Dem Präsidenten der Hochschule, die den größten Zuwachs an internationalen Studenten verzeichnete, wurde auf seinem abrupten Weg aus der Tür ein riesiger Zahltag überreicht
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/conestoga-college-board-john-tibbit-payout
2 Kommentare
From the headline I was thinking it might be like $100k or $250k somewhere in that range, but nope:
>When John Tibbits abruptly resigned as president of Conestoga College on Jan. 14, he walked away with an exit package worth **more than** **$3 million.**
And I’m sure a great cheer rose up from the all the current students and all the alumni who watched the worth of their diplomas diminish thanks to his bullshit „pack ‚em in“ philosophy – „You deserve it! You deserve it!“
Honestly, there is some serious rot going on with post secondary administrations. Consteoga cannot be looked at in a vacuum. This dude was charged with running a Canadian school, proceeded to ruin the quality of education at his school to the point where the province had to step in and appoint its own administrator to run it and was handsomely rewarded for his troubles.
I understand he’s also persona non grata pretty much all over Kitchener-Waterloo for the strain his imported student body put on public services and local rents.
I’d call the dude a leech if I wasn’t afraid of running afoul of Rule #2
The thing that bothers me about this story is that the province designed a system that financially rewarded aggressive international expansion, then politically punished the institution that became the most successful at executing it.
People are acting like Conestoga went rogue, but Ontario colleges have been pushed into behaving like competitive enterprises for years. Domestic tuition was constrained, public funding didn’t keep pace, and international tuition became the pressure valve that kept the system growing.
Conestoga didn’t invent that model — they just leaned into it harder and more successfully than everyone else.
You can absolutely debate whether the growth became too aggressive, whether governance failed, or whether the compensation package was excessive for a public-facing institution. Those are fair criticisms.
But if this were a private-sector organization with that kind of enrollment growth, revenue growth, campus expansion, and operational scale, a CEO making ~$600k with a large exit package would barely raise an eyebrow. In many sectors it would probably be considered low.
We constantly say we want education to attract top-tier leadership and talent, but then seem shocked when someone running one of the largest and fastest-growing colleges in the country is compensated more like a major executive than a traditional academic administrator.
The bigger issue isn’t really Tibbits individually — it’s that Ontario created a system where colleges are expected to compete like corporations, but are judged politically as though they’re still operating like small publicly administered institutions.