing for the government validate the sector’s assessment. Wright’s internal verdict was that “there is no funding formula.” Without a material increase of at least $200 million per year for the sector, he suggested, the review is a zero-sum exercise.¹⁶⁷

The 2025/26 Sector Sustainability Review

In November 2025, the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills launched a new review, this time led by Don Avison, former deputy minister of advanced education.¹⁶⁸ The review, however, picked up precisely where Wright said meaningful reform stops being possible, with terms of reference that took new funding off the table from the outset. 

As the BCFS put it, ”the review excludes the single most important factor in the current crisis: funding.”¹⁶⁹ “Our members,” FPSE echoed, “express strong concern with the premise that no additional provincial operating funding is anticipated, emphasizing that this is not a neutral constraint but a policy choice with foreseeable system consequences.”¹⁷⁰ 

The review timeline was impossibly compressed. Where previous reviews of narrower scope had taken 14 to 15 months, this review aimed to wrap up in three.¹⁷¹ Multiple stakeholders expressed a widespread belief that it was a pro forma exercise to give cover to a predetermined outcome: using the fiscal crisis at the time to implement higher tuition fees, institutional mergers and deep cuts, while jeopardizing free and fair collective bargaining.¹⁷²

The scope of the review also raised concerns.

Questions about governance, legislative frameworks and institutional structures struck one labour source as “unrelated to the current crisis” and raised “profound concerns over the undermining of academic freedom, institutional academic democracy and educational quality.”¹⁷³ FPSE notes that “several of the questions seem to assume that senates and education councils are the problem thwarting academic administrators from responding more immediately to the government of the day.”¹⁷⁴

In response, the publicly shared submissions to Avison’s review effectively reiterated the same assessment that Wright received in 2022: BC’s public institutions are in a crisis of deliberate underfunding. Unfortunately, the worst consequences of this underfunding anticipated by the sector just a few years ago have come true.

Underfunding has bred destructive competition: mission creep, duplicated business degrees chasing international tuition and growing layers of administration.¹⁷⁵ Yet the suggestion of mergers in the Terms of Reference risks further eroding regional access, relationships with Indigenous Peoples and host nations and place-based delivery.¹⁷⁶

“BC’s public institutions are in a crisis of deliberate underfunding.”

The sector also raised alarms over signals that the Province intends to use the review to strictly prioritize workforce training over broader educational mandates. FPSE warns that “when workforce alignment becomes overly dominant, institutions are incentivized to prioritize short-term, measurable outputs in ways that can weaken their capacity to deliver broader educational, civic, and social outcomes.”¹⁷⁷ The BCFS adds that graduates “are more likely to vote, engage in their communities and feel connected to their work.”¹⁷⁸ Public post-secondary education, the sector insists, is a public good with civic and democratic functions, not a labour-market pipeline. 

Finally, some submissions expressed fears that the review is paving the way for amendments to the Tuition Limit Policy. Where institutions in 2022 pointed to disparities locked in at the cap’s 2005 baseline—students and faculty argue that those disparities are the predictable outcome of the funding arrangement, not a flaw in the cap. Weakening the cap to address institutional revenue would penalize students for a problem government created. BCFS set a clear test for the review’s success: “do students have stable programmes, stable supports, stable costs, and a clear path to graduation?”¹⁷⁹ The government is expected to release the sustainability review report in fall 2026.

The future of public post-secondary education in BC

Post-secondary as public infrastructure

Faculty, students and sector staff across BC describe post-secondary education as a public good with social, economic and civic purposes that extend well beyond producing workers.

Yet, for decades, higher education has been increasingly framed simply as a private investment—a way for individuals to secure higher wages. This narrow view has been used to justify shifting costs to students through tuition hikes and a market-driven approach. The aggressive recruitment of international students at higher tuition rates created, in effect, a private marketized stream operating within public institutions. This further normalized the marketization of higher education in the public imagination: education became a commodity that could be bought and sold, the only question being who pays what price. 

But education is not a standard consumer product. While graduates do benefit personally, an educated population drives innovation, supports public health and sustains a democratic society. These benefits spill over to employers, communities and governments that never set foot in a lecture hall.¹⁸⁰

“Education is not a standard consumer product.”

