Ontario’s postsecondary education system resembles a 'house of cards'; fragile, strained, and nearing collapse under the weight of structural inequities, financial precarity, and eroding public trust. This Major Research Project asks not how to preserve a failing system, but how to cultivate new architectures of resilience, imagination, and civic stewardship.

Using a multi-method approach that includes systems mapping, timeline analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory foresight workshops, and wind tunnelling, the research traces the forces that have shaped Ontario’s higher education landscape. Four divergent future scenarios are developed to surface critical uncertainties and strategic tensions, alongside seven strategic intervention pathways designed to foster relational governance, regenerative learning ecosystems, and distributed leadership. A roadmap for phased institutional transformation is proposed, emphasizing adaptive, participatory, and place-based approaches.

The findings show that transformation will not emerge through incremental reform but through courageous acts of imagination, relational trust, and collective stewardship. Futures are not inherited. They are cultivated, through choices made today, and through the relationships we dare to build and sustain.