As work to address our enrolment and budget challenges continues, I am writing to provide an update on our 2025-2026 budget process, as well as a deadline extension for our Retirement Incentive Initiative (RII).

As I’ve said in previous updates, the federal government’s sweeping changes to Canada’s international student program have greatly damaged international student demand for Canadian higher education. Additional restrictions placed only on colleges have had a further negative impact upon the college sector. Niagara College is not immune to the enrolment and budget impacts of this significant decline in international student demand. Academic programming is our core business and our enrolments drive College revenues. The steep overall decline in enrolment projected for next year will impact the individual budgets of program and service areas College-wide.

This is a time of profound change for our sector and our College and I know that unprecedented times create concern and anxiety. As always, our commitment as an Executive Team is to be transparent with our college community as we work to achieve a balanced budget through a systematic and measured approach focused on minimizing the impacts on our programs and our people.

We continue to pursue multiple strategies to grow our domestic student enrolment, and stabilize our international student levels. We’ve enhanced our student recruitment and retention efforts, and are expanding capacity in programs with strong applicant demand, while accelerating the creation of new programs. Through our Together fundraising campaign, the largest in NC history, we’re raising critical funds to support our facilities, programs, and students. We’re also prioritizing capital projects that support increased capacity in programs with high student and employer demand.

We’ve also introduced a generous retirement incentive initiative (RII) for employees who are pension-eligible. This program is a key part of our plan to mitigate the impacts of lower enrolments. Recognizing the many factors involved in considering retirement, and to ensure that eligible employees have ample time to assess this initiative, we are extending the deadline for the RII to February 18 and encourage eligible employees to reach out to HR with any questions.

Thanks to our strong reputation and strategies to bolster student recruitment, we are projecting further increases to domestic enrolment, but this growth will not be enough to offset an anticipated 40 per cent reduction in our international student enrolment for 2025-2026. Driven by changes to post-graduate work permit (PGWP) eligibility, our enrolment decline will be unevenly distributed across program areas, with the greatest reductions expected in programs that previously had high numbers of international students but are now excluded from PGWP eligibility.

The reality of our enrolment challenge means that some program changes and workforce reductions will be unavoidable. We will work to maintain vacancies created through normal attrition and through the RII to minimize the number of individuals that might be impacted.

Final details of our budget, including staffing changes, will not be available until our 2025-2026 Business Plan and Budget is finalized in late April and we will provide a fulsome overview to our College community in the Spring term.

In the meantime, there remains difficult work ahead in our budget cycle and we need your support to position our College for success. We all need to do everything we can to continue to grow our domestic student enrolments, and to stabilize our international student enrolment levels. We also need to work together to identify operational efficiencies and budget savings, and to draw on our entrepreneurial and trailblazing mindset to look for revenue growth opportunities. We need everyone’s best ideas; please share these with the Executive Team by sending an email to [email protected].

As I reflect on the upcoming five-year anniversary of my presidency, I am indescribably proud of the caring, dedicated, trailblazing and collaborative team at Niagara College. It is an honour to lead this College and I know that, much as we did in 2020 when I became President and we faced the unexpected onset of the pandemic, we will harness our collective values to navigate these extraordinary enrolment and budget challenges in a way that is uniquely NC, and positions us for future growth and success.