Kesia DiasNew year, new you, new proposed tuition increases. I’m not the betting type, but I would bet a lot on the University of Alberta successfully increasing tuition for the sixth year in a row. This is becoming a norm for the U of A and there’s no end in sight.
The reason the university has given for needing to raise tuition yet again is financial strain, largely thanks to provincial funding cuts. The U of A has said it needs to raise tuition to maintain the quality of programs with less provincial funding. Yet, the thing that seems to be the top priority for the university is achieving its 10-year strategic plan SHAPE.
I’ve attended university governance meetings over the past months, whether that’s the Board of Governors (BoG) or General Faculties Council (GFC). A common theme through most of these meetings has been SHAPE. While the financial strain on the university may come up, much of the time is focused on strategic plans.
The big focus of SHAPE is increasing student enrolment from 44,000 to 60,000 and achieving higher national and international rankings. It’s an ambitious plan to say the least. But if the U of A is in such a dire financial place, why is the focus on growing rather than sustaining and improving what we have?
U of A President and Vice-chancellor Bill Flanagan has admitted SHAPE will require significant investments — whether that’s to accommodate 16,000 more students, additional professors, teaching assistants (TA), support staff, or build and renovate physical infrastructure. So the U of A can’t afford to not raise tuition for the sixth year in a row, but it’s somehow going to find the money to achieve SHAPE? That doesn’t exactly make a whole lot of sense to me.
Cracks have already begun to show in the efforts to achieve SHAPE. The university created a vice-president (international and enterprise) role to help recruit more international students to achieve SHAPE. But as of December 2024, the university has paused its plans to hire someone in that role due to “budgetary pressures.”
Perhaps instead of investing in another administrative position to achieve SHAPE, the U of A should focus on balancing its budget the best it can. But instead, the university seems to be focused on growing enrolment while raising tuition annually as a means to solve its funding problem. What other alternatives the university has explored is rather unclear.
Students’ Union business councillor, Owen Pasay, asked about alternative funding sources when Melissa Padfield, deputy provost (students and enrolment), presented to the UASU Students’ Council on the proposed 2025–26 tuition increases. In response, Padfield mentioned the university has cut some administrative positions and established a university property trust. This supposedly saved and will generate funding, respectively. Yet these aren’t a clear shift from what has proven to be a problematic funding model.
Admittedly, there’s likely no easy solution to this. The provincial government has proven to be unwilling to offer post-secondary institutions (PSI) more funding. By increasing enrolment, there’s some hope that will generate more revenue. But that’s not without its own costs, as Flanagan admitted, and risks.
A particular risk is depending more and more on international student tuition. Of the 16,000 additional students the U of A seeks to add in the next 10 years, 6,000 will be international students. International students pay up to four times the tuition of domestic students.
The university isn’t just increasing revenue through getting more students to pay tuition. That tuition is also consistently increasing year after year. If BoG approves all tuition increases, international students beginning their undergraduate degrees in 2026 will pay 10 per cent more in tuition.
But given the Government of Canada’s decision to put a cap on the amount of international study permits, there’s a lot of uncertainty. The federal government will assign portions of the cap to each province. While some provinces will see larger cuts, Alberta is expecting more international students.
Yet, that doesn’t mean we should still be so eager to depend on international students for revenue. Things could still change, as it has since the initial announcement of the cap. This decision has hit PSIs in other provinces hard because of their dependence on international students. It wouldn’t be wise to dig ourselves into the same hole. But it seems that’s the direction we are going in.
To the U of A’s credit, it has tried other things in the past. The university underwent massive restructuring in 2021, meant to save millions in costs. Clearly, that didn’t solve a whole lot. In fact, it seemed to just create more problems.
Two years after the restructuring, student services seemed to be suffering. Accessing services has become more difficult. Delivering services has also become more of a challenge according to the U of A Non-Academic Staff Association (NASA). Faculty have said the “whole environment changed,” and not for the better.
Now, three years later, some of that still rings true. The UASU recently did a student survey on academic advising. It found that only 50 per cent of students reported finding value in speaking with advisors, down six per cent from previous surveys. Additionally, students voiced concerns about lack of staff availability, wait times, and unprepared staff.
Non-university services like the Campus Food Bank (CFB) are also struggling. It’s seen a 600 per cent increase in use over the past five years and has been struggling to keep up with the costs. Erin O’Neil, CFB’s executive director, confirmed that CFB receives no funding from the U of A. If the university can’t even help fund the CFB, how can it afford to take on 16,000 more students?
On top of that, academic teaching staff (ATS) have reported increased class sizes and workloads. At the same time, over half of ATS are on short-term contracts, which lack job security and often benefits. But solving this doesn’t seem to be top of the U of A’s priority list. Rather, achieving SHAPE is.
Furthermore, the university has now announced a hiring freeze. This means it will be exponentially more difficult to hire more ATS or support staff. Whether or not the university plans to still go full-speed ahead with increasing enrolment is unclear.
While the university promises that the quality of the student experience will be maintained with every increase in tuition, it doesn’t seem to be true. The U of A already underwent massive changes for academic restructuring which were supposed to help with the loss of funding. And the result doesn’t seem to have been a net positive.
But here we are, with the university putting an extensive amount of time and effort into yet another ambitious plan. Only this time it isn’t about saving money or necessarily making education better for students. It’s about growth and rankings.
It seems like the university hasn’t learned from the academic restructuring. Throughout much of the consultation process, staff and students were expressing concerns about the effects of the plans. Oftentimes the university just said academic restructuring wasn’t meant to affect student experiences. But it did. Now, with SHAPE, concerns from faculty and students seem to be similarly brushed off. We may end up with yet another big change at the U of A and no solution to our funding problem.
