Should selling real estate require a college diploma?

Should selling real estate require a college diploma? Let’s look at the case for and the case against.

In Ontario, real estate education is not a credential. It’s a course. You must have finished high school or an equivalency, pay one of four approved providers, work through the pre-registration program, pass your exams and register with the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO). There’s no diploma at the end, no standing in the post-secondary system, and because the program gets no direct provincial funding, it doesn’t qualify for the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP).

That arrangement has held for years without much argument. Lately, the argument has started, quietly and mostly among instructors: replace the course with a recognized college diploma, an OSAP-eligible credential, ideally with a practicum attached. Note the ceiling, though. The serious proposal is a diploma, not a university degree. No Canadian jurisdiction requires you to earn a degree to sell a house, and a four-year degree would screen more for access to, and the money for, university long before it screens for any skill in negotiating for buyers and sellers.

Quebec is presently the only province that runs real estate licensing through a recognized college credential, and, as such, that credential allows students to qualify for provincial loans and bursaries. Everywhere else, the licensing course sits outside the student-loan system.

The case for

It opens the door to financing. The current program can’t be funded through OSAP because no provincial money flows into it. A diploma would change that automatically, the way Quebec’s credentials open access to its loans and bursaries for students. Ontario has even started funding professional training this way through OSAP for micro-credentials, including the mortgage agent program. The plumbing exists. Real estate just isn’t connected to it.

It gives the job real standing. Our training is already consistent; RECO sets the curriculum across every provider. What we don’t have is status. A diploma means a transcript and a solid credential that a bank, a client or another profession recognizes, which a course-completion certificate never will. A diploma wouldn’t teach the material any better. It would, though, let the qualification stand on the same footing as other professions.

It could raise the bar and reduce some of the industry’s turnover. Put real cost and real length in front of people, and you screen out a share of the noncommittal and part-time entrants who treat registration as a low-stakes side gig. A more committed cohort is one likely result. A practicum is another: putting a new agent’s first deals under supervision rather than out in the open with what is usually a client’s single biggest asset.

The precedents are close to home. None of this is a shot in the dark. Quebec shows the financing works. And Ontario has done the harder version of this before: in the same stretch of years that gave us RECO and the Trust in Real Estate Services Act (TRESA), the province took its paralegals from anyone-can-hang-a-shingle to a mandatory accredited college diploma plus a licensing exam. Nobody seriously claims today that paralegals are over-trained.

The case against

It raises a wall in front of the wrong people. Real estate has always been a way to earn a professional income for career changers, newcomers and people who never finished a degree. A longer, pricier program puts a bigger barrier in their path. OSAP eligibility takes some of the sting out, but it doesn’t remove it, and screening people out on time and tuition has very little to do with whether they’ll look after a client.

The financing point hides a debt trap. Making the program OSAP-eligible sounds purely generous. It isn’t. It would nudge people into borrowing money to enter a commission-only job with no salary, no floor and a dropout rate the industry doesn’t like to talk about. If the credential doesn’t also improve the odds of lasting past year two, then all the loan does is let people borrow their way into a bad bet, and it aims that bet at the very entrants most likely to wash out still owing money.

A credential is a very indirect fix for some real problems. If what we want is competence on the ground and better ethics, a diploma comes at the question sideways. The ethical pressure in this business has more to do with how we get paid than with how many hours anyone studied, and no syllabus addresses that; it is a topic for separate discussion. And if we are seeking to address the high rates of attrition in the industry, let’s look at British Columbia: a harder program, a tough exam, and still no shortage of agent churn. That tells you a more difficult program mostly identifies who’s good at exams, not who sticks around. Articling or supervised first transactions might land closer to the real weak points, and cost less to do.

I should note that, as part of its TRESA Phase 3 advocacy, the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA) recommends introducing a new two-year mentorship and articling requirement for new registrants to provide practical training and better equip new agents for a modern market, and it claims that nine in 10 Ontario Realtors support introducing an articling requirement for new registrants. However, RECO hasn’t committed to OREA’s specific proposal.

It shifts control, and that means a fight. Quebec’s system parks curriculum authority with the education ministry and its colleges. Doing the same here would mean taking the program out of RECO’s hands, and RECO has just finished rebuilding it around being “practice-ready from day one.” Agents won’t be the ones resisting. The regulator that owns and controls the current program will, and that kind of fight moves slowly.

It is important not to oversell or overreach in proposing advanced real estate education, but it is equally important not to claim it is too ambitious to consider. Because for a college diploma, the argument that Ontario would be out on a limb simply isn’t true. Quebec is already there. Push past a diploma toward a university degree, though, and the objection lands hard, because the further up the credential ladder you climb, the harder it gets to square with what the job truly asks of a person.

Summing it all up

The middle option seems to hold up better than either the status quo or the grander one. An OSAP-eligible college diploma with a practicum, built on Quebec’s model and our own paralegal history. Not a degree. And not dressed up as a cure but tied to something that really helps people get through the early years, rather than just borrowing against them.

But let’s be honest, this is not going to solve every problem and concern present in the industry at a time of unique considerations and rapid change, such as the introduction of artificial intelligence and challenges to the traditional pricing models, and anyone selling a diploma as the answer is overselling it. So, the question the industry needs to address isn’t whether a credential would raise our standing, because it probably would. It’s whether we’re willing to be straight about its limits, and about who ends up paying to find them out.

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