During the December 8th Board of Governors meeting, members of Trent’s Senior Administration took pains to express their feelings that Trent is “taken for granted” by the City of Peterborough as they discussed the progress of the ongoing internationalization efforts across both campuses.

Between inexplicable fits of uproarious laughter during conversations about the number of students Trent is managing to jam into Peterborough and Oshawa and the prospect of yet again raising tuition for international and out of province students, the Board found time to reflect upon some salient points about the nature of the school’s relationship with both municipalities.  

During discussion of a report from the Trent Durham Task Force, which included six recommendations including the creation of a new Vice President - Durham position, as well as the creation of a college system for the Oshawa campus, and looking at opportunities to expand the Trent Durham by buying and renting properties close to the existing campus, Groarke openly gushed at the growth of the Durham Campus and glowing relationship between Trent and the City of Oshawa.

“One of the remarkable things about Trent Durham is the relationship between the campus and the city of Oshawa,” Groarke said before adding, “I want to say this carefully, but when you have a campus in the city for 50, 60, 70 years, there’s a sense in which you get taken for granted – you’re causing a lot of headaches, whether it’s parking or student parties.”

Similar sentiments were later re-iterated by Vice President of External Relations, Julie Davis as she noted the work of Trent Governor Emeritus and former Chief Administrative Officer of Durham, Garry Cubitt. 

Cubitt, Davis suggested, “was always quite surprised at the, as Leo said, perhaps, [being] taken for granted in Peterborough.”

“Even when you talk about transit and the extent to which Durham Region would financially support students accessing transit, and [in Peterborough], you know, really we subsidize Peterborough transit – so just a whole philosophical difference,” Davis went on to say. 

Philosophical differences aside, Arthur assumes Davis meant to state that it is Trent University students, rather than the administration, who “subsidize” Peterborough Transit, which this year is slated to cost the City $13.5M in net operating expenses in 2024 – an increase of nearly 25% from 2023 – while total operating expenditures amount to $21M.

At the beginning of each academic year, Trent undergraduate students in most programs taking at least 1.5 credits pay a transit levy fee. For 2023-24, that amounts to $324.26 transit paid as part of their ancillary fees. 

In their final budget report for the year, The Trent Central Student Association (TCSA) reported that they spent $2.6M in transit service expenses in 2022-2023, which would suggest that Trent students provide approximately 20% of the transit system’s net operating expenses during any given year and just over 12% of total costs to operate transit in the City of Peterborough.

The Board of Governors is also in the midst of deliberations over the 2024/25 budget and with it is reporting an estimated 10.8% growth in enrolment at Trent for the current academic year. As it stands now, Trent will yet again be focusing on putting forward a “conservative” budget as it awaits the provincial response to a recent Blue-Ribbon Report on ensuring financial sustainability in the postsecondary sector. 

The report notes that while many universities across Ontario, including Trent, are experiencing a small decline in domestic undergraduate intake, “International and graduate enrolment is growing significantly and is mitigating the reduction in domestic intake for now.”

While government funding continues to remain flat, and Trent continues to drive enrolment growth far exceeding its provincially funded corridor – by 40% in 2022/23 – the administration and Board have once again committed to “adopting an enrolment growth strategy reliant on tuition-only revenue and international recruitment to offset inflationary pressures” while also noting that “Students are seeking tuition rate reductions, citing financial affordability concerns.”

Dean and Head of Trent Durham, Scott Henderson, noted that the campus in Oshawa has seen an increase in international enrolment on his campus grow from around 6% in 2019 to around 20% in 2023 as total registered students at Durham has risen to 2900 as of this year.

In addition, Henderson also noted that domestic growth has increased rapidly alongside it, noting a 50% increase in accepts from “traditional” OUAC 101 and 105 applicants since 2019. 

“The long-term trajectory looks very good,” Henderson said. “I know we talk about Internationals being very important, that’s helping us to fuel that longer-term growth.”

The “international file” as Groarke would later refer to it, is something that some institutions in the province are not handling very well. 

Key to this file, according to Groarke, is VP Finance and Administration Tariq Al-idrissi, who at one point Groarke called “his secret weapon when we go to the Middle East” due to his ability to speak Arabic, a comment which again drew a chorus of laughter from the Board. 

Groarke then immediately doubled down, proclaiming that Provost Michael Khan, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago before attending university in Canada and spending 12 years working in the United Kingdom, “was the star in Trinidad and Tobago and probably a trip to Africa.”

Following these comments, Groarke noted that applications from India are “way down.” 

“There's a lot of political reasons for that and what they're doing with visas, etc.,” he said. “It's hard to tell, that can be just a blip and three months from now, it will change. But in any case, we want a more diversified group of students coming to Trent, and we want more students coming from a more diversified set of countries.”  

Both Laurentian University and Wilfrid Laurier University, Groarke noted, have “almost no international students” before stating that Laurier “used to get tons of international students” until their recruiter came to Trent University” – a statement which received a round of laughter from the Board and which Groarke joked to have kept out of the minutes.

“We have managed both revenue generation, I think the board's been really great, and I think in the future it looks like we're gonna want revenue sources, and we've been careful with the costs,” Groarke said noting his personal view that Trent pays employees well and has “great working relationships with TUFA and with the other unions at Trent.”

Finally, a report on alumni engagement was presented by recently hired Director of Alumni and Engagement Services, Naomi Handley.

Key findings of the report is a 9% drop in “affinity for colleges” and the impact events such as the yearly Head of the Trent Celebration has on Trent’s reputation in the community and with alumni. The report also calls for the creation of a strategic plan as the lack of one “poses a risk” to alumni associations as there is a continued “lack of focus and an inability to demonstrate results, value, and performance.”

“Given the diversity in how our alumni wish to interact or engage with us, as well as diversity of our alumni, it becomes paramount that collaboration and communication across our campus and community partners is forefront in how we conduct our affairs,” Handley told the Board. “Alumni Engagement is truly a team sport. The next pillar is the need for a strategic plan to guide our work, particularly for principles and values and to identify the metrics of how we will measure our success.”

Speaking directly to and picking up on the “team sport” analogy, VP Communications & Enrolment, Marilyn Burns noted that “one of the things we see is an opportunity because there is data that is related to communication.” 

This data, Burns suggested, can be shared between the Colleges and the Alumni relations in order to create a more strategic approach to creating and maintaining connections with alumni through what she referred to as “a kind of brand journalism.”

“You can have distributed people across the institution, that are communications people, but they all share their stories and to share the wealth of stories that are mapping various areas,” Burns explained of the strategy. “So this is what we're really working towards is making sure of the coordination because what you hear in the report is that there has been siloing.”