Over the past two decades, British Columbia’s universities have seen a steady erosion of stable, predictable provincial appropriations—funding that once underwrote instruction, research and student services—only to be supplanted by revenue streams reliant on tuition, fee-for-service programmes and the recruitment of fee-paying international students.
What began as modest supplementary initiatives in the 1990s evolved into a financial imperative by the early 2000s, as public contributions stagnated and institutions sought new resources to close annual budget gaps.
How did we get here?
The rise of global student fees and casual labour
By the mid-2000s, campuses were recast as global education brands, aggressively marketing themselves to offshore markets and research partners; in tandem, rising reliance on sessional and part-time faculty—who today comprise nearly half of all teaching staff—has created a workforce precarious both in income and in job security, undermining institutional capacity for sustained mentorship, curriculum innovation and robust student support.
Impacts on inclusion and accessibility
These financial shifts have exacted a steep toll on equity and universal access: as international-student revenues and auxiliary-service fees supplant core grants, the resources available for services such as disability accommodations, mental-health counselling and learning supports have been rationed, deferred or reallocated; meanwhile, under-resourced accessibility offices struggle to meet growing demand, and students with disabilities, first-generation learners and those from low-income backgrounds are left navigating labyrinthine application processes for minimal assistance, compounding inequalities that a needs-based public system was originally designed to mitigate.
Shifting demographics and economic pressures
Concurrently, demographic plateaus among domestic student populations, shifting labour-market demands and the ebb and flow of global migration have exposed the brittleness of a business model premised on ever-rising enrolment; as cohorts shrink and competition intensifies, universities facing budget shortfalls have cut programmes deemed non-profitable, often in the very areas—humanities, community-based research, foundational sciences—that foster critical thinking, social cohesion and regional capacity building.
Political intentions and policy choices
Underlying these developments are deliberate policy choices that favour market logic over public stewardship: successive provincial governments, citing austerity imperatives and the rhetoric of fiscal restraint, have championed partial privatisation, framing universities as engines of revenue generation rather than cornerstones of a democratic society; this realignment reflects broader ideological commitments to deregulation and reduced public spending, even as the social contract between citizens and their post-secondary institutions frays.
A long-brewing crisis and the risk of collapse
Taken together, tuition-driven budgets, casualised labour and a narrowed policy vision have fostered a brittle, charity-dependent culture in which unpaid labour and volunteer goodwill are expected to fill systemic gaps; while surges in international-student recruitment may temporarily patch the books, immigration-policy shifts, global competition and economic downturns threaten to reverse that trend almost overnight. Without a return to a needs-based, publicly underwritten model—one that embeds equity, accessibility and academic integrity at its core—universities will soon confront an existential reckoning: unable to guarantee course offerings, student supports or equitable working conditions, they risk compromising both the quality of education and the public mission that once bound them to the common good.