Twenty-four of Ontario’s public colleges have quietly executed one of the largest mass layoffs in provincial history, shedding well over 10,000 faculty and staff positions and mothballing or cancelling more than 600 academic programs during the past academic year.
“These are huge numbers; the human toll of this is massive,” OPSEU/SEFPO president JP Hornick said, adding the union had to “fight tooth and nail” for the data to surface through last week’s interest arbitration award.
The arbitrator’s decision shows that, by June 2025, 19 of the 24 institutions had already booked 7,100+ job losses—with another 2,200+ cuts planned for this autumn—across full-time faculty, contract instructors, support workers and administrators. Four colleges have yet to report.
Academic offerings have shrunk just as dramatically. The award lists 607 program “suspensions of all deliveries with the intent to cancel,” plus four complete campus closures.
Many of the axed courses were high-margin graduate certificates built around recruiting international students but they have vanished. A federal cap imposed in January 2024 slashed first-semester international enrolment by 48%—from 91,306 in September 2023 to 46,555 a year later—eliminating a tuition stream that once covered three-quarters of college teaching costs.
Colleges now face a 77,500-student hole and a projected sector-wide deficit of up to $900 million by 2026-27.
Administrators call the collapse “existential,” noting that international tuition had soared 152% in the decade before the pandemic, to $1.7 billion, masking stagnant provincial grants and a domestic tuition freeze. In 2021, the Ontario Auditor General already warned that such reliance was unsustainable.
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