Why Is Higher Ed in a Mass Downsizing Crisis?

Welcome to the latest edition of For All Our Futures. This being the second instalment under our new label, the newsletter is still a little uncertain as to regular form. Before I dig into this edition’s main topic, I want to start with some interesting reading I’ve lately come across that I thought would be interesting to readers (but don’t click away yet!). 

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic has written a provocative piece about the overpromising utopian hype of the AI field. You can access it through Warzel’s post on his BlueSky feed, where he’s supplied a gift link. Warzel is one of many voices arguing that artificial intelligence systems are falling far short of the industry’s promises of their revolutionary potential. More likely, he says, we’ll be dealing with an industry that invested tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure for underperforming services, misapplied applications, and general mediocrity. 

I’ve also included a screenshot from a brief article in The Verge I came across, where Emma Roth describes a few features being tested in Microsoft Excel. It allows the CoPilot AI to classify many different items at once across large spreadsheets, and fill many targeted cells with interpretations and fresh data very quickly. However, Microsoft still can’t guarantee that CoPilot will do any of that correctly, which means you’ll likely have to check all its work manually and you will save no time. 

In alliterative points of interest, Wesley Wark at The Walrus has an interesting longread on why the Canadian government may soon need to invest in developing a foreign intelligence service that focusses on spycraft abroad. While my own political ideals are a world united in liberal democratic pluralism building the future that Star Trek promised us, I broadly support the idea. Canada can no longer rely on its major ally, the United States, for foreign intelligence, since the dominant faction of its political culture now considers liberal countries like Canada to be enemies.

With hundreds of universities and colleges across North America facing some form of crisis, whether budget cuts and program closures or ideological pressure from the US President’s office, higher education across the continent faces challenges today unlike anything in my lifetime. For my own perspective, I’ve worked in higher education in some form throughout most of my professional life. It’s where I’ve been most successful and felt most at home. While I’m looking forward to the new challenges and the more flexible company cultures that exist in the private sector of businesses of 50-500 employees, it’s a major transition in my own life. 

In the context of my own career and the decision point I (and many other professional educators like me) now face is whether to continue as if we have a place in the higher education system. I already chose not to, which was a difficult decision for me personally. Speaking at least in regard to the Canadian system, those cuts run so deep in so many institutions and so many higher ed contexts, that I just don’t consider it realistic to pursue a career in the field anymore. 

Back in the early 2010s, I completed a doctorate in philosophy, which also included a lot of interdisciplinary research in political and sociological studies, and some significant training in teaching and course design. My original goal of landing positions in university philosophy and humanities departments never came together, and I struggled to figure out a path forward over the next few years. 

The private college sector in my province of Ontario opened up new opportunities, though things were precarious under the surface. Private colleges were on hiring binges, massively expanding their enrolment as part of partnerships with public, government-funded colleges. I found positions of increasing quality over the last decade, until my last job as a full-time professor earning a reasonable middle-class salary. 

Here was the situation that brought about this growth period. Canada’s public colleges and universities, especially in Ontario, had been deal with shrinking government financial support. After Conservative Doug Ford become Ontario Premier, he ordered an immediate, universal higher education funding cut so huge that eastern Ontario’s major university, Laurentian, went straight into bankruptcy. All the other colleges and universities, especially outside Ontario’s big cities, faced similar pressure.

Rural and small-town colleges all came to the same solution to make up for the lost government funding: huge increases in international student enrolment. The demand was there, mainly because the conventional immigration pathway to Canada is quite awkward to experience: you gain enough points in education and career experience to be granted permission, and then you wait for your name to appear in a lottery, and you’re suddenly uprooting your life to immigrate. But a pathway through a student visa was much more reliable: get accepted into a Canadian university or college to upgrade your skills, two years on a student visa can convert to three years on a work visa, which can convert to permanent residency and the path to citizenship. Only about a quarter of those who tried succeeded in the process, but the pathway was predictable.

But it was hard to attract international students to study at campuses in small towns in Ontario, where there were small or barely-existent immigrant communities. The small town campuses had no room to accommodate as many students as those colleges wanted to enrol to put their budgets in the black again. The private college partners provided capacity: they could fill their classrooms with an easy source of students, which the public colleges (along with a network of reasonable to sketchy immigration agencies) recruited, and when they reached capacity, would simply build more or rent office space which they rapidly (sometimes too rapidly) converted into classrooms. 

Private colleges all across Toronto and the surrounding cities became the urban satellite campuses of rural public colleges. They mostly taught business programs in management, administration, finances. I spent years teaching and developing programs and course content in these fields, bridging my analytic and research skills from my humanities to educating business workers and entrepreneurs.

But like any field that sees such rapid growth and inflows of cash, greed took over. Nearly a million international students had come to Canada, many with little to no support to help establish themselves. They were living in overstuffed suburban houses, working multiple jobs, commuting ridiculously long and complicated routes. All too often, teachers and college program administrators treated them like coddled kids living with their parents instead of the hustling immigrants they were, like my own grandparents. They’d be punished and penalized for having to compromise their classes for jobs or childcare. 

I was fortunate over the last four years to have worked for a company that was putting effort into building a respectable international program that rivalled the standards of their public college partner. But too many private colleges created programs that slammed as many students through as quickly as possible, to maximize their tuition income each year. Two-year programs would be condensed to eight months, semester-long courses delivered in a month by teachers with no time to evaluate projects properly and no payment for the time they spent on evaluation and administration. I had one colleague who taught 13 courses each semester across four colleges to reach a decent salary. 

The misconduct, struggles, and general chaos that surrounded international college education grew so intense in the years after the pandemic that the federal government shut down the entire enterprise. When the Trudeau government announced the policy, mainstream media focussed on the international student cap: no more than about 250,000 international students would be permitted visas each year for all of Canada. 

But the blow that killed programs like mine was a new restriction on student visas. The whole reason these private partner expansion campuses could exist for public colleges was that most of the students were seeking to immigrate through a more predictable path than Canada’s lottery system. As of September 2024, no student visa to attend a private college could be extended to a valid work visa. That included private colleges delivering a public college’s programs. A year ago, international enrolment at private college partners fell to zero. Any incentive to join the program was gone. 

In the cuts that followed, more than 5000 faculty and administrators in private colleges were downsized. As international students’ tuition dried up for public colleges, their own cuts followed, with their unions estimating that a further 10,000 educators and managers would lose their jobs. These numbers are just in Ontario. Even as Canada’s most prestigious universities make generous offers to attract American scholars fleeing the repression of the Trump government, Canadian professionals in education, training, and program design are left in the cold to fend for ourselves. That’s one reason this newsletter exists: to be a gathering place for those exiles to figure out a path forward in this challenging time.

I had originally intended this newsletter to consider what my old research discipline of philosophy, with its unique and curious special abilities, could do to resolve this unprecedented situation where arts, humanities, pure sciences, and college programs are starved and dried up out of existence. But I’ve already run this much longer than I wanted to write (this may happen a lot), and than you probably wanted to read. So that topic will come in my follow-up post a little later.