The financial viability of the University of Hearst and the University of French Ontario (UOF) is “on hold,” warn experts, who recommend that the two institutions join forces with other French-speaking or bilingual establishments in the region. province.
“Ontario has long struggled to offer a wide range of programs aimed at the French-speaking and Francophile student community,” the experts said in a report released last week.
While the University of Ottawa is a “major player in the offering of bilingual and French programs” in the province, the “financial viability” of the University of Hearst and the Université de l’Ontario français remains “on hold,” indicates the group of experts, formed in response to the recent financial difficulties of Laurentian University.
The establishment in the federal capital has “more than 14,700 French language learners”. Some 261 people are registered at the University of Hearst, and only “29” at the UOF, we can read in the report. An incorrect figure, regardless of the date, specifies at Duty the UOF, while “226 students” are currently enrolled in the establishment.
Without wishing to comment on these differences, the UOF also indicates that international students represent 50% of the student body, while the report indicates that they are “overwhelmingly foreign”.
The University of Northern Ontario, which severed its ties with Laurentian University in 2021, also deplores an “insufficiency of provincial funds” to support it in its independence. Two observations that lead experts to “doubt[r] strong that the UOF and the University of Hearst can continue to operate effectively as independent and financially viable establishments.
The two establishments, whose size is “too modest for them to be able to reach the scale necessary for their sustainability”, have three options to “resolve the problem”, which rely on “collaboration” between the institutions, experts say. .
The first consists of federating the two universities with the University of Ottawa, which “would generate significant efficiency gains and allow more precise planning” according to the “needs of the labor market”.
The second plans to associate the UOF and the University of Hearst “with two long-established French teaching colleges: Collège Boréal and Collège La Cité”.
Finally, a third option would involve setting up an “integrated network or consortium […] between all French-speaking and bilingual post-secondary educational establishments”, overseen by the University of Ottawa.
The only French-speaking member of the expert group, Maxim Jean-Louis, did not support the recommendation to examine these three options.
During an interview with ONFR media on Friday, the rector of the University of Hearst, Luc Bussières, was also less than enthusiastic. The proposals “do not correspond at all to our reading of reality, nor to that of the discourse of “by and for” which is completely removed from the reading that the committee has made,” he declared.
For their part, the UOF and the University of Ottawa affirm by email that they want to take the time to analyze the report before making comments.
Rising tuition fees
More generally, the group of experts estimates that the 10% reduction in tuition fees in 2019 and the freeze since then has “put post-secondary education establishments in difficulty”. It therefore recommends a one-off upward adjustment of tuition fees of 5% in September 2024, to “partially compensate for the inflation suffered in recent years”, with an additional increase of 2% in the following years always according to the index of consumer prices.
Experts also believe that colleges across the province are at “risk” by being heavily dependent on foreign students, while their tuition fees represented more than 30% of total revenue in 2020-2021, and 20 % in universities. “Many establishments would no longer be able to survive with an exclusively Canadian workforce,” experts warn.
The source of financing is also not necessarily “viable”, taking into account “the threats inherent in various international factors such as pandemics [et] geopolitical events.
This report is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.