Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / Did Ontario Turn a Blind Eye to Career College Fraud? | Alex Usher

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Did Ontario Turn a Blind Eye to Career College Fraud? | Alex Usher · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_05: The government, when it cut OSAP in February, they said it was because the system was becoming unsustainable.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's now clear that the reason it was becoming unsustainable was because of all this malfeasance in a handful of private colleges.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_05: They knew that.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_05: They knew that at the time, and they had a chance to do that to make the system more sustainable.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_05: Instead, they cut grants to students.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_05: It took everything from under me.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We are not only fighting the government, now we're fighting Trillium 2.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're supposed to graduate in February.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't look like it's gonna happen.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: If you talk to young Canadians, you hear a familiar refrain.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: I got the degree, I took on the debt, I did everything right.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: So why am I still struggling to land a decent paying job?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Governments spend billions of dollars funding post-secondary education.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: And in Ontario, hundreds of millions of dollars in OSAP funding have been frozen, and the Ontario Provincial Police have been called in to investigate fraud.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: The decision that will impact thousands of students here in Ottawa and across Ontario.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Possible criminal activity concerning OSAP payments, irregularities with OSAP and private career colleges.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: As a result, the government has paused all OSAP payments associated with private post-secondary institutions while the audit proceeds.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, tuition keeps rising, and many in Gen Z are questioning whether post-secondary education offers the same value it did for previous generations.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: So how do we get here and where's all that money going?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffitt and Kara Stern.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: To help us unpack it, we're joined by Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates and author of the annual State of Postsecondary Education in Canada report.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for joining us and coming back to the show.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, Kara.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: I've been hearing about how like a bunch of students have had their OSAP funding cut because of a scandal at seven career colleges.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess my first question, let's just start with like, what are career colleges?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_05: So career colleges are uh a subset of private institutions.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_05: We do have some private universities in this province, places like Yorkville University, but private career colleges are tend to be offering programs of a year or so in length, sometimes a little bit longer.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_05: They tend to be very focused on getting people into jobs quickly.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_05: So you know, the names that you would know maybe from just watching ads on TV.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: At Twilas College of Information Technologies, join other successful graduates of Tredit Institute.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_05: If it's a career college, it means it doesn't give out a degree.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_05: They tend to be very focused on short-term credentials that will get people back into the labor market.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_04: If you take a four-year program, what you learn in the first year could be outdated by year three.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: Learn hands-on fast at Academy of Learning.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: So what's the scandal about?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_05: Starting about three or four years ago, there were a number of private career colleges.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_05: The number differs because in different reports, because some of them are chains, right?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_05: So the Academy of Learning is a chain.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_05: It's got spots in Brantford, it's got spots in different parts of the province.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: Started enrolling a lot more students.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_05: And I would say it's not entirely clear exactly how this happened.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_05: It seemed to be a scam that uh involved immigration consultants.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_05: The schemes were about getting new Canadians involved.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_05: And often it seems they were told they could get thousands of dollars just by, you know, click on a button and we'll get you thousands of dollars, which is in itself is illegal.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: You can't have third parties applying for student aid for you.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_05: In student aid, what happens is you they figure out how much you need, and the institution takes its cut before any money goes to the student.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_05: So, in a lot of cases, what was going on was the students got no money.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_05: It was the institutions that got the money.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_05: The students would get some kind of credential, you know, what the teaching was, this is going to vary a little bit from place to place.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_05: But in some of the investigations that have occurred to date, you know, they were looking at students who were finishing their tests in five minutes or something like that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_05: So they weren't real courses they were being involved in.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_05: And the amounts of money involved are staggering.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_05: The stories that we've seen to date talk about numbers in the region of$380 million that went out to these institutions.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_05: That's probably correct up to 2024-25.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_05: But what we don't have any data about is how much was spent in 2025-26.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_05: And if you go back to a document that the government released in February of this year, there's this extra billion dollars in spending that no one's been able to explain.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_05: What it looks like is actually that scam kept going into 25-26.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: Could be up to an extra billion dollars that went out this way.