Post-Secondary Is in Crisis. A New Report Proposes a Fix

Four years after the province announced a review of the public post-secondary funding formula, the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association got tired of waiting.

Last fall they commissioned BC Policy Solutions to write their own report, with a focus they did not trust the province’s long-awaited review would take: reinvesting into public colleges and universities. The review comes as post-secondary schools across Canada are struggling financially after dramatic federal government cuts to the number of international students they can accept.

With 19 out of 25 B.C. institutions reporting a collective $300-million annual budget shortfall, the VCC Faculty Association report argues the B.C. government should treat public post-secondary education as public infrastructure by funding at least 75 per cent of their annual operating costs.

At the same time, B.C. should maintain the two per cent cap on increases to domestic tuition, while introducing a similar cap for international student tuition increases. The report also calls on the province to work with Indigenous leaders and communities towards designing a decolonized post-secondary education system.

“There’s been no vision or master plan for post-secondary in B.C.,” said Frank Cosco, president of the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association.

Nor has there been significant investment in the schools, Cosco added, especially at the college level, including Vancouver Community College, since the Ujjal Dosanjh-led NDP government in 2000 to 2001.

“Seventy-five per cent is arbitrary. Please, give us something,” he said. “There should be a royal commission, like the McDonald [report] in the late ’60s, early ’70s that set up the system in B.C.”

Since the federal government announced a reduction and cap on international student visas in early 2024, the province’s public institutions have cut 180 programs and laid off 1,300 faculty and “countless support staff,” the report says. Forty-five student services have also ceased operations.

While research universities like the University of British Columbia — with its $6.9-billion endowment — have significant savings to rely on, it’s the teaching universities and community colleges that have been hardest hit.

Langara College has had the most layoffs, with a loss of over 200 faculty members, and the suspension or cancellation of three programs.

Other colleges and teaching universities have lost fewer staff members but cut or suspended more programs: 35 programs at Capilano University, 32 at Vancouver Island University and 26 at North Island College.

Véronique Sioufi, author of the report and BC Policy Solutions’ racial equity researcher and policy analyst, estimates it would cost the province about half a billion dollars annually to stabilize B.C.’s public post-secondary institutions. But she argues it would be money wisely spent.

“It would be a boost to the economy at many local levels, particularly for rural communities” with public post-secondary institutions, Sioufi said, adding that increasing progressive taxation levels would cover the costs.

“I spoke to almost 28 people, not counting all of the literature that I looked at. And there’s not a lot of conflict here. I would say there’s quite a bit of consensus.”

How did we get here?

When public B.C. student and faculty associations talk about funding issues in B.C., they will tell you provincial funding was 90 per cent of institutions’ operating budgets in the 1970s. Today government funding is 40 per cent of public institutions’ operating budgets.

But the VCC Faculty Association report, called “ Rebuilding Post-Secondary Education as Public Infrastructure in B.C. ,” goes back much further, to the first University Endowment Act in 1907 that established funding for UBC by selling two million acres of unceded land.

Then, post-Second World War, the province created 10 vocational schools and funded veterans to enrol. The federal government was directly investing in the country’s universities, too, until introducing provincial per capita grants in the 1950s.

The federal Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act of the 1960s pledged up to 75 per cent reimbursement for provinces’ investment in new buildings and equipment for post-secondary education, for six years.

In the 1980s, provincial cuts started with the Social Credit government’s 10 per cent budget cut for universities. Simon Fraser University would become the first school to charge international students higher tuition rates than their domestic counterparts.

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney reduced and capped post-secondary funding transfers in the late 1980s.

Then, former prime minister Jean Chrétien merged education, health and social assistance provincial transfers into one fund in 1994. This gave the provinces more autonomy on how they spent their money but forced public sectors to compete for funding.

In the mid-1990s, then-premier Mike Harcourt’s BC NDP government granted…