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From: http://www.thestar.com/GTA/Education/article/241555
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Student boom stirs new university talk
Leading educators brainstorm ways to accommodate 40,000 undergrads
Jul 31, 2007 04:30 AM
Louise Brown
Education Reporter
Even five is not enough.
The GTA may need another university within 15 years to handle a surprise boom of 40,000 more undergraduates, warns University of Toronto president Dr. David Naylor.
So strapped are GTA universities for space, they may even – in a rare show of team spirit – form a consortium to run a new sort of feeder university, Naylor said, where students could earn a bachelor's degree or switch after second year into one of the older universities to prepare for graduate studies.
It's one of a scramble of ideas being developed by the presidents of the U of T, Ryerson, York and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) to cope with an unexpected surge in students driven by the flow of immigrants to the GTA and a growing appetite for higher learning.
"There was a widespread assumption after the double cohort that we would see enrolment pressures drop – well, surprise! That didn't happen," said Naylor.
"There's 40,000 more students coming to the GTA – that's basically another university unless we find some smart ways to handle the crunch."
Among other ideas raised so far by the university chiefs:
A university outside the GTA opening a satellite campus in Toronto to take some of the undergraduate load.
More Toronto kids may have to go away to school. "We don't want to push more students out of the GTA, especially students in the lower-income groups, but the concept that one has an unequivocal right to commute to university is bogus," said Naylor.
Pushing for better transit from downtown Toronto to the UOIT in Oshawa so more GTA students would consider the 905 university.
A fourth campus for U of T, which is not a popular notion at Canada's largest university, where many fear it would "distract" from the university's move to bolster research and graduate work.
A second campus for Ryerson University at the foot of Jarvis St.
Ryerson kept first-year enrolment the same this fall despite almost 20 per cent more applicants because it has no more room to grow.
"The double cohort was spread right across every university in Ontario but this is a unique problem to the GTA," said Ryerson president Sheldon Levy. He has asked Queen's Park for permission for Ryerson to expand into the old Sam the Record Man store on Yonge near Dundas.
"If we're looking at taking even 10,000 of the projected 40,000 more students, that's a 40 per cent increase in our numbers. We can't do that without affecting the quality of education."
The GTA's fifth university, the Ontario College of Art and Design, has just about outgrown its jazzy new three-year-old building on stilts, said vice-president Sarah McKinnon, and is poised to start fundraising for another building.
Unlike the double-cohort crunch of 2003 caused by the final Grade 13 graduates and the first new four-year crop, this boom is expected to last for the next two decades, according to Naylor.
"The way we dealt with the double cohort was like an anaconda swallowing a rabbit, and to just push more students into the system would be naive.
"These are bigger numbers that will last a longer time on campuses that already have grown beyond their limit."
Not all of them have grown beyond their limit. Besides the five-year-old UOIT, which has room to expand, York University has room on the east and west side of its sprawling campus and plans to boost its science and engineering programs, as well as add a medical school, said new president Mamdouh Shoukri.
"I see this as an opportunity for York to help out while meeting our aspirations to increase the number of university graduates who are science-literate," Shoukri said.
But talks about any new university must include funding for new professors, warned Henry Mandelbaum, executive director of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.
"We don't have enough faculty to teach students right now," he said.