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_05: It's a lot of money.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Are the students involved in the scam, or is this just something that the colleges are doing?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: In some cases, the students didn't know they were enrolled, right?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_05: Like so if the federal government didn't enroll, because the federal government shares some of these costs with the government of Ontario, and they were finding that in fact, this is outright fraud.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_05: This is immigration people saying, click this button, you'll get some money.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: And I think, I mean, it's not clear what this how the scam worked exactly, at least to me.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_05: But some people clearly didn't, they were not in on the fraud.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_05: All the money went to the institutions.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: We know that the province knew as early as the end of 2024 that there were some bad actors in the private college sector.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: And you wrote a blog post where you kind of inferred that the scandal was being used to justify cutting grants to public university students in the most recent provincial budget.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: Why did the government do that?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_05: That's the$64,000 question.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: Nobody knows why they did it.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_05: But it's absolutely clear the government, when it cut OSAP in February, and it cut it by about three-quarters of the amount of grants going to students.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_05: They said it was because the system was becoming unsustainable.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_05: It's now clear that the reason it was becoming unsustainable was because of all this malfeasance in a handful of private colleges.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_05: They knew that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_05: They knew that at the time.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_05: The Association of Career Colleges, they were saying these colleges are doing bad things.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_05: You have to stop giving them money.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_05: And they had a chance to do that to make the system more sustainable.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_05: Instead, they cut grants to students in February.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_05: And it wasn't until May of this year or June of this year that they actually put some limits on those specific colleges and cut them off from the system.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's wild.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like they knew so much money was being wasted and they just didn't care about it at the time.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: Like they didn't do anything about it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_05: Not as far as we can tell.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: And now they've paused OSAP payments to private institutions altogether, right?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: Like not just the ones that were part of the scam, but all private institutions.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_05: Why?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's a distraction.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_05: The first time I was on your show, if you recall, we were talking about uh public-private partnerships and international students and how the government of Ontario kept pouring gasoline on the fire of too many international students.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_05: They got out of that whole situation without too much political damage.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the ways that they did that was they said privates are bad actors.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_05: Private higher education doesn't have a lot of friends in this country.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_05: So if you just point to privates and say bad, people will forgive you a whole bunch of other stuff.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's exactly what they're doing right now.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_05: They don't have to answer questions about why they let a particular five or eight or however many institutions you want to call it, uh go on doing all this malfeasance if they keep saying private's bad.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_05: And but to make that look plausible, they've cut all the privates off.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_05: And there are a lot of private institutions that are going to go under.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_05: The statement that the provincial government put out yesterday suggests we're probably looking at March or April at the earliest.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_05: And so we're talking about companies that will not be able to enroll sick students for six months.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_05: Now, some of the, you know, places like Yorkville University, they might be able to keep going.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_05: That's not a big deal.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_05: National Ballet School, that's another technically, it's a private career college.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_05: They'll be fine.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_05: But boy, there's a lot of other ones, you know, sort of small mom and pop shops in particular, which I think are going to be in a lot of trouble.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_05: We've already had one cease taking new students uh up in Sudbury.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: These private colleges, are they ones that were getting money through the Skills Development Fund as well?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_05: Some of them would have, yeah.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I'm not sure which ones, but yes, so they would have been eligible for that kind of money as well.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: It seemed like they were trying to push money towards some of the private sector uh universities and colleges while not funding the public ones and now trying to say, well, private's bad.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, well, is it bad?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: Because you guys seem to like it before.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_05: And clearly, one of the reasons that they were defending these malfeasant colleges was precisely because they were private.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_05: Like I think that's part of it.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, there could be issues about money going back and forth.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_05: And I'd sure like to see the the political donations report on the people who were running these colleges.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_05: But I do think that they would just sort of say private's good.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_05: And therefore, they didn't want to look too closely at it.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: What happens to the students that are like in the middle of a program at these places or expected to start?