“It really hit me hard once I had to start paying it back when I became a part-time student,” said Joanne Lunag, a second-year Carleton communications student. “There were a lot of instances where I didn’t want to pursue any more university because of how much debt I was already in.”
One of the first in her family to attend university, Lunag has faced a dilemma that is common among Canadian students. Average tuition costs have risen by more than 20 per cent over the past five years. Costs are particularly acute in Ontario, where students face fees of $7,500 per year, according to Statistics Canada.
“You pay a lot of money for the reputation of being a highly educated person in society, even if you don’t necessarily know what that means at the time you’re signing up for it. A lot of people that come from backgrounds where you aren’t encouraged to think about your future, financially, academically; you do what you think is best, but it’s poorly guided,” Lunag said.
During the Canadian Federation of Students’ (CFS) 2016 annual lobby week which took place from Feb. 1-5, the group proposed its Post-Secondary Education Act to reform federal education subsidies. Its ultimate goal is to abolish tuition fees altogether.
The CFS policy consists of merging numerous federal tuition subsidies, including the Registered Education Savings Plan and federal textbook tax credit, saving a total of $3 billion. Those funds would then be sent directly to universities based on enrolment, offsetting the cost of tuition for students.
Gabrielle Ross-Marquette, the CFS’ national executive representative, spoke of providing equal education access to students across the country.
“We are calling on the federal government to introduce the education equivalent of the Canada Health Act, so we don’t have a country where students can go to university for a couple thousand dollars in Quebec or Newfoundland, but in Ontario you have to pay $8,000 in tuition fees each year,” Ross-Marquette said.
Alex Rady, a third-year Carleton political science student, said he supports the proposal.
“As someone living on a budget, it would definitely help not having to
shell out eight grand a year for tuition. People I know personally have had to budget crunch so much that it affected their marks,” Rady said.
Glen Jones, an Ontario research chair on post-secondary education policy at the University of Toronto, said he questions the viability of the CFS’ and the Ontario government’s policy.
“I understand that the idea to have a national standard or national regulation, but we have a long history in this country of high levels of decentralization, especially in education and higher education. Politically it’s hard to imagine right now,” Jones said. “It would require both a federal government role which not be considered appropriate, and substantial funding that is not likely to be considered feasible or desirable by the provinces. There is no national post-secondary education act, no federal ministry of education to implement such a program. Anything is possible, but the political challenges are probably insurmountable at this point.”
On Feb. 25, as part of its 2016-2017 budget, the Ontario provincial government announced its own strategy for affordable post-secondary education. Like the CFS proposal, the government will streamline the public funding process, unifying multiple grant and loan programs and repealing tax credits for graduates, with the savings added to the grant budget.
According to the Ontario Ministry of Finance website, under the new budget, students from families with incomes less than $50,000 will have no provincial student debt and free post-secondary tuition.
For students from families with incomes of $83,000 or less, the Ontario government will distribute non-repayable grants that will exceed the average cost of post-secondary tuition.
The budget also promises to increase access to loans for middle- and upper-class families, expand financial support for mature and married students, and raise the weekly assistance maximum levels of individuals, married, and sole-support parents.
Matthew Webb, an associate professor of economics at Carleton University, said he praises the announcement. He said he was encouraged by the reform’s progressive nature.
“The existing tuition and education tax credits are kind of a bad policy because you need to earn enough income to actually redeem those credits. What this Ontario program has done is eliminate these credits and now they’re in the form of grants for students when they start,” Webb said.
Webb also said he condemns the CFS proposal.
“The CFS’ plan is to have no tuition for everyone, and that is a very different policy, and probably a very poor policy. The majority of people in university are individuals from above average income families. Reducing tuition for everyone is going to disproportionately benefit well-off families,” Webb said.
Students today face tremendous pressures, from their family, to their studies, to their part-time employers, to an increasingly competitive job market upon graduation. Alleviating financial stress will lessen the greatest burden many students face today, but the form it takes will be left to provincial policy-makers.
Robbie Stewart, a fourth-year Carleton palaeontology student, said he has doubts about the new policies.
“I’m not sure if money is the correct way to do this—I mean it’s certainly an easy way—but it’s very good to incentivize students to do well in university and make sure there’s some sort of negative incentive for, not even failure, but for laziness. Actual, honest-to-goodness laziness,” Stewart said. “There’s already a punishment for failure—you have to repeat the course—but if you just repeat the course ad nauseum then there needs to be some sort of repercussion because you are taking up faculty time. And while they’re paid to do this, if the people paying them are not directly tied to you then what incentive do you have to work harder?”
—With files from David Ariza Diaz
