THUNDER BAY -- Lakehead University president Brian Stevenson successfully addressed the institution's $10-million budget deficit but the enrolment challenges will take five years.
Lakehead administration announced it was running a nine per cent budget deficit in November 2015 mostly attributable to changes the Ministry of Education made to post-secondary faculties of education across the province.
Ontario eliminated the one-year Bachelor of Education professional program in favour of a two-year program, a move which resulted in a $7-million shortfall for Lakehead's budget.
The ministry also capped the number of students Lakehead's Faculty of Education could accept at 428 in 2015-2016. As the program changed over, only 391 students enrolled for the new two-year program.
Stevenson told city council on Monday the university's five-year plan to eliminate the deficit involves working with the province to increase the number of students in its education faculty from the current 25 per cent of its former height of enrolment to 50 per cent.
"Part of it has got to be increasing enrolment in education," Stevenson said.
"We're getting support from the province in easing ourselves into a lower number of students so in about five years or less we'll be back to the numbers we had before. The rest of it, we really did internally through internal budget moves and changes."
Other savings will result from budget cuts and debt management.
The blow came as the base of regional students attending Lakehead began to fall with regional demographics. While 71 per cent of university-bound students in Northwestern Ontario choose Lakehead, they comprise only 48 per cent of the school's full-time undergraduate students.
Stevenson's response has been to extend Lakehead's reach to international students and to increase satellite classrooms in remote communities throughout the region. As of the fall of 2016, 925 international students are registered 400 of which are new this year.
As he looks further to global markets, Stevenson assured council the university is keeping both its feet in the region as it considers its future.
"We want to be able to brand ourselves as the regional university and that means a university that plays a role in economic development in the region through a variety of means including research, including finding different economic potential for the region supporting the basic mining, forestry and other industries but also developing a knowledge-based economy for the region," he said.
