The board of directors at St. Clair College has been passed the 2025-26 budget, with a deficit of $6.5 million. Last year, the federal government slashed the number of international student visas it issued by a further 10 per cent from the 2024 cap. For 2025, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will issue 437,000 study permits, with Ontario being able to issue approximately 117,000 of those permits — a 40 per cent reduction of international students coming to Canada was expected this year. “From an operations perspective, we certainly have seen the impact of policy as it relates to international students,” said St. Clair College President Michael Silvaggi. “That has impacted St. Clair, and we have taken that into consideration and we’ve had to pivot, and we’ve been pivoting for the past few months in our planning and so forth.” Some of that planning and pivoting included the suspension of 18 programs at St. Clair this coming fall, including journalism, dental assisting, power engineering, hospitality, fashion design, event management. Fall admissions for those programs are suspended while students who are currently enrolled in year two or three will be allowed to finish out their studies. Silvaggi says at this time, no further program reductions are anticipated. “If programs were to be identified right now, there would would be potentially students with no options, or they’d be putting on a pause, waiting until next year, perhaps going into a program they do not want, those are all individual circumstances, we did not want to do that because we know the impacts,” Silvaggi said. He said the college still remains in a good position financially with $75-million in reserves. “We need some time to make sure that that operation budget can get to a place, obviously we have to be no worse than a balanced budget, but certainly we have something’s up our sleeve if you will, and there is a lot of work to do.” he said. “At the same time, dealing with a lot of the inputs that are coming in, and as they change, it keeps us on our toes,” Silvaggi said John Fairley, VP of Communications and Community Relations, says St. Clair won’t know the full impacts of international student numbers until around 10 days after the fall semester begins. — Dustin Coffman & Meagan Delaurier/AM800 News
