LU looking for new options for its Barrie students

Losing out on a full university campus in Barrie was a huge disappointment for Laurentian University, says its chief of staff.

But Chris Mercer says they will keep looking for ways to expand the eight programs it currently offers students in the city.

"At the end of the day, this doesn't stop us,” Mercer said Wednesday, hours after Reza Moridi, the minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, announced that Markham would be getting the new campus, an extension of York University.

“Continuing to enhance Ontario’s world-class post-secondary education system is critical to the future success of our province, and this includes expanding undergraduate capacity in areas with strong long-term demand and current gaps in local access,” Moridi said.

“With today’s commitments, we are ensuring students in the highest-growth communities have access to local high-quality programs for decades to come.”

The current application process began in 2014, when the province asked for proposals to build a new campus in areas with high demand for programs but gaps existed in access. The Markham proposal emerged from 19 applications, including Barrie.

Mercer said the decision is particularly frustrating since Barrie is the largest city in Canada without a full-time university. If the main criteria was bringing education to an area with strong demand but no access, he wonders how the Laurentian proposal failed to win.

"The site that has been chosen in Markham -- keep in mind there are 10 university campuses within 54 kilometres of that site,” he said. “So the idea that there's an access problem there -- there's certainly growth, I grant them that -- but is there really an access problem? You literally have 10 university campuses within 54 kilometres? I struggle with that.

"In spite of our best efforts, we only have eight programs here. That's not going to meet this community's need. It's a good staring point, it's a good base, but it's not going to fully address the needs of the community."

While there will be a second round next spring in which another area will be chosen for a new campus, Moridi seemed to rule out Barrie, saying that round will focus on the needs of people in the Peel and Halton regions. That decision also strikes Mercer as odd if the province's goal is to bring post-secondary education to places without access.

"The Halton-Peel area is certainly an area that's growing, so on one hand it seems sensible,” he said. "But Barrie does not have a full-fledged university campus within 75 kilometres of the city.

“Kitchener-Waterloo has the same population base, but they have 40,000 fully funded university spaces. Simcoe County has 3,000. That's the kind of stuff we're talking about."

While disappointed, Mercer said the next step is to explore ways to expand LU's programs in Barrie, particularly since the university has $39 million committed for expansion.

"We still have a thousand students, we have eight programs, and we have great students on campus,” he said. "What we were essentially asking the province was for them to match the money that was already on the table, which would allow us to fully build a 30-program campus – a full university campus with all the bells and whistles.

"There's lots of grey area between that and where we are today, so it becomes what parts of that are we prepared to explore with the city, which parts of it may the provincial government be interested in exploring? Those are really the key questions out there right now, and I don't have the answers to those questions yet."