By Louise Thorpe, CEO, Thesis SM
I've spent thirty years working in higher education, most of it in the UK. So when I look at what's happening in Canada right now, I'm doing it as someone who cares deeply about the sector but who isn't living inside the Canadian system day to day. And what I'm seeing, particularly in the college space, has really stayed with me. Not because the challenges aren't solvable; I believe they are. It's the speed at which they're arriving, and the way they're layering on top of one another, that has stayed with me.
Canadian higher education matters to us at Thesis SM. We're fortunate to work alongside colleges there, to learn from people across the sector, and to pay close attention to what's unfolding. So I wanted to share a few honest reflections, and a few thoughts on where the right systems thinking might be useful.
What I'm Observing
What strikes me, looking in from the outside, is how quickly the picture has shifted. International student volumes have fallen sharply, and the college sector has felt that shift more than most. A revenue stream that institutions had quietly come to rely on has receded faster than almost anyone could have planned for.
The consequences are playing out in public. Institutions are reporting deficits, reviewing campus footprints, restructuring teams, cutting programmes. These aren't just financial headlines. They land on real people, in real towns, in colleges that are often the educational and economic anchor of their community. That's the part that stays with me.
From the outside, the structural picture looks layered in a way that makes the current shock feel almost inevitable in hindsight. Domestic tuition has been held flat for years, public funding per student has been under pressure for a long time, and international fees quietly became the balancing item. When that balancing item moves suddenly, the gap it leaves behind is enormous. And it's a gap most colleges had very little time to plan around.
A Pivot to Efficiency and Domestic Diversification
In this environment, the phrase "do more with less" stops being a management cliché and becomes a daily reality. From what I can see, colleges are being asked to rethink their operating models in a fairly fundamental way. Reviewing programme portfolios, restructuring teams, automating more of the administrative grind, and pivoting hard towards domestic recruitment and retention. All at once. All under pressure.
This is the point where, as someone who spends their working life thinking about student information systems, I can't help but see how central the underlying technology becomes. Not as a shiny purchase. As the plumbing that decides whether any of the other changes can actually be delivered.
When I talk to colleagues across the Canadian sector, the themes are remarkably consistent. Administrative teams are overstretched. People are stitching student data together across legacy systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Reporting demands keep growing, while headcount keeps shrinking. One of the genuine difficulties is that, when budgets tighten quickly, institutions can find themselves leaning more heavily on manual workarounds and fragmented data, which over time tend to cost more time and effort than they save.
Where Better Systems Actually Help
I've watched UK institutions move off legacy platforms, and the operational difference has been meaningful for them. I share that not as a template, because Canadian colleges sit in their own context and know it far better than I do, but because the underlying pressures (financial constraint, the need for efficiency, rising regulatory demands) feel familiar across both sectors. My sense is that colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic stand to benefit equally from rethinking the systems underneath the work.
From where I'm sitting, these are the capabilities that exist within Thesis SM that seem to matter most for the college sector right now.
Doing more with smaller teams. Strong self-service for students (enrolment, transcripts, financial accounts, forms, progress tracking) takes a real chunk out of the administrative load on stretched staff. Every interaction a student can handle themselves is one a staff member doesn't have to, which frees those staff up for the higher-value work only humans can do.
No-code configuration. Colleges don't have the luxury of long, expansive IT projects right now. So the ability for registry and administrative teams to configure their own workflows, communications and reports, without raising a development ticket every time, stops being a nice-to-have. It becomes essential. The system has to bend to the team, not the other way round.
Financial management under pressure. With every dollar of revenue under more scrutiny, clean and reliable fee management (tuition matrices, payment plans, sponsor accounts, refunds, proper integration with finance systems) really matters. It isn't glamorous. It is foundational. Errors in student finance, especially for international students sitting on top of complex fee structures, are costly in every sense of the word.
Regulatory compliance. From the outside it's striking how quickly the compliance demands on Canadian colleges have grown. Immigration-related reporting, domestic funding returns, various data submissions. A system that treats statutory reporting as a core part of how it works, rather than something bolted on at the end, takes a serious operational risk off the table.
Data-driven decision making. Colleges need to be able to see, in close to real time, which programmes are performing, where enrolment is dropping, and what the student experience actually looks like. Reporting and querying capabilities that put that visibility directly in the hands of registry, recruitment and academic teams, rather than queuing behind an over-stretched data analyst, change how quickly an institution can react.
Domestic Student Growth Requires Better Systems Too
One theme I keep hearing from Canadian colleges is a renewed focus on domestic students and on lifelong learning. With international volumes down, institutions are looking much more seriously at mature learners, part-time students, micro-credential pathways and continuing education.
From a systems perspective, this is genuinely exciting. Flexible programme structures, rolling intakes, credit transfers, continuing education management. These are exactly the capabilities a modern student information system has to handle properly. And the good news, if there is good news in all this, is that if you're going to modernise anyway, this is the moment to build for the institution you want to be in five years, not just patch the one you've got today.
Implementation in a Constrained Environment
Let me be direct about something, because it would be odd not to. I'm aware that "invest in a new student information system" can feel like an awkward thing to suggest when institutions are actively cutting budgets. So let me address that honestly.
The harder question, I think, is what the real cost of not modernising looks like over time. Legacy systems carry a lot of hidden costs: IT maintenance overhead, manual workarounds, compliance risk, and the everyday friction of processes that quietly consume staff time. From the outside, my impression is that the institutions that come through this period in the strongest position will often be the ones that used the pressure as a prompt to operate more efficiently, alongside the careful financial stewardship the moment also calls for.
At Thesis SM, we've designed our implementation approach with exactly this kind of environment in mind. Canadian colleges don't start from a blank page, because we bring a pre-configured higher education foundation with the common processes already built. We work iteratively, so institutions see real value and test against real data throughout the project, not at the end of a multi-year programme. And we try to be straightforward about what implementation actually requires from a college's team, because surprises mid-project are the last thing anyone needs right now.
A Final Thought
I started this piece by saying Canadian higher education feels, from the outside, like it's at a crossroads. I really do believe that. But crossroads aren't only moments of crisis. They're moments of choice. The colleges that come through this disruption in the strongest position will, I think, be the ones that chose to get their data in order, streamline their operations, and invest in the infrastructure to serve students well with leaner teams.
That's the kind of decision Thesis SM exists to support, and it's one we'd genuinely welcome an open, unhurried conversation about with any Canadian institution that's reflecting on what comes next.
Louise Thorpe is CEO of Thesis SM, a student information system built exclusively for higher education in the UK, Ireland and Canada. She has thirty years of experience working within UK universities and in global edtech companies.
Find out more about how Thesis SM supports Canadian colleges.