The case for treating post-secondary education as public infrastructure rests on the same logic that justifies public roads, water systems and the electrical grid:

1. They produce massive, uncapturable positive externalities—the whole economy depends on them.
2. Universal access is necessary for their social function—a road network only serves its purpose if everyone can use it.
3. Private provision systematically underinvests relative to social need and produces inequitable access.
4. Their degradation harms everyone, not just those who fail to “purchase” adequate access.¹⁸¹ 

Because these are collective benefits, a purely market-driven system will always underfund the types of education that society needs, such as foundational scientific research, the humanities and civic education. Public financing, therefore, is not merely a subsidy to individuals, it is an essential investment in shared infrastructure.¹⁸²

When we treat higher education as a commodity funded by student debt, we deepen existing inequalities. The post-secondary sector performs particularly poorly for low-income,racialized, Indigenous and first-generation students under market conditions. Tuition increases, reduced means-tested supports and the expansion of for-profit post-secondary providers disproportionately affect these groups.¹⁸³ The 2021 Census shows that educational gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada were widening from the bachelor’s degree level and above for all Indigenous groups.¹⁸⁴ “Marketized international education systems, such as in Australia and Canada, also spurred a proliferation of lower-cost, lower-quality academic programs capitalizing on the desires of this growing cohort.”¹⁸⁵

As neoliberal ideology reframes post-secondary education as individual investment, the college-access imperative becomes “largely situated in the need to meet workforce development needs” rather than addressing “historic inequities and marginalizations”.¹⁸⁶ This reframing converts a justice claim—that all people should be able to  access intellectual and civic life—into a purely instrumental claim about labour market participation, stripping universities and colleges of their potential as sites of equity-building and social repair.

Evidence from fully marketized systems, like England’s, shows that high-debt loads force lower-income students to make educational choices based strictly on expected earnings, while wealthier students have the freedom to pursue a broader range of fields.¹⁸⁷

Marketization also degrades the core functions of the university. When students are positioned as consumers and faculty as service providers, education becomes a transactional exchange rather than an intellectual and civic pursuit. Institutions are forced to compete on amenities and marketing rather than on educational quality, compromising their role as “one of the few public spheres left in which people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think critically and hold power and authority accountable”.¹⁸⁸ 

“When students are positioned as consumers and faculty as service providers… institutions are forced to compete on amenities and marketing rather than on educational quality.”

This corporate shift also threatens academic freedom—the very condition under which universities produce trustworthy knowledge. When universities depend heavily on private research contracts and industry partnerships to survive, research priorities skew toward what is commercially profitable, undermining independent, critical inquiry.¹⁸⁹

Once private investment is made to seem like the natural value the system has to offer the public, the “public-good” language is systematically hollowed out, a pattern documented across jurisdictions where policy has lost the capacity to name social and collective outcomes at all.¹⁹⁰

Canada has long had the highest share of post-secondary-educated adults among the OECD countries.¹⁹¹ But that ranking is “thanks to immigrants, young adults and a strong college sector” with “recent immigrants making up nearly half of the growth in the share of Canadians with a bachelor’s degree or higher,” meaning that it is not the accessibility of higher education driving this education rate.¹⁹² And with Statistics Canada projecting that Canada will reach “zero natural increase” in its population around 2029 after which the domestic population will decline, that means the traditional post-secondary-age cohort in BC will shrink with it.¹⁹³ These factors combined with the underfunding of BC’s post-secondary institutions could see our education rate start to decline. 

Within the existing marketized logic, BC can default to another round of international student recruitment as soon as policy and the political climate allows or institutions can reorient toward credential recognition and upskilling for the immigrants that Canada will continue to recruit, yet whose credentials are under-recognized and underutilized.¹⁹⁴

Or, the Province can rebuild public post-secondary education as an accessible right, including at the graduate level, so more British Columbians actually use the system.

