Policy in Ontario has aimed to provide public services in French for its francophone minority. One result has been the development of education in French at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels. Services in French at colleges and universities, however, have remained incomplete. This study is based on 1986 data and thus does not reflect any progress made at Laurentian University during the past five years. The purpose of this study was to examine reasons for two interrelated phenomena: one, a consistently low availability of university programming in French in Ontario vis-à-vis English-medium programming and two, continued low participation of francophones in university study relative to the rest of Ontario. Because differential provisions of postsecondary services in French versus those in English appear to be related to the differential distribution of the francophone and anglophone populations in Ontario, a geographic-regional approach is taken. The provision of university services is analyzed in terms of size constraints of institutions and their programming as they relate to size of surrounding populations. This is done by examining how delivery of educational services is organized, borrowing macro-parameters from Central Place Theory (CPT), which are adapted in this thesis to education. The 1986 data base was derived from three sources: one, those available for the provincial education systems in Canada; two, special compilations from bilingual universities in Ontario; three, data from a student survey undertaken in this study in the Laurentian University system in 1986: at the main campus in Sudbury and at Laurentian's geographically dispersed affiliates: the University Colleges of Algoma, Hearst and Nipissing. The new parameters from CPT for analyzing educational university services, and participation in these services, are then used to compare expected with observed values for the francophone and anglophone sectors at Laurentian and at Ottawa. The analysis indicates that the hierarchy of education institutions--elementary, secondary, college and university--is related to size and density of population in Canada's provinces, and that full-time undergraduate enrollment in Ontario's cities is correlated to the size of the respective cities' populations that reside within a 50 km radius. The study further shows how breadth of programs is dependent on size of enrollment and that the number of French-medium programs and the number of study fields in French at Laurentian University were lower than expected, given the size of francophone enrollment there. Other findings are that, while instruction in French tended to decrease with increasing level of study at Laurentian--as did the percentage of learning materials in French--there was an unmet demand among students for French-medium instruction. The evidence suggests there was room for expansion of programming in French in the Laurentian University system.