Jill Dunlop

Ontario's college system built its financial model on international student fees, and when the federal government capped international study permits, the model collapsed faster than the institutions could adapt. Jill Dunlop inherited a sector in crisis that she didn't create — the over-reliance on international revenue was building for years before she held the portfolio — but she's had to manage the consequences. The crisis has forced some reckoning that was probably overdue: programs that were sustained by international enrolment rather than domestic demand, campuses that were opened based on projections that didn't hold, and a funding formula for domestic tuition that hasn't kept pace with costs for years. The fix requires action on all of these — domestic tuition policy, program rationalization, federal coordination on international volumes — and the minister can't do it alone.