Treating post-secondary education as public infrastructure runs against the grain of decades of BC provincial policy. To make it truly a public good requires a different organizing logic altogether based on:

1. Access decoupled from ability to pay: Removing financial barriers that reproduce class stratification, moving toward models that do not require assuming massive debt.
2. Labour protections for academic workers: Reversing the casualization of academic labour, which impoverishes staff, degrades teaching quality and undermines the conditions for serious intellectual work.
3. Public accountability and community governance: Reorganizing governance structures to empower those closest to the work, ensuring faculty, students, staff and local communities have genuine decision-making authority.
4. Research independence and mission plurality: Providing stable public core funding sufficient to sustain basic research, the humanities, the social sciences and civic education.
5. Equitable distribution across regions: Making meaningful investments in Indigenous post-secondary education, regional institutions, community colleges and programs serving first-generation and working-class students.

With these measures the Province can rebuild public post-secondary education as an accessible right, including at the graduate level, so more British Columbians actually use the system.

Decolonizing post-secondary education

Rebuilding post-secondary education as true public infrastructure is impossible without confronting its colonial foundations. The colonial logic that built BC’s post-secondary system continues to shape the present crisis. 

British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA)  mandates BC to bring provincial laws into alignment with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous Peoples. The public post-secondary education sector is a substantive domain to which DRIPA applies, both through the UNDRIP articles it incorporates and through the specific actions in the provincial Declaration Act Action Plan.

UNDRIP affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to see their histories, languages, cultures and knowledge reflected and respected in education, to improve their economic and social conditions, including through education, without discrimination to establish and control their own post-secondary institutions. These articles ground equity-based approaches as rights obligations rather than discretionary programs. BC’s 2022–2027 Declaration Act Action Plan translates these obligations into three commitments that apply to the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education, including:¹⁹⁵

4.5  Co-develop a policy framework for Indigenous post-secondary education and skills training that includes:  

• supporting post-secondary institutions to be more culturally relevant and responsive to the needs of First Nations, Métis and Inuit learners and communities;  
• expanding the Aboriginal Service Plan program to all 25 public post-secondary institutions;  
• ensuring that Indigenous learners have access to student housing that is safe, inclusive, and enables them to thrive personally, academically, and culturally; 
• developing mechanisms for First Nations, Métis and Inuit learners and communities to play an integral role in public post-secondary institutions’ decision-making; and 
• identifying legislative amendments needed to ensure all public post-secondary institution boards include at least one Indigenous person.

In 2025, the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) released a renewed Accord on Indigenous Education that sets eight responsibilities for institutions across the country, grounded in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and UNDRIP¹⁹⁶:

• Recognizing and affirming Indigenous rights and self-determination
• Decolonization and Indigenous resurgence in and through curricula
• Indigenous and anti-colonial pedagogies
• Indigenized approaches to assessment
• Indigenous language revitalization
• Indigenous education leadership
• Relational accountabilities
• Indigenous scholarly activity

The same extractive, market-driven mindset that has marginalized Indigenous knowledges also structures the sector’s treatment of international students. As Brunner and Trilokekar write, “Canada’s higher education has become dependent on a large-scale wealth transfer from the Global South to the Global North, premised on notions of Western supremacy—even as many stakeholders engage in parallel conversations regarding indigenization, decolonization and equity concerns.”¹⁹⁷ 

Decolonization is not merely an isolated departmental or institutional initiative, it requires a fundamental overhaul of how post-secondary education operates in the province. To rethink this system, scholars Kumari Beck and Michelle Pidgeon argue we can look to the precedent set by the ACDE. The relational, decolonizing process used to develop the ACDE’s earlier Accord on Indigenous Education (2009) directly influenced its later Accord on the Internationalization of Education (2014).

“The Accord presents five principles for ethical engagement in international activities”¹⁹⁸:

1. Economic and social justice and equity across contexts and sites of educational practice;
2. Reciprocity as the foundation for engaging in internationalization activities;
3. Global sustainability;
4. Intercultural awareness, ethical engagement, understanding, and respect; and
5. Equity of access to education, regardless of socio-economic status or financial circumstance.

