Confederation College has faced one of its toughest years yet, but has overcome obstacles and had many achievements during the 2024-25 academic year.
Michelle Salo, college president, presented the college’s 2025 Report to Community, Wednesday, which reviewed the school’s past year’s performance against its strategic plan.
Salo said this year, they also incorporated the current landscape of colleges, illustrating what’s happening in the post-secondary environment and included policy changes on international student recruitment. A federal cap and barriers limiting international students from coming, staying and working in Canada have resulted in a major decline in enrolment this past September, which was cause for the college to cut 11 programs.
However, the school did see some milestones.
“Given the environment that we’ve been in, we started our brand new pharmacy tech program, which was a huge accomplishment,” Salo said.
“That’s the brand new one that started this fall with a great cohort to start. We also became a Best Practice Spotlight Organization for our practical nursing program, and got our first cohort through this first year, which started in the fall.”
She highlighted the work students from an applied research group carried out with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) to provide more durable braille signage in their training kitchen.
“We also launched our Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan, and we’ll be going externally with that in June,” she said. “It’s laying the path forward for several actions that we’re going to take as an institution to support our reconciliation efforts with actionable items. We also finished the second phase of the Indigenous outdoor classroom.”
But the cap on international students was by far the biggest challenge this past year.
“We’ve spent a tremendous amount of effort just trying to determine which programs needed to be suspended because of the policy changes, which resulted in low enrolment in many of the 11 programs that we ended up suspending,” she said.
“Looking on the horizon, we still see even a bigger decline in international enrolment than was anticipated.”
Salo said that in the 58 years of the school’s existence, the situation is unprecedented in college history.
Bringing in international students aimed to offset a 30-per cent decline in domestic students seen in the last decade,
“It was well over 100 per cent for the incline of international students . . . which allowed us to continue to run programs where the domestic enrolment was so low but is still in high demand for the community employers,” Salo said.
“The biggest impact will be next year. We had the students who were already continuing with student visas, and now, with the changes in the new legislation from last year and this year, the numbers have dropped drastically.”
She said next year, the college will be running a deficit of at least $6.5 million, which includes the programs they already suspended and a number of cost saving initiatives that they’ve also implemented, including some voluntary retirement incentive plans.
“The big thing we need is the federal government to lift some of the restrictions on the post-graduate work permits for these programs to help us to actually achieve our targets for integration,” she said.
“Number two is looking at the funding model for post-secondary education, specifically colleges, in our circumstance.”
Salo added that there is a bit of a misconception that the programs that are being impacted are typically attended by international students, but these are programs graduating students that community employers have a great demand for. There just isn’t enough domestic students signing up for them.
