As presidents of Ontario public community colleges backbite and call each other names over whose fault it is the federal government is cutting their access to international students and their hefty tuition fees, Shouyi Ma is contemplating the ruin of his business.

Hanson College, where Ma has been CEO for 10 years, delivers classes on behalf of Sudbury’s Cambrian College at two sites in the Toronto area and one in a Vancouver suburb. It caters to international students, offering Cambrian diplomas and certificates in business management, hospitality, and IT specialties alongside its own business diploma and English classes.

The cap that Immigration Minister Marc Miller ordered in January “is essentially killing the entire sector for the public-private partnership,” Ma said.

The cap alone could reduce the number of international students allowed into programs like Hanson’s by two-thirds; a second part of Miller’s announcement, making graduates ineligible for work permits, will deal another blow, he said.

The views of students at Hanson and other private colleges appear to validate Ma’s fears. Aastha Sharma, a 20-year-old from India studying hospitality at Hanson, said the move effectively cuts off students who aren’t being sponsored by family members to study or work—the private colleges’ prime income source. “How can they manage it?” she wondered of the schools. 

Palak Gangwani, a 25-year-old from Delhi studying sales and marketing at Cestar College, a Toronto institution that partners with Sarnia’s Lambton College, predicted enrollment will plunge with the loss of the employment permits. “Nobody’s purposefully coming here just to study,” she said. “The main focus is to get settled here. So everybody will need a work permit.”

For about the same price as classes at Cambrian in Sudbury (about $17,600 a year for a two-year business diploma, for instance, more than four times what Canadian students pay), students can instead study under Hanson instructors in—or at least near—a big city.

Hanson has a campus in a light industrial area in northeast Toronto, and one in an office building by a shopping mall in Brampton. Its B.C. site is in New Westminster, on the Fraser River waterfront. The Toronto site is brand new, said Ma, “with all the amenities in place, as much as [Hanson] could find feasible.”

Lucrative as it is, Cambrian College doesn’t need its relationship with Hanson for the Sudbury college to be financially viable, spokesperson Dan Lessard wrote to The Logic in an email. The arrangement made Cambrian $17 million last year, he said, but “we achieved a net surplus of $18 million, meaning we did not rely on Hanson to balance our budget.”

This wasn’t always the case, said Ma. “This goes back to 20 years ago, when Cambrian College was struggling. They had less than 100 international students. And then collectively, we found each other, and found a solution,” he said.

Cambrian is a smaller college and Sudbury has little international profile, he said. “I am an immigrant myself. I’ve been in Canada for 20 years. Until I started my journey working at Hanson in international education, I didn’t know where Sudbury was. I didn’t know who Cambrian College was.”

Toronto’s own colleges, such as Humber, Seneca and George Brown, could hoover up many—though likely not all—of those students and their hefty tuition fees, which would leave some would-be students in the cold and smaller colleges in more remote parts of Ontario to wither.

In that scenario, he said, the smaller colleges “become less of a pillar in their own communities’ social and economic infrastructure, and that is sad to see.”

Hanson recruits students abroad for Cambrian-branded programs. Having campuses in multiple communities helps enrollment even at a college’s home base, by making a college like Cambrian more credible to people outside Canada, Ma said. “Once they have the awareness, they can choose whether they want to study in a true north Canadian environment or a metropolitan environment in Canada.”

These public-private partnerships have exploded in Ontario in the last few years, right after they were almost snuffed. In 2017, former senior Ontario civil servant David Trick advised the then-Liberal government to wind them down and to boost colleges’ funding to compensate. The risks of unscrupulous recruiting and low-quality education were just too great, he wrote.

This was the worry Miller cited in announcing the federal cap—that international students are being exploited. The impact on the Canadian housing market is incidental, he said at the time.

In 2018, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives defeated the Liberals. The new government rejected Trick’s conclusions. The minister for higher education at the time, Ross Romano—from Sault Ste. Marie—encouraged the private partnerships after the government ordered Ontario students’ tuitions cut by 10 per cent, where they have been locked ever since.

Days after Miller’s announcement in January, Ontario’s current higher-education minister, Jill Dunlop, froze new partnerships while her ministry tries to “ensure that program quality protects Ontario’s reputation as a world leader in education and meets Ontario’s labour market demands.”

Her spokesperson, Liz Tuomi, did not respond to questions from The Logic about why the provincial government changed its mind about encouraging the partnerships. The ministry followed up with an announcement of about $1.3 billion over three years to support all the province’s universities and colleges, at the same time as it extended the tuition freeze.

