Every school year feels like a new beginning. September brings fresh opportunities, fresh anxieties, a sense of open-ended possibility. But this year more than most, college and university students are entering a system in enormous flux.

First, there are the finances. Economically, this province’s post-secondary institutions are in trouble—slashing hundreds of programs, firing thousands of instructors, and making big changes that will be keenly felt by the students they serve.

“Nearly two decades of stagnant provincial funding, a seven-year freeze on domestic tuition, and federal cuts to international student visas have left many of the province’s colleges and universities in dire financial straits,” writes Kunal Chaudhary in his data story explaining how Ontario got here.

Kunal’s story leads off our latest issue, Higher Education, and it’s the clearest explanation I’ve read yet of how this province’s post-secondary institutions got into such a desperate situation—a financial crisis revealed in a series of damning charts. The story also clearly lays out the consequences for the future. Post-secondary education is a huge part of this province’s economy, with activity from universities contributing 12 percent of provincial GDP. Our workforce—the nurses and electricians, teachers and carpenters the province so desperately needs—are the products of our colleges and universities. What happens if we don’t have the funds to educate them?

The financial crunch isn’t the only challenge universities and colleges are facing in 2025. Talk to students and professors today, and what emerges is a picture of a sector facing a series of existential questions. The mass adoption of AI has totally upended post-secondary instruction and evaluation. The political pressures on higher learning we’ve seen in the United States are being felt here, in subtler ways, with the Ontario government’s Bill 33, which would give the province unprecedented power over university and college operations.

All that change can be revealing. Under economic constraints, what programs does an institution choose to cut? When ChatGPT can write an undergraduate essay, what kind of learning does a student value? With economic, social, and political pressures, institutions are forced to try to answer a question that has been bubbling away in the background for decades now: What, exactly, is higher education for?

That’s the question that underlies the stories in our issue, launching today and continuing through the fall. We’ll analyze the data, and tell intimate stories from the city’s campuses. We’ll dig into the evolution of high-tech cheating, the fraught finances of York University, political pressure on Chinese international students, and shifting attitudes to sexual violence on campus. We’ll also visit a frat house.

In typical Local fashion, when covering sweeping changes, we want to hear from those most affected. In this case, that means the students. We spent this summer working with our Local Journalism Fellows—three promising young journalists either still at university or fresh out of school who have been able to bring us their perspectives and stories.

Questions about the purpose of higher education are also at the centre of Simon Lewsen’s thought-provoking essay, published today. Simon is a longtime Local contributor and an instructor at the University of Toronto. He’s seen the humanities in decline for the entirety of his career, but his essay avoids the more apocalyptic rhetoric that often comes with writing about how AI—or neoliberalism, or “political correctness”—has destroyed post-secondary education.

“In my own classroom, I’ve encountered surprising signs of renewed life in the humanities, which suggest that a renaissance could be possible, at least if people who care about this stuff can rise to meet the moment,” he writes. It’s a nuanced, ultimately hopeful look at higher learning at a moment of profound change.