Shannon Knelsen, a health care management instructor, is one of the professors affected by cuts at several colleges in the province due to low enrollment of international students.Andres Valenzuela/The Globe and Mail
Shannon Knelsen has taught health management in Ontario’s college system for nearly eight years. Until recently, she had all the work she could handle, even if that meant a teaching schedule cobbled together across four different schools.
Then came the sudden drop in foreign enrolment brought on by changes to the international student program. The college sector plunged into financial crisis, and one after another, Ontario’s 24 publicly funded colleges have announced layoffs, program suspensions and other cost-cutting measures.
Ms. Knelsen has seen her teaching offers dry up for the spring term. Three of her four former employers say they have no work for her. That’s a stark contrast to a year ago, when she was juggling as many as 10 different classes and turning down offers to teach.
She recently received a note from Sheridan College informing her that they had no need of her services come April, a result of what it called “government changes to the sector.” The e-mail was signed off with a “cheers,” which struck an odd note, she said.
“We’re just being discarded,” Ms. Knelsen said in an interview. “The people in administration are treating this like, ‘Oh well, no big deal, enrolment is down.’ ”
Ms. Knelsen is among hundreds of instructors who don’t have permanent employment but work as part-time or sessional teachers whose livelihoods will be affected by the nosedive in college finances.
She said that she and her colleagues are “quietly freaking out” and looking for other work. She has applied for more than 100 jobs and received only two interviews, she said.
Many instructors have had their professional futures thrown into doubt as a result of the rapid decline of college finances over the past year.
A year ago, the federal government announced a 35-per-cent cut in the number of international study permits it would issue, part of an effort to address what it described as strains in housing and health care. This year, the cut was deeper, with the number of permits reduced by a further 10 per cent and previously excluded groups, such as master’s and PhD students, now counted.
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Ottawa also made changes to eligibility for postgraduate work permits, making Canada less attractive to many potential applicants. College presidents say Canada’s brand has been badly damaged abroad and applications have dropped significantly.
The situation is particularly acute for Ontario colleges because, over a decade-long boom, they drew a substantial portion of their operating funding from international tuition. According to one figure cited in the sector, it made up roughly a third of all college revenue in 2022-23, about $2.3-billion.
JP Hornick, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said many part-time and sessional instructors in the sector are seeing their jobs evaporate. The union has been sounding the alarm about the precarity of the college teaching complement for years, said Hornick, who prefers no honorific.
Over the recent boom years, Hornick said, when most colleges ran surpluses, the number of students in the system increased rapidly, but full-time faculty numbers increased only slightly.
“The bulk of faculty who have been hired in the system over the past 10 years are precarious,” Hornick said. “These are the folks that are losing their jobs. I don’t know a business outside of this one that believes it can run with nearly 75 per cent of its workers as contract workers. There’s no stability in it.”
Ms. Knelsen worked in hospital operations before teaching courses in health-information management and other health care topics in the college system.
She has found teaching rewarding, although she’s troubled by the way colleges have, in the wake of the pandemic, encouraged online learning and large classes, which she believes sacrifice teaching quality to get more students through the system.
“You can’t tell me online education is as good as in person. No way,” she said.
In recent years, she has often found herself lecturing to a screen of 75 black boxes, wondering if the students in the online course are actually paying attention.
She said students from abroad, in particular, have in some cases been sold an unattainable dream. Many start their programs in health care management assuming they will graduate to administrative jobs in hospitals. They eventually realize jobs are scarce and are lucky to get the chance to start at the bottom, she said.
Some international students she has taught have mixed feelings about the decision to come to Canada, Ms. Knelson said.
“It breaks my heart. It feels like they’ve been bamboozled.”
In a submission to the Ontario government last month, Colleges Ontario called on the provincial government to boost operating grants. The sector is funded at the lowest level in the country on a per-student basis and has had to operate with a six-year freeze on domestic tuition fees imposed by the provincial government.
A report from a budget watchdog found that the college sector, in which about three-quarters of operating expenses tend to be labour costs, has already cut spending by $750-million in the first half of this fiscal year.