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe they started, I guess, probably in September, and all of a sudden they don't have any money.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: What's happening to them?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_05: They're going without and they're dropping out of school.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_05: Career colleges don't work quite like colleges and universities in the sense that they don't necessarily have semesters.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_05: One of the really big selling features of private career colleges is they start all the time, right?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_05: They don't make you wait until you know four months or eight months for the next intake to start.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_05: They're like, yeah, we got a class starting Friday.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_05: That's a big deal for people, you know.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_05: I think, you know, particularly if you're a little bit older or you've got kids, you don't want to wait around for the education that you want.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_05: But nobody can get aid now.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_05: So who's going to enroll?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: Wild story.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: So they knew that all this money was being spent.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: And instead of stopping the bad actors, they just said, we're just going to stop handing out OSAP to private colleges.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's horrible because then, yeah, there's so many people who are stuck in the middle of that, who are in school right now trying to, you know, get better career prospects.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: They're going to end up spending so much more money than they expected, maybe not even be able to pay for it, as you said.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Are the colleges letting them continue and hoping this gets sorted out?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: Or are they just like, sorry, can't pay your out?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think anyone's saying can't pay your out.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it could be.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: There's so many of them.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, there's hundreds of community colleges.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_05: There are some places that are just saying we're not taking new students.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_05: The province could have stopped this at any time.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_05: The power powers that provinces have over private colleges are extensive.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_05: They could literally walk into any college at any time and say, give me your data, give me your files.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_05: They could have done it at any time.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_05: It seems to me that they chose not to.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand why.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's so weird.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like I know it's just speculation that you don't know the answer either, and no one's going to know the answer because I don't think they're going to share it.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: And you can't do a freedom of information requests anymore now that the provincial government has decided to opt out of that.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm like, I don't even know how people can look into this and find out what's going on, what's the real story here?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_05: So they haven't quite got rid of everything in FOI.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I think Allison Jones of Canadian Press has done a fantastic job using FOI.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_05: Kelly Grant at the Globe, who is who is writing a big story on this very shortly.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: They can get it from the bureaucrats.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_05: You can still get stuff from the bureaucrats and court files now.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_05: Remember, so a lot of this is now in court.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_05: Some of these colleges are suing the province.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_05: And so they're putting documents in the public record about when the discussions happened and who knew what when.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_05: So there's there's an increasing amount of information out there.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_05: We'll get to the bottom of this story relatively quickly, I would think.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we hope we'll have you back to talk about what happens once we have the answers to it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: But I wanted to ask you some other questions because, like, part of the reason we wanted to have you back on is because you do a lot of this analysis.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things that I know that you hear a lot from young people and that I hear a lot from young people is whether investing in post-secondary education is going to pay off for them the same way it did for their parents.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of them are Gen Xers or Boomers.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I was wondering like, how different is it that experience for them in reality?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_05: It's pretty similar to Gen X.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_05: In some ways, it's better than Gen X, actually.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: How?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_05: Gen X was Gen X had a terrible time.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_05: It's nothing as good as what the boomers had.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like over time, the number of credentials you need to do basic jobs has gone up.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: That happened, like boomers could make a lot of money earlier on in their career, which of course, if you're working until you're 65, let's say, that's a lot of time, that's extra time that you're spending making money instead of paying money.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: But you're saying it was different for Gen X, people shouldn't really compare.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: How come?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_05: Roughly four times the percentage of people who got degrees 60 years ago when the boomers were there, are getting them today.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, back then 10% of the population got a university degree.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: Now it's 40%, and another 30, some percent, some kind of college, and then a little bit of trades on top of that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_05: So a lot more people get a university credential than they used to.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_05: And that's the biggest increase in time spent in school by far.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_05: Just in this century, the percentage of young people that is 25 to 34 who have a master's degree or above, that's gone from about 7% to 12%.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_05: So that's some of that credential inflation that you're talking about.