I am a candidate in the election for faculty representatives for the UBC Board of Governors. I previously served on the Board (2020 to 2023) and put time into understanding UBC’s budget and finances while serving on the Board’s Finance Committee. This blog post reflects on some elements of the current state of financial health, particularly from the perspective of the academic mission.
UBC is in a challenging financial situation that seems likely to transform the university substantially in spite of our relatively strong financial position going into the present period of uncertainty.
Although this uncertainty is shaped by broader global instability, many of the pressures on the core academic mission of UBC are acutely familiar. UBC is grappling with increasingly unpredictable international student demand, persistently tight limits on provincial funding for universities, limited external funding for capital projects, tightening national research budgets, and rising costs for both essential digital infrastructure and library resources. These financial pressures do not exist in isolation.
These constraints are also emerging at a time when broader cultural devaluing of academic expertise and reason is reshaping the environment in which we teach, conduct research, and govern our institution.
International Student Enrolment Trends, 2022 to 2025.
International student enrolment has become one of the most significant drivers of UBC’s financial position. When these enrolments were expanding steadily, this revenue stream appeared stable and allowed the University to support a wide range of academic activities. Over the past few years, however, international student demand has shifted rapidly and unpredictably, and the effects of this instability are now being felt across many faculties. UBC’s enrolment data illustrate how these changes have unfolded since 2022 and why they have become central to UBC’s current financial challenges.
To understand how we arrived at this point, it is worth recalling that in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, UBC ramped up its international student enrolment, alongside large increases in international tuition fees, thereby generating a large stream of revenue. Between 2010/11 and 2021/22, annual ISI tuition revenue had increased from about $76 million (~28% of tuition revenue) to about $600 million ( ~61% of tuition revenue). This rapid expansion created a structural financial dependence that now amplifies the impact of enrolment volatility.
What has changed in the past few years is the stability of ISI enrolment. Since 2023/24, many faculties have seen sharp decreases in international student numbers, largely due to factors outside of UBC’s control. As a result, several faculties have implemented major budget cuts, including effective faculty hiring freezes, and are struggling to maintain their academic programs with reduced resources.
UBC’s Tuition Allocation Model (TAM) plays a central role in determining how international tuition revenue flows to faculties, and therefore how enrolment volatility translates into budget pressures. When I examined the TAM’s structure and implications in a 2021 blog post, the model was already showing signs of strain; since then, it has undergone only modest adjustments, such as increasing the portion directed to student financial aid and adding a cap on the growth of the “excellence funds.” Built in an era of sustained expansion in international student enrolments, the TAM’s underlying assumptions have not been updated to reflect the far more unstable environment we now face. The Administration has acknowledged the need to consider modifications that better suit a period of limited or negative growth, and these discussions will be important for the University in the coming years.
The way tuition revenue is allocated has profound consequences for the academic mission, and faculty representatives on the Board must be prepared to engage deeply with this issue. As UBC considers adjustments to the TAM in response to changing enrolment patterns, faculty representatives on the Board will play a crucial role in ensuring that academic priorities guide these decisions.
These are not abstract concerns; the underlying enrolment trends are already affecting faculty budgets and academic capacity across the University.
I have plotted enrolment data for 2022 to 2025 (normalized so 2022=100) for the four largest ISI-enrolling faculties in Vancouver in Figure 1.
Figure 1. ISI Undergraduate Enrolment for the four largest enrolling faculties in Vancouver. Data are normalized so 2022 enrolment = 100. (Some other smaller faculties like Forestry and LFS have seen similar declines to Arts.) Based on 30-credit FTEs.
These recent trends can be compared to what UBC had originally planned for this period.
In March 2022, I wrote a blog post on UBC’s 5-year Vancouver campus enrolment plan and its implications for faculty finances. The plan anticipated a period of slower growth for the Vancouver campus, with intentional decreases in domestic enrolment across all faculties (as we had long been enrolling well above the provincial grant target). For international students, the plan projected a decline of more than 6% in ISI enrolment for Arts, an increase of more than 11% for Science, and a small decrease of less than 1% for Applied Science.
What actually happened to ISI enrolments during this period is seen in Figure 2, which plots both the predicted ISI enrolments and the actual ISI enrolments for Applied Science, Arts, and Science for 2022 to 2025 (normalized so 2022=100).
Figure 2. Predicted and actual ISI enrolment data for Vancouver Applied Science, Arts, and Science. Data are normalized so 2022 enrolments = 100. This plot uses Normal FTEs, which account for the variation in standard FTE course loads between faculties.
The situation at UBC Okanagan is even more severe. The campus has experienced very large relative decreases in ISI enrolments across most faculties, as shown in Figure 3. When combined with the fact that domestic students at UBCO are funded by the Province at roughly 60% of the Vancouver rate (a holdover from the Okanagan’s pre-UBC history), the result is a full financial crisis. The campus will likely need to restructure to reduce the number of faculties and programs. One of the major constraints on any such restructuring is the strong set of protections for faculty in our Collective Agreement; for example, the financial exigency provisions beginning on page 144 of Part 9 of the UBC–UBCFA Collective Agreement.
Figure 3. Relative change (%) of ISI enrolment for the set of Okanagan faculties corresponding to the set of Vancouver faculties reported in Figures 1 and 2.
The academic implications of any restructuring at UBC Okanagan fall squarely within the authority of the Okanagan Senate, which will have a central role in determining what academic changes are possible. Because the Board is responsible for the administration of the University, it also has a duty to ensure that the Senate is engaged at the earliest stages of this process, in support of the Senate’s statutory role. The 2012 Morden Report emphasized that governing bodies must be consulted during critical decision points; at UBC, this means that both the Board and the Senates must be involved from the outset, and faculty representatives on the Board need to be attentive to this requirement.
Because UBC Okanagan is part of the same institutional and financial structure overseen by the Board, its financial circumstances affect the University as a whole. Any notion of an impenetrable budgetary firewall between the campuses is inconsistent with the Board’s statutory duty to consider the interests of the entire University, and that duty does not permit UBC Okanagan to be left to address this financial crisis on its own.