The ACDE’s work demonstrates that Indigenization and internationalization share common goals. Both demand a shift away from Eurocentric, market-driven education toward social justice, ethical engagement and respect.¹⁹⁹ To guide that shift, Beck and Pidgeon look to the Indigenous wholistic framework grounded in the “4Rs” first articulated by scholars Verna Kirkness and Ray Barnhardt: Respect, Responsibility, Reciprocity and Relevance.²⁰⁰ The Province and its institutions should evaluate all future policy, governance and funding decisions through this framework:

• Respect for different ways of knowing and being: Post-secondary education must move beyond Western-centric models and “us-them” binaries. This means genuinely embedding Indigenous ways of knowing and respecting international students as intellectual contributors rather than just ‘revenue-generating units’.
• Responsibility to land and peoples: Institutions must move beyond performative territorial acknowledgments to accept their active, material responsibility to the land, its original peoples and the communities they serve.
• Reciprocal relationships: Institutional relationships—whether with local First Nations or international students—must shift from an extractive “give-and-take” to an equitable exchange. Institutions must stop asking what financial or economic value they can extract from students and instead focus on mutual support and shared knowledge.
• Relevant policy, programs and services: Government and institutional policies must stop framing education merely as a workforce pipeline and international students simply as “ideal immigrants” to feed the economy. The focus must return to providing wholistic, culturally relevant educational experiences.²⁰¹

Applying the 4Rs to the current crisis means recognizing that a public system cannot survive by exploiting marginalized groups.

Restoring public funding

The BC Tuition Limit Policy—that caps domestic tuition increases at 2% annually—is one of the most successful post-secondary public policies in the province‘s history. Every student and faculty organization consulted for this report called for its preservation. However, the policy is under threat. The 2026 sector review‘s terms of reference list “review of tuition limit policy” under revenue generation.²⁰² The  leaders of several institutions have privately and publicly expressed interest in deregulation.²⁰³ 

If the cap is weakened or removed, the consequences will fall hardest on students who can least afford it—lower-income families, Indigenous students and students in rural areas where there is no alternative institution. The cap should be maintained, loopholes closed and protections extended to international students whose fees remain entirely unregulated.

Many sector stakeholders have set a restoration of public funding to 75% of operating costs as a minimum starting place for sector recovery. In its submission to the 2022 funding review, the BCGEU recommended reducing student fees to an absolute minimum and focusing on “funding the system on a ‘cost recovery’ basis through progressive income and business taxes.”²⁰⁴ 

The longer-term horizon should see tuition-free post-secondary education realized. In 2022, the FPSE recommended the Province recognize that a post-secondary designation is now the minimum requirement for stable employment and argued that “the Province should work towards the bold plan of making all undergraduate and trades education free to students (following the historical pattern of how K-12 education was made free).”²⁰⁵ Others in the sector, including the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and provincial labour coalitions, have long argued that eliminating tuition is highly supported by the public and is financially viable through restored government funding.²⁰⁶

“The longer-term horizon should see tuition-free post-secondary education realized.”

International data clearly show that BC’s current reliance on high tuition is neither necessary nor normal. OECD data tracking the share of higher education expenditure coming from government sources place Canada (51%) far below the OECD average (67%).²⁰⁷

The OECD’s framework on tertiary education financing categorizes global systems into four broad models²⁰⁸:

• Low or no tuition fees combined with high levels of financial support are characteristic of systems in countries such as Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Türkiye, where annual tuition fees in public institutions are below USD 500 and more than half of students receive public support through grants and/or loans. These systems offer generous student benefits that reduce upfront costs and promote access, but graduates often contribute more through higher income tax rates later in life. This reflects a broader policy choice to finance tertiary education collectively through progressive taxation rather than through individual student payment (OECD, 2024[5]).
• High tuition fees combined with well-developed financial aid systems, as seen in Australia, England (United Kingdom), Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand and the United States. In these countries, average tuition fees for bachelor’s programmes in public institutions typically exceed USD 4,000. However, more than 50% of students receive robust financial aid, primarily in the form of student loans and, in some cases, need-based grants. Loans in Australia, England (United Kingdom), New Zealand and the United States are income contingent, meaning graduates only start repaying them once they reach a certain income threshold, whereas in Latvia and Lithuania loans have fixed-term repayments. Student debt levels are high in many of these countries, with average debt per borrower exceeding USD 20,000 in Australia, England (United Kingdom) and the United States (Table C5.5).
• Moderate tuition fees combined with targeted student support are characteristic of systems in Austria, the Flemish and French Communities of Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, and Switzerland. In these countries and economies, annual tuition fees for bachelor’s programmes in public institutions typically range from USD 150 to USD 2,000. Financial aid is generally means-tested and directed toward the most disadvantaged students, based on family income or other social criteria, rather than being universally available. As a result, less than 40% of students receive public financial support in all of these countries. These systems rely predominantly on public funding to ensure broad access to higher education, while limiting the accumulation of student debt.
• Relatively high tuition fees with limited public financial support, as observed in countries like Canada and Poland. In these systems, less than 40% of students receive public grants or scholarships, while tuition fees are substantial, averaging over USD 5,500 in both countries for a year in bachelor’s programmes in public institutions. As a result, students and their families bear a significant share of the cost, which can create financial barriers for low-income groups unless mitigated by institutional aid or private support mechanisms.

