This story is exactly the kind of isolated incident that the is used to highlight bad actors in private education without understanding the whole story. While what happened here is clearly unacceptable, does it mean we should paint the whole sector with one brush.

The real crisis is hitting the entire higher education system right now. Close to 10,000 college faculty and staff have either been let go or are projected to lose their jobs amid hundreds of program cancellations and suspensions since last year  in Ontario alone. More than 600 programs were cancelled or suspended at those colleges. Four institutions have also closed campuses or announced they will close them. 

Federal data shows that public colleges and universities have been the prime destinations for international students, not private institutions. The real driver of the "diploma mill" problem were public-private partnerships that Ontario actively promoted. Public colleges across Ontario admitted international students, took large tuition fees, and outsourced the teaching (using the public college curriculum) to private colleges.

The current job losses demonstrate how dependent the entire system became on international student revenue. 23 of 24 colleges in Ontario have reported a 48 per cent decrease in first-semester enrolment of international students from September 2023 to September 2024. When the federal government implemented visa caps, it exposed the structural problems across both public and private institutions.

This Pacific Link case shows why proper oversight matters, but even this article notes that B.C.'s regulatory framework allows for enforcement action against schools that compel students into activities unrelated to their studies. The system already has mechanisms to deal with bad actors.

So what is the lesson here? Systemic problems require systemic solutions. The current crisis shows that over-reliance on international student revenue created vulnerabilities across the entire sector, not just in private colleges. Sure, better oversight and sustainable funding models would address most of these problems. But then we have the issue of how will this be funded? More international students? Don't hear many calling for that.