After half a century, longtime college program nears radio silence

For 54 years students have flocked to Algonquin’s radio program, searching for opportunity, to develop a presence, to have their voices be heard.

Here, they’ve found not only that but so much more: success, lasting careers, friendships and community.

“It’s a really tight-knit group,” says program coordinator Jessica Brando. “They walk in as strangers and by the end of the two years, they’re like family.”

The college’s recently announced proposal to suspend 30 programs is a harsh reminder for the radio students, who were facing the same fate a year ago along with 36 other programs.

In February 2025, the radio program was suspended by the college and did not accept any new students in the fall. The reaction within the program was immediate and intense.

“When the news actually broke, our program director at the time, Dan Mellon, who’d been here close to 20 years, was so emotionally impacted that it broke us all,” says second-year radio student Tristan Escobar. “For the rest of that year, everybody was all down in the dumps.”

Escobar is one of the students on track to graduate when the program wraps up at the end of the semester. He says that despite the program’s looming shutdown, his peers have tried to make the best of the situation.

“We all kind of came together and said, ‘Okay, in this new year, we’re gonna have a different mindset. 
We can’t just be sad. Let’s go out with a bang, let’s give it everything we got… And really make these people regret that they’re shutting our program down.’”

Sitting and watching Escobar on air with fellow second-year radio student Owen Landry highlights a hole that will be left in the media school: the student-run radio station CKDJ 107.9 FM.

The college was granted the licence for the station in 1993, and since the following year CKDJ has operated as an FM radio station completely run by college students, covering everything from pop hits to local sports.

“Getting to work with sports has been really fun and it’s helped me get a good look at the real world,” says Landry. “That’s what I want to do in the future.”

Landry is set to graduate this year alongside Escobar, but not all radio students share that good fortune.

Brando explained that the closure means that faculty and students alike will be scrambling to find equivalencies in order for students to graduate.

“We still have some students that won’t graduate this year,” says Brando. “It’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Right now, myself and the academic chair are trying to find different ways so that these students can get that learning, and they might have to go outside the college, which is kind of crazy.”

Algonquin is just one of many institutions, like Humber College and Fanshawe College, closing their radio programs. While it seems like the program itself may be at an end, the future of the station and the license of CKDJ is still up in the air.

“It just feels like we’re being made extinct,” laments Brando. “(Our radio) licence is valid until 2030, but just because the licence exists doesn’t mean it’ll be played out until the end.”

Escobar is similarly concerned for the future of students, and radio as a whole.

“Most of the people in our program, and even from the students last year, there’s probably a quarter of us who are actually guaranteed to have a job in radio in the future,” he says.

“From my experiences with talking to so many different radio hosts, my conclusion is that it’s just very much stagnant at the moment.”

Brando challenges those who say radio is a dying art.

“There’s a lot of pessimists who say, ‘Oh, well, radio is a technology of the past’… But it’s not. We have 20 students right now out on placements in different radio or radio-adjacent fields,” she says.

“I think that it’s a bit of a misnomer. I think they should say what it is,” says Brando when asked about the suspension.

“There’s no going back from this. It’s not like they’re going to unsuspend us.”