Canada currently sits in the fourth—and arguably worst—category among nations with the highest tuition fees for public institutions while simultaneously providing direct public financial support to fewer than 40% of students. 

Moving toward a tuition-free model—funded on a cost-recovery basis through fair taxation on the increased incomes resulting from post-secondary education—would bring us into line with many of our peer nations. In fact, under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which Canada ratified in 1976, the country is legally committed that higher education “shall be made equally accessible to all […] by the progressive introduction of free education”²⁰⁹ Continuing to raise tuition, even at 2% per year, violates this commitment.

Labour relations

As the BCFS writes, “faculty and support staff working conditions are student learning conditions.”²¹⁰ To treat post-secondary education as public infrastructure, the Province must treat the people who run it as essential public workers. Currently, decades of chronic underfunding have resulted in severe staff burnout, wage stagnation and an unsustainable reliance on precarious employment.

Both labour and student sector bodies call for BC’s public post-secondary institutions to transition away from their over-reliance on short-term and casual contracts by hiring permanent, full-time faculty and staff.²¹¹ Institutions must also stop contracting out campus services (such as food, custodial, facilities and maintenance) and return this work in-house. This would ensure that all campus workers receive fair wages, benefits and access to institutional resources like on-campus childcare and tuition waivers.²¹²

“System efficiencies” cannot be achieved by laying off instructors and forcing remaining staff to manage double or triple workloads.²¹³ New institutional goals—such as equity, diversity and reconciliation work or the adoption of new online learning tools—must be properly resourced rather than simply added to the side of ’ desks.²¹⁴ This is particularly critical for Indigenous faculty, whose cultural labour and mentorship are often heavily relied upon but rarely compensated in workload evaluations.²¹⁵

To combat wage stagnation and high turnover, labour advocates recommend implementing annual Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA) and establishing a common wage grid for public post-secondary education support staff across BC.²¹⁶ Beyond direct wages, the Province and institutions must provide systemic living supports that reflect current economic realities.

Expanding on-campus childcare spaces, providing affordable dedicated housing for faculty and staff and enhancing remote work flexibility for non-instructional staff are critical to resolving recruitment and retention barriers.²¹⁷

The funds to support these improvements can be found by addressing administrative bloat, targeting the growth and compensation of senior administration rather than cutting student-facing staff. Recommendations include implementing salary and spending caps for senior management, freezing executive pay increases and tying executive compensation to budget restraint.²¹⁸)

Finally, the province must protect free and fair collective bargaining. In their 2026 submission to the sector sustainability review, FPSE strongly advises against any legislative changes that would undermine the bargaining process, explicitly rejecting suggestions to consolidate all post-secondary unions into a single entity—a ”one size fits all” move that would ignore unique campus cultures and invite massive labour strife. Many also suggest reducing the intrusive micromanagement of government bodies like the Public Sector Employers’ Council (PSEC) and the Post-Secondary Employers’ Association (PSEA). Institutions need the autonomy to negotiate competitive wages and collaboratively navigate workforce planning directly with local union representatives.²¹⁹ 

Public accountability, collaboration and community governance

Across research, interviews and the sector labour and student submissions, an alternative structure is suggested for how the post-secondary education system should be governed and organized in BC. This reform calls for a system guided by high-level, values-based provincial principles, backed by robust public funding and supported by centralized operational agencies. This support should in turn be paired with flexible, community-driven governance at the local level.

