Expense assumptions

Ontario Tech’s estimated expenses for 2024-2025 total $241.7M. These are illustrated in Figure 3. These are estimated based on the following assumptions:

Labour

Labour costs represent the overwhelming majority of our annual expense budget, and the largest increase in our total expenses in comparison to last year. This total increase of about $10.5M (year over year view in Figure 5) includes $6.5M to cover existing contractual commitments to salary and benefit increases, $1.5M for new faculty and staff, and $2.5M for additional sessional instructors and teaching assistant support.

Student experience and student financial aid

An additional $2.0M will be invested to support our students (i.e. $1.5M, mainly funded by ancillary fees, to support the student experience and $0.5M in financial aid).

Research

While most of the direct research funding (e.g. from the Tri-Agencies and other funding sources) goes into restricted faculty accounts, the operating budget increase includes an additional $1.5M of which two-thirds is covered by direct revenue (i.e. $500K for start-up funds, $500K for equipment related to advancing the energy research agenda, and $500K to fulfil Brilliant Catalyst contracts).

Capital infrastructure

An additional $1.1M will be invested in new assets and repairs to our IT and facilities infrastructure. Combined with the current base (which is mainly offset by grants), this brings the total capital investments to about $8.4M.