StudentsNS has launched a new advocacy campaign to draw attention to financial difficulties students face in Nova Scotia, and to make the provincial government take action against these difficulties.
StudentsNS is an alliance of eight post-secondary student associations in Nova Scotia that researches challenges and provides solutions for post-secondary education, according to the organization’s website.
Jonathan Williams, the executive director of StudentsNS, said the campaign, known as Students Speak Out, is built around a government petition and videos of students discussing their financial challenges in going to school.
“The students interviewed each have significant debt ranging from $14,000-$75,000,” he said.
He also said the challenges the students face include getting enough money to pay for school, and finding meaningful jobs after graduation that let them pay off their debts.
The petition, he said, calls the provincial government to improve the Nova Scotia student assistance program, freeze tuition growth rate in the province “at least till employment conditions for young people are recovered to pre-recession levels,” and allow students to control approval of non-academic fees such as athletics fees.
Williams said changes recommended to the student assistance program include eliminating the maximum assistance amount for students in Nova Scotia, converting all student loans to grants, and addressing problems of how the program calculates a student’s resources to pay for school.
“In our view, it significantly overstates the resources that students can access, notably through the support of their spouses, if they’re married, