After a union representing Ontario college workers revealed that approximately 10,000 faculty and staff have been laid off over the past year, faculty and students are voicing their concerns over program closures, including overworked staff and psychological impacts.
On Wednesday, members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), which represents nearly 180,000 members, gathered outside of Centennial College’s Story Arts Centre to protest the layoffs.
The layoffs come after multiple colleges and universities across the province announced a series of program suspensions and closures, citing the decline in international student enrollments as one of the main reasons.
In 2024, the federal government first announced it would be reducing the number of international students admitted into the country by 300,000 over the next three years, in light of housing affordability and public service concerns.
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As universities and the OPSEU have been pointing out, Ontario has imposed a tuition freeze for public colleges and universities since 2019, after also reducing fees by 10 per cent, restricting schools from raising prices for students in the province since then.
According to the Council of Ontario Universities (COU), the province also poses its own challenges for education funding, offering the lowest per-student funding in Canada compared to other provinces.
In a statement released earlier this year, the council revealed that public universities in Ontario have seen over $550 million in cuts over the last few years, in light of the international student cuts, tuition freezes and low investment from the province.
STUDENTS FACING PSYCHOLOGICAL BURDEN
One of the colleges in the region that has seen significant changes since the beginning of the year is Toronto’s Centennial College.
Since January, the college has already suspended 54 of its programs, including several programs in its Business School and School of Communications, Media, Arts and Design departments. Centennial has also decided to relocate the programs offered at its Story Arts Centre in the Danforth area to its Progress Campus located in Scarborough, starting summer of 2026.
“This decision, while deeply upsetting and unsettling, is a critical step if we are to safeguard Centennial’s long-term sustainability,” a spokesperson for the college said in a statement.
“After analyzing a range of factors with careful evaluation, this decision has been approached with great care and respect for the deep connections that our students, faculty, alumni, and the broader creative community all have to this campus.”
According to the spokesperson, the difficult decisions were based on “stagnant government funding and a decline in international student enrolments.”
While suspensions don’t mean that programs are closed altogether, allowing currently enrolled students to finish their studies and graduate, they impede the enrollment of new students.
On Friday, Now Toronto spoke with Centennial College Students Association’s (CCSA) Vice President Logan Routhier, who said that despite having the chance to conclude their degrees, students at the college have experienced a psychological toll from the decision, including feeling lonely.
“It’s in the air, not necessarily on paper, but it’s in the air that general sentiment… It’s kind of more that moral, psychological aspect that really hits the students [who] are currently enrolled.”
For students who had been planning to transition into the affected programs, or even who were just getting enrolled, Routhier says the cuts represent a significant inconvenience, as they are not able to follow up with their plans.
But CCSA’s vice president says that the main impact is not only on students, but also on the future of the country, as many of the suspended courses offer the foundation for needed professionals.
“The nurses of tomorrow, the construction workers of tomorrow, the folks that will actually be responsible for a lot of responsibilities, are affected [by] this,” he said. “Post-secondary education is one of the foundational values of building a strong city, a strong province, and a strong country.”
FACULTY WORRIES ABOUT BEING OVERWORKED
Now Toronto also spoke with Marlon Valencia, a professor at York University, and Chair of its Department of Global Communication & Cultures.
York has also taken a toll with a series of suspensions, suspending admissions of new students into 18 of its programs.
In an interview on Thursday, the professor revealed that as a result of several layoffs and program reductions, many of the faculty members have had to take on multiple other departments and tasks, which has left them feeling overwhelmed.
Valencia, who used to oversee two programs in the school’s Global Communication & Cultures department, has now taken over as chair for seven of the remaining programs. He is also the coordinator of the university’s Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (D-TEIL), and the Open Learning Center Director for York’s Glendon College.
“I am chair of seven programs. Each of those programs used to have a chair… Now, we have a department that has seven programs, four certificates, and we have on paper two admin assistants, but the reality is that we only have one,” he said.
On top of leading the department and keeping up with administrative work, Valencia also has to carry on with his responsibilities as a professor.
“I do my best to provide a quality education and experience to all of my students. But it’s not easy, because we are humans, and you know, well-being is very important. Like, I can tell you that my well-being has been compromised in the last year, because sometimes what we do is, we put our students first,” he said.
“I tried not to have any of this impact my teaching. I do my best. But if you’re overworked, it’s going to show somehow.”
The professor says that many students who had already received their enrollment letters from the university had to be contacted and informed that they were not taking on new students, which has also been difficult for staff to handle.
“You cannot imagine. We heard one of the people helping us in admissions express her discomfort in telling a student, ‘You know that letter of admission that you accepted? We cannot offer you that anymore,’ he revealed. “It’s painful, it’s terrible. It created a lot of anxiety.”
Valencia also says that while the university assures students currently enrolled that they won’t have any issues graduating, some who may be missing their first-year credits could face some impacts, as these classes are no longer offered.
