Canadians concerned about Queen’s University’s proposed cost-cutting measures should be thinking of West Virginia University.
That school was embroiled in controversy last year after it announced it would cut 32 degree programs primarily in the arts and humanities in response to a budget deficit about the size of that facing Queen’s.
Queen’s and WVU are alike in many ways. Both schools intake about the same number of undergraduate students each year. Both have about a US$1 billion endowment. And both Queen’s and WVU are trying earnestly to balance their budgets by cutting costs without veering too far from their roots in the arts and humanities.
What the situation at WVU reveals is that cost cutting threatens the soul of the institution. If Queen’s has a soul — and as an alum, I feel something special about the 183-year-old university — it’s perhaps best described by the school’s motto: Sapientia et Doctrina Stabilitas. In English: wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.
Of course, a dictum like that would be impossible to live up to without the arts and humanities.
Yet, like WVU, Queen’s has announced a set of cost-cutting measures that might hit the humanities the hardest. For example, the National Post reported that Queen’s Department of Classics and Archaeology will cut upper-year classes in Latin and Greek due to low student enrollment. The piece asks, “What’s a Classics department without Latin and Greek?”
Fortunately, if the province takes modest measures to shore up the university’s financial health, its soul will remain intact. And so will that of the other universities in the province with mounting budget deficits.
Modest, because Queen’s financial troubles are not existential, despite what the university’s provost, Dr. Matthew Evans, said about being concerned for the institution’s survival. As of 2022, the university’s endowment was about $1.4 billion. Meaning, with no additional donations, the school could cover its current $48-million deficit for the next 29 years.
Still, there’s a need to act fast. Financial strain has a kind of compounding effect. Consider, for example, the mega donation that Canadian financier and Queen’s alum Stephen J.R. Smith gave to the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science this year. Would that kind of money — $100 million, the largest ever gift to a Canadian faculty of engineering — be flowing in, in the wake of this news about the school’s financial troubles?
The first thing the province should do is rejig the tuition freeze the Ford government imposed on Ontario universities in 2019. The Globe and Mail reported in 2023 that Queen’s estimates the tuition freeze cost them $179.4 million since 2019.
In the five years that followed the freeze, the world changed markedly. We saw, in Canada, inflation peak at more than eight per cent in 2022. Canadian universities saw their expenses rise, while tuition remained flat — with the exception of international students, whose fees are not capped by the province. It’s time to fine tune this policy to better reflect the world in which we live.
The Ford government could, for example, lift the tuition freeze on the condition universities provide greater support for low-income students. In other words, students who can afford to pay more will, and those who can’t won’t. Anecdotally, I suspect there is a not insignificant portion of the student population at Queen’s for whom tuition is trifling anyway. Some, for example, have attended private schools where annual fees are much higher than university fees.
An additional step the province can take is to ensure the cap on international student visas that the federal government announced this month is allocated fairly across Ontario’s public and private institutions. That means targeting “diploma-mill” colleges instead of imposing a blanket reduction in the number of international students each school can accept.
International students made up only 11 per cent of the total student population of Queen’s in 2022-23. That’s down from 12 per cent in 2020-21. Queen’s has since hired a consultant to help boost those numbers, the Globe and Mail reported.
By contrast, there are some private colleges in Ontario made up almost entirely of international students, and they have “no show” rates as high as 90 per cent. If the province can weed out those “diploma-mill” colleges, they might create more room within the cap for public institutions to recruit internationally.
Immigration minister Marc Miller called on the provinces to determine how best to allocate student visas among their colleges and universities. So while the total number of international students in Ontario will fall, the province could still allow some schools to increase international student enrollment by redistributing allocation of the student visas.
Combined, a modest increase in tuition and international student enrolment could alleviate some of the financial pressures facing Queen’s and other Ontario universities. Beyond that, it will be up to Evans and his administration to put the institution — including its world class arts and humanities departments — on a path to financial health.
That, history tells us, is not an impossible task.
Some 100 years ago, in the wake of World War I, Queen’s was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Administrators rolled up their sleeves and dug their way out. In one year, they raised $1 million and introduced the school’s now legendary commerce program.
That kind of Ingenuity and leadership, as opposed to rampant cost cutting, can once again save Queen’s.
