All Posts Tagged With: "Canadian university enrolment"

Ask any accountant or business analyst: the juicy material in annual reports and corporate filings is usually not what you see headlined on the first page of the document. It’s generally buried. Or hiding in plain sight. So it is with the recently released annual actuarial report on the Canada Student Loans Program. The report [...]

Ask any accountant or business analyst: the juicy material in annual reports and corporate filings is usually not what you see headlined on the first page of the document. It’s generally buried. Or hiding in plain sight. So it is with the recently released annual actuarial report on the Canada Student Loans Program. The report is built on the rather newsworthy but largely overlooked assumption that Canadian university and college enrolment will start shrinking as of next year, and go right on shrinking steadily, all the way to 2026. By the time the great contraction is done, Canadian campuses will have 18% fewer full-time students. The audit was performed by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, or OSFI, a federal oversight agency.

The Star was the only major media source to pick up and run a story on the CSLP report. But The Star focussed, not surprisingly, on CSLP’s first order of business, namely student loans. The actuaries expect that tuition will rise 3% faster than the rate of inflation, such that average full-time tuition in 2031 will be $19,000, up more than 200% from this year. And the CSLP program will, as a result, become larger and more expensive, with more students requiring loans, and with average loan amount growing larger. A little over one-third of Canadian student rely on CSL loans now; by 2031, the report estimates that slightly more than one-half of students will be taking out a CSL loan to help pay for higher education.

But the bigger story, with a rather significant impact on the post-secondary sector and the country, went largely ignored. The auditors expect full-time, Canadian post-secondary enrolment—which has been climbing for a couple of generations—to peak next year at 985,000. Student numbers, the auditors assume, will then slowly but steadily fall until 2026, when Canada will have 805,000 post-secondary students. That’s a drop of 180,000 students or 18.3%. How big is that? This big: It’s equivalent to shutting down every public university in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

(Not something I’d recommend; just trying to give a sense of the magnitude of decline in student numbers that OSFI is talking about. Note that these post-secondary enrolment numbers include both colleges and universities; presumably both colleges and universities will see enrolment drop. So don’t start selling off the U Calgary campus to real estate developers just yet).

OSFI’s actuaries are just the latest debating squad to join the “Canadian universities: growing or shrinking?” debate. We’ve seen the Council of Ontario Universities, the lobby group for Ontario’s universities, predict massive enrolment growth in the province over the coming decade. The four universities in the Greater Toronto Area last year similarly said that they were bursting at the seams, and the future would bring so many new students that the city would need another university. At the same time, however, the Maritimes Higher Education Commission said that universities in Atlantic Canada could see enrolment shrink by 14 per cent in the near future, because the number of young people in Atlantic Canada is falling. Last year, the Millennium Scholarship Foundation and Statistics Canada similarly noted that the pool of university-age (and college-age) Canadians is about to shrink sharply. Absent a substantial increase in participation rates—the percentage of young people in higher education—that should spell many thousands of fewer students at Canada’s colleges and universities. The fact that OSFI’s actuaries have joined this debate unwittingly, and from a position of disinterest—they’re just financial institution supervisors, trying to understand whether the CSL program will remain solvent in years to come—is a powerful argument in favour of taking their conclusions seriously. They aren’t biased one way or the other.