Faculty Associations has released a report calling for a $1 billion increase in education funding over the next five years—money they said Ontario universities need to keep pace with other Canadian schools.
OCUFA argued that the funding increase was feasible, on the grounds that the provincial government made comparable expenditures on post-secondary education in the 1970s, during another period of undergraduate growth.
The report detailed a $2,220 funding- per-student gap between Ontario and the rest of Canada, calculated using figures gathered from Statistics Canada and a 2005 financial report by the Canadian Association of University Business Officers, an organization representing university management and administrations nationwide.
According to OCUFA, the $6.2 billion in additional post-secondary education funding the provincial government announced in 2005 will amount to only a one per cent increase in per-student funding over the next five years. When the funding was announced, the government estimated post-secondary enrolment in Ontario would grow by 46,000 students by 2009. In their report, OCUFA projects enrolment at 92,000 by that year.
GTA universities have observed the same trend in student enrolments, leading to talk of creating a new, undergraduate- only “feeder” university in Toronto, which would stream graduate students into existing Toronto institutions