It includes a special boost for northern universities and small, northern or rural colleges to share. That one-time funding is to “support financially vulnerable institutions while the government works with them on efficiency initiatives.” It’s only $10 million, though.

Sarnia’s public Lambton College booked more than $45 million in revenue from “licence and service agreements” in international education in 2022-23, helping it run a surplus of just under $29 million. That income was more than all of Lambton’s grants and reimbursements (just under $35 million) plus all its tuition revenue from domestic students (about $7.8 million).

Through a spokesperson, Lambton’s president Rob Kardas declined interview requests. The college referred The Logic to Colleges Ontario, an umbrella group, which referred The Logic back to individual colleges to talk about their own arrangements.

Lambton advertises that it works with two private colleges. One, Cestar, has a building in the same light industrial area as Hanson’s in northeast Toronto. Another, Queen’s College, is in the sprawl of warehouses and strip malls near Pearson airport (it describes the site as “nestled in the heart of north Mississauga”). Neither replied to interview requests from The Logic.

A site for Ace Acumen Academy, which gives classes for St. Clair College in Windsor, is next door. St. Clair’s private partnership was worth more than $95 million to it last year, according to its most recent financial statements, nearly a third of its revenue. The college ran a surplus of about $30.1 million.

Even Ottawa’s public Algonquin College, in Ontario’s second-biggest city, launched a private partnership with private CDI College in 2022, starting with classes in four Toronto-area locations that fall. In its financial report at the end of March 2023, Algonquin said the deal had been worth nearly $4.4 million in just a few months; that contributed to turning a $3.7-million deficit the previous year into an $11.3-million surplus.

“Immigration through international education is one of our Canadian national foundational pillars,” Ma said, and that’s exactly why students The Logic spoke to in Toronto are studying at private colleges; at Lambton’s and Cambrian’s Toronto campuses (run by Cestar and Hanson), several students said bluntly that the real attractions were the work permits of up to three years attached to their programs.

Gangwani, the business student from Delhi, said the lecturers at Cestar are professional and its atmosphere positive. But subtract the permits, she said, and “I don’t think anybody will come here to study.” 

Some students said they’d endured dismal living conditions and gruelling commutes for the prospect of employment that could someday lead to residency in Canada. Kushal Neupane, a 24-year-old business management student at Cestar, said he lived with 19 other tenants in a single-family home in Scarborough when he first arrived in the city. The landlord had filled the one-storey house with makeshift partitions to create separate sleeping areas, he said, but “there was no privacy at all, no peaceful environment. Too noisy.” After a month, he found new lodgings.

Many of the Cambrian students The Logic spoke to at Hanson’s nearby building said they found it difficult to find jobs and housing and that the government is right to cut international student admissions.

“There are two girls living in my own house and [I think] they are depressed because they’re not getting work. And there are so many students like that,” said Jeena Chaudhary, a 20-year-old student from India in the hospitality program. “It’s maybe better to choose another country … things are getting very hard.”

Several students at Hanson said they commuted from Brampton—a bus journey that can take up to two and a half hours—where housing is cheaper than it is closer to their classrooms.

Manpreet Kaur, a 27-year-old hospitality student who’s also from India, pays about $8,900 per semester in tuition. Kaur said the college has informed students about coming changes to international student and work permits, although the restrictions will only affect those starting in September.

None of the Cambrian-Hanson students said they felt they had been exploited or tricked.

Ontario’s post-secondary schools—universities, public colleges and private ones—are facing a free-for-all battle for shares of the federal government’s reduced allocation of student permits.

Kitchener’s Conestoga College reports having about 30,000 international students on its own campuses in southwestern Ontario. According to figures obtained by the CBC, that’s up from 8,455 in 2019. Not working with private career colleges is a point of pride in Conestoga’s business plan.

After the president of Sault College in Sault Ste. Marie, former provincial cabinet minister David Orazietti, criticized Conestoga for irresponsibly ballooning its enrollment, Conestoga president John Tibbits called Orazietti a whore and accused Sault of benefiting from academic “puppy mills” at Toronto-area outposts run by private TriOS College. (Tibbits is in some trouble over it.)

According to Ma, the initial Cambrian-Hanson deal in 2005 was the first of its kind. His industry threw a financial lifeline to colleges like Cambrian, in Ontario’s smaller and more remote communities, when the provincial government would not, he said.

“Now we’re basically resetting everything to say, ‘That’s not going to be the case and figure it out yourself, without using the system and the proposition that’s been proven,’” Ma said.

With files from Charlie Gillis and Sebastian Leck