One of Quebec’s three English-language universities is reporting a nearly 30 per cent drop in enrolment from out-of-province students following a controversial tuition fee hike announced last year by the provincial government.
Concordia University’s president warned Wednesday that the drop in new enrollments will have a major impact on the institution and is “clearly” linked to the government’s decision to increase tuition fees for out-of-province students by 30 per cent.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Carr said in an interview. “Obviously, for the university, it’s very problematic in terms of the impact on our funding.”
Concordia says out-of-province enrolment is down 28 per cent this year, while new international student enrolment is down 11 per cent. That decline “will cost us about $15 million in revenue that we would have otherwise hoped to achieve,” Carr calculated.
The blow will be felt for several years, Carr added, since students typically spend four years completing an undergraduate degree.
Last October, the Coalition Avenir Québec government announced plans to nearly double tuition fees for out-of-province students, from $9,000 to $17,000, in an effort to protect the French language in Quebec. The province assumed that by raising tuition fees, fewer students would enroll and therefore there would be fewer anglophones in downtown Montreal.
The increase was later reduced to $12,000. The government also decided that tuition fees for international students would be set at a minimum of $20,000.
Deficit
Concordia has seen a decline in enrolment since the pandemic, but Carr said the significant drop in out-of-province students this year is “clearly tied solely to the Quebec government increasing tuition fees for students from the rest of Canada.” He added that prospective students are unsure how much they will have to pay given the government’s changing plans. Last fall, the university reported a 27 per cent drop in applications from Canadian students outside Quebec.
Carr said overall enrolment at the university is down four per cent this year. Out-of-province students typically make up nine to 10 per cent of the student population, while 21 to 24 per cent are international students, he said.
Last spring, Concordia reported a $30.9 million deficit for its 2023-24 fiscal year and announced it would cut nearly $36 million in costs in 2024-25. The university is currently in a hiring freeze.
“But clearly the additional burden of trying to make up for a $15 million loss is significant and it’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” Carr said.
He added that students could see fewer sections offered for some courses and strict thresholds for the number of students who must be enrolled in a course for it to be offered.
Mr. Carr said the university is looking for ways to increase its enrollment in the coming years, including recruiting international students from French-speaking countries who are eligible to pay lower tuition fees than other international students in Quebec.
Concordia and McGill, Quebec’s two largest English-language universities, have both been fighting tuition hikes since they were announced last year. Bishop’s University, in the Eastern Townships region, was exempted from the increase.
The two Montreal universities are suing the Quebec government over the new tuition policy, which they say constitutes discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Concordia court hearing will take place in December, Carr said.
A McGill spokesperson said the institution would not know its final enrolment figures until October, but the university said last December that it was seeing a 20 per cent drop in applications from outside the province.
“These are decisions that we made. They are difficult decisions, but they were necessary,” Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry told reporters in Quebec City on Wednesday.
With the matter before the courts, she added, “I will avoid any further comment.”