Toronto may be facing a new crunch of incoming undergratuates, far beyond the present capacity of the city’s universities to accept.
U of T’s president, David Naylor, was recently quoted in The Toronto Star, claiming the GTA will have to deal with a boom of up to 40,000 incoming undergraduates within the next 15 years.
“That’s basically another university unless we find some smart way to handle the crutch,” said Naylor.
His tentative solution is simple and direct.
Make a new university.
Calling his proposed school a “feeder university,” Naylor suggested its students might have the option of graduating from it with a bachelor’s degree, or transferring to one of the older, more established schools to prepare for graduate studies.
Naylor floated the idea to the presidents of Ryerson, York, and the fiveyear- old University of Ontario Institute of Technology, as a way to make room for the increasing number of future first-year students entering university in the GTA.
Other ideas thought up by the GTA’s education leaders include creating a fourth U of T campus, a second Ryerson campus on Jarvis Street, or force more students to to attend university outside Toronto.
The presidents also suggested that a university currently outside the GTA might create a satellite campus in Toronto.
The higher-learning boom is thought to be largely a result of a sharp rise in immigration to the GTA.
A recent University of Alberta study showed that immigrant youths tend to aim higher than native-born youths when it comes to education.
The study found that 79 per cent of visible-minority immigrant youths hope to earn at least one university degree in their future, compared with 57 per cent of Canadian-born, non-visible minority students.
It suggests that the parents of visible- minority immigrant students generally have higher levels of education than their Canadian-born counterparts, and express more optimism for their children’s education. About 88 per cent of visible-minority immigrant parents who participated in the study expressed hope that their children would obtain a university degree, compared to 59 per cent of Canadianborn, non-visible minority parents.
The study also reported that visible- minority immigrant students also tend to get higher grades and have higher levels of school engagement than Canadian-born students.
Other causes of the GTA undergraduate boom include 2003’s double cohort of grade and grade 13 graduates, and the job market’s increasing demand for applicants that have a university degree.