This framework rests on four core principles:

1. The Province’s role is to set high-level principles that govern the sector—such as equitable regional access, Indigenous self-determination, academic freedom and fair labour standards—and to fund the system at the level required to deliver them. 
2. Robust public funding must be paired with collaborative, centralized coordination. Instead of merging institutions, the Province should incentivize operational collaboration. BC already has centralized coordinating agencies: the BC Council on Admissions and Transfer, BCcampus and SkilledTradesBC. Expanding these agencies to handle shared digital infrastructure, cybersecurity and bulk procurement can drive down administrative overhead and create system-wide efficiencies without stripping institutions of their autonomy.
3. Governance must be participatory and multi-stakeholder. Current board governance models—often dominated by political appointees from the business community with little understanding of academic culture—are a source of dysfunction. Meaningful reform requires a return to strong collegial governance. Senates and education councils need real authority over academic and budgetary matters. Decision-making bodies must reflect the people actually doing the work and receiving the education, ensuring faculty majorities and protected, influential roles for contract workers, support staff and students. Furthermore, Indigenous representation must be structurally embedded through designated seats and Elders Advisory Councils that actively shape decisions rather than merely ratifying them.
4. Between the provincial and institutional levels, regional coordination tables can foster local strength. By convening neighbouring institutions alongside faculty, students and community stakeholders, these coalitions can cooperatively manage the deduplication of programming, share expensive infrastructure and align their offerings with genuine regional needs.

Future policy directions: Technology, online learning and AI

Technology can extend access to post-secondary education. Online learning provides flexibility for students who cannot relocate or attend classes in person—caregivers, workers, people in remote communities—as well as for some students with accessibility needs. BCcampus and open educational resources have demonstrated how shared digital infrastructure can reduce costs without shifting expenses to students.

But technology is not a substitute for full accessibility and adequate funding and it is not a solution to the structural problems described in this report. While many of the benefits of remote learning were embraced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic also demonstrated that online learning has real limitations: many students reported challenges with engagement, motivation and mental health. Not all students had equal access to reliable internet, private study space and the technology required for full online learning. Trades, health sciences, environmental programs and field-based disciplines require supervised, hands-on instruction that cannot be replicated online.

The emergence of a two-tier system—in which smaller, rural or northern campuses are left with online-only instruction while urban institutions retain in-person learning—must be avoided. Technology should complement place-based delivery, not replace it.

With the federal cap constraining how many international students can physically come to Canada, some institutions are signalling interest in online and offshore delivery as a way to keep extracting international tuition without the political costs of in-country enrolment such as housing pressure, job competition and public backlash. Migration studies scholar Lisa Brunner’s analysis of Canadian distance-education policy finds that this kind of “internationalization at a distance” functions less as an educational strategy than as a governance tool, one that allows institutions and governments to “ensure the uninterrupted mobility of capital,” that is, the continued flow of international tuition revenue, even when the human beings paying that tuition can no longer cross the border.²²⁰ “Education, equity, sustainability or other rationales were almost entirely absent” from these discussions.²²¹ But an online credential bought from abroad is a thin substitute for the package students were originally sold and one the international student market is unlikely to accept at the same prices.

Decades of underfunding have left institutions stretched thin—and in these marketized conditions, artificial intelligence and expanded online learning are being sold as cost-efficient fixes. They are not. Research shows that over-reliance on AI erodes students’ critical thinking, hollowing out the very competence a degree is supposed to certify. Predictive algorithms and generative models encode the biases of the data they were trained on, reproducing barriers for Indigenous, racialized and low-income students. And handing core academic functions to private tech corporations cedes the governance of public education—along with the data of every student and instructor—to companies whose interests are not the public’s.

“Decades of underfunding have left institutions stretched thin—and in these marketized conditions, artificial intelligence and expanded online learning are being sold as cost-efficient fixes. They are not.”

Faculty report that AI tools often increase workload, require significant support and raise serious concerns about reliability, bias, academic integrity, intellectual property and privacy. Ultimately, technology must complement human capacity, not replace it to balance a broken budget; we must not sacrifice our future capacity for faux-efficiency.

Rebuilding BC’s post-secondary sector requires first, that we recognize that education is a fundamentally human, relational process and second, that we invest in the people—faculty, staff and students—who make it the vital public infrastructure our society relies upon.

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Funding for this report was provided by: the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association (VCCFA)