The Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) is saying that Camosun College is restricting intakes for the fall, and claims that it’s not in relation to demand; the CCFA also claims the college is overloading sections.
CCFA president Lynelle Yutani points to computer science programming in particular as an area where students are struggling to get in: seats in the Information and Computer Systems Technologist diploma program have been reduced from 72 to 40 this fall intake. Yutani says that despite waitlists, the college is cutting seats for financial reasons. (Camosun College declined to be interviewed for this story.)
“So, in particular, the course Computer Science 156 has been reduced from 100 seats down to just 20. And the course Computer Science 132 has been reduced from 72 seats down to 20,” she says. “So this is irrespective of demand, there are waitlists for these courses, and new sections have not been added because the college does not want to hire term faculty to teach these courses.”
These claims are the latest in a conflict between the CCFA and the college that’s primarily centred around how the college dealt with the federal government placing a cap on international students and the resulting financial strain. Yutani says that now what is happening is a “substantial number of faculty members have come to the union and said, ‘I’ve arrived to teach my course that normally has X number of students, and I’ve got X plus one or X plus three that I didn’t agree to.’”
“So what the college is doing is they’re taking the student class size caps, and they’ve just ignored them. They’re just adding students in, and they’re not appropriately addressing what that means for workloads for the instructor,” says Yutani. “And they’re not appropriately addressing what that means for fairness for students, because in the past, when there were too many students, or courses, they would open up additional sections, and then more students would be able to find those sections and take those courses.”
Yutani says that there are also problems with students not being able to enrol in classes that either aren’t offered or are offered in minimal sections; these students could potentially lose funding they have if they can’t keep a minimum level of classes. This can also cause problems for international students.
“So if I’m a student in a cohorted program and the courses that I need to take to progress are unavailable to me, and I can’t take enough courses to maintain my funding, my grants, my scholarships, then I can lose my student visa if I’m an international student, or I have to be in school for longer, which means more loans and more debt,” she says. “[You’re] loading the cost of your education, because you have to take something because you have to take something but it doesn’t help you achieve your program completion or your personal educational goals.”
Yutani says that it’s “devastating” to have to explain that the CCFA can only compel the college to follow the collective agreement. And sometimes, she says, it’s students who she has to explain that to.
“The collective agreement does not guarantee us good management,” she says. “It does not guarantee us evidence-based decisions, and it does not guarantee us that what the college chooses to do will always be student-centred. I got into teaching because those are the kinds of things that really mattered to me. So sometimes that’s a really hard thing to explain to people. And sometimes I’ve had to explain it to students because they’re looking for help in understanding why things are the way that they are at the college, too.”
Yutani says particular students will be disproportionately affected by these changes—students facing financial insecurity and juggling other responsibilities.
“The students that are trying to balance home and family life are students who might be single parents or have responsibilities for family care in the home, they’re the ones that are most affected always by restrictive schedules,” says Yutani. “Students that are trying to work or have challenges with housing are absolutely negatively affected by this, especially students who are temporarily relocating to Victoria to finish or complete their schooling. I think that having to be in a city that has a really high cost of living longer because you need to stay around for a whole other year to catch up to all the courses that you need to finish your program, that’s, I think, an unfortunate challenge.”