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_05: It's still a fairly small group of people.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's only an extra 5% who've gone to get that second degree.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it is going up, but it's not a huge number of people.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_05: The big increase in time spent in school is just people going from no university to university.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Then having so many more people in the university program then means that if everyone has it, you're not standing out as much, in which case, like it kind of makes it that the job market is so difficult, where if you don't have a degree, you're competing against so many people who do for jobs that probably don't really need it.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_05: I would say there's at least two issues in there.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_05: And one is that just people, yes, there is credential inflation going on.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_05: There is professionalization.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_05: You're a journalist.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_05: Journalist 60 years ago, that was not a profession that needed a degree.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_05: Even 30 years ago, not everybody needed a degree or a credential.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_05: It's kind of got to the point where it's 100% now.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_05: Certain types of nursing require extra credentials, certain types of you know, dietitians.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_05: And so there's a there is a lot of credential adding, and it's gatekeeping by people in the profession who want to keep some people out, right?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_05: You know, as you say, it's kind of like an arms race.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_05: As more and more people are chasing a certain number of jobs, they're just going to get education that they don't need this to stand out, if you want.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_05: That is a bit of a problem.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_05: The other thing you got to remember though is that the number of jobs that genuinely require higher education, and we can debate a bit about what that means, has gone up quite a bit as well.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_05: And so the result is that actually like the starting salaries of graduates now versus the starting salaries of graduates 20 years ago, pretty similar.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_05: Pretty similar.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_05: It did drop for a while when we had a really big explosion of students.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_05: So, right after, if you remember the double cohort, we ended grade 13 or whatever they called it, the OACs at the time, and we put two cohorts of of high school graduates through university at the same time.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_05: Graduate salaries went down quite a bit for a number of years, but they've risen again in the last decade or so.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_05: Not everybody's gone up.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_05: Humanities, uh, science have not done very well in the last 10, 15 years.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_05: Math, business, uh, health, they've done pretty well the last 15 years.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_05: So again, it's it's averages.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_05: It's certainly true that some fields of study, it's not anything like as good as it was 20 years ago, but in some it's better.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: But if you can get a post-secondary education, should you get it if you can afford to do it?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_05: It always depends on what you're paying in tuition, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_05: In most places, if it's a public university, you're paying$8,000 in tuition, another$1,500 in fees of different kinds, and you're doing it for say four years,$40,000, that's a car.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_05: It'll save you through your lifetime.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_05: I think what people get upset about these days, particularly as you know, cost of housing and and things like that go up, is they wish it took less time.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_05: It's not so much the tuition that matters, it's the number of years you pay it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_05: And I I you know tell my clients a lot, I'm like, guys, you got to start.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_05: We didn't always have four-year degrees.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_05: Like back in the late 20th century, three-year degrees were still the most common in Ontario.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_05: They still are in Manitoba.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_05: People mostly do three years and they get a bachelor's, and if and only if they get the fourth year, then you get an honors.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_05: And I think that's part of the issue, right?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_05: People just want to get their careers started faster.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_05: And people want to get out of the classroom faster.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_05: And we've done an okay job of that in Canada by bringing things like co-op and internships.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_05: And people can, it's it's a little easier for people to earn money now than it was 30 years ago while in school.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_05: But I think that that's that's really the issue, is you know, what's that fourth year for?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we've been doing a lot of shows about why people are having fewer kids.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: And one thing I hear when I look at some of this information is that people like they don't feel established in their career until later.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: And of course they don't feel established in their career until later because they don't even try to start their career until much later than previous generations.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: It just seems like there's so many knock-on effects.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I guess you mentioned housing, and I bet if they solve housing, that would go a long way.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_05: I hear you have some connection with that in the show.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like I just think of with the cost, like when you said that there's more opportunities to make money while being in school, yes.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: But then I'm like, well, but I always heard about from, especially the boomers in my life, I've heard about how they used to be able to pay it off in the summer.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: They'd go to university, work in the summer, pay it off, easy peasy.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: And now it's like you have to work and you're still not going to be able to pay for your tuition and definitely not with tuition and rent.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_05: So again, that's that what are you comparing to?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_05: If you're comparing to 30 years ago, are you comparing to 60 years ago?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_05: 60 years ago, absolutely true.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_05: You know, people would go, you know, work on highways or cut down forests because that's what we were doing in the 60s.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_05: They could make a lot of money.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the reasons they could do that is frankly, uh, professors made less, right?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_05: So the the cost of providing education was lower.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_05: There were only a quarter as many students, remember?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_05: So it's easier for government to pay for higher education when only 10% of people go.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's a lot harder to keep up that standard if 40% go.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_05: And so a lot of the ways that we paid for massification, the way that we gave more people a chance to go to university was by shifting some of the costs onto those students.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_05: And we said, well, you know, they're still going to make money over their lifetime.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_05: And yeah, that's absolutely true.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_05: They will make money after their lifetime.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_05: But as you put it, it's gonna be, it's gonna take a little longer to get there.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: How do we solve this?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like, is that the kind of thing you're saying?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: You talk to universities and to say, maybe you don't need a four-year degree, maybe you need a three-year degree.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: Like, how do we get out of this problem?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_05: There's no simple way.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, because again, that the those gatekeeping functions of degrees will kick in pretty fast, right?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_05: There are a lot of accreditation agencies out there in health and engineering and other fields where we could just say, actually, you don't, we don't need to do this.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_05: We don't need to always add things on.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_05: You know, there's a lot of discussion about, you know, how many years do you need to be a doctor?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_05: Does it really need to be eight years?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_05: In other countries, it's not always eight years.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, a bachelor's degree, does it need to be four years?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_05: In Europe, it's three.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: Mix think of teachers in Ontario.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: I've had too many teachers, I believe.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so they increased how long it takes, and then they got a shortage.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then I heard they decreased it since then, right?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_05: That's a that's a perfect example, right?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_05: And and there's just that's useful.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's just it's ridiculous.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_05: People talk about, you know, a degree is not an automatic guarantee.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_05: And like, that hasn't been true since 1973.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_05: Like, you got to go back to the oil crisis before that was true.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_05: Youth unemployment now, or graduate unemployment now, pretty close to where it was in 1976.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_05: Like, we've been in this situation a long time.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: What's better now that wasn't true 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago, tuition was lower, but we got a lot more student aid than we used to, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_05: So the the amount of grants and tax credits and non-repayable aid in the system is now about three times what it was 25 years ago.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_05: And that's why I always say, like, actually, the worst time to have been a student was about 1994 to 1998.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_05: Those were the years that were really tuition fees were going up.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_05: We were cutting grants at the time, we were making more student loans, and they were graduating into the last really bad economy that we've seen, right?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_05: The 1990s economy was was still much worse than it is today.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_05: And then it got really good really fast in the early 2000s.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_05: And so those students, yeah, they did okay.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_05: And like I say, you know, now we give out more money in various forms of student aid, be it scholarships or grants or tax credits.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_05: We actually give out more aid to students than we take in in tuition.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_05: We have what I call net zero tuition.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_05: Uh well, that was true until the OSAP cuts.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure it's true anymore.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_05: But yeah, I think uh the last year I checked this, we gave out$13 billion in non-repayable aid and we took in$11 billion in domestic tuition fees.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_05: We are a generous system.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_05: We're just kind of opaque uh with the way that we hand out the money.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Looking forward to having you back once we know more information about what's happened.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's wild to me that we can see this government do this.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like it just it's really frustrating when you see a government know there's a problem, can see it coming, and they just don't do anything about it.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's this bunch of collateral.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's that's really sad.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's even sadder in that there doesn't appear to be a lot of accountability for it.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's what you're here for.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, thank you everyone for watching and listening.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: The producer of this episode is Meredith Martin, who, for full disclosure, our guest happens to be dating, and it's been edited by Canadian Civil, who our guest is not dating.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: And if you feel like your degree went on too long and maybe didn't need to be as long as it was, I'd love to hear about it.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Please post your story in the comments.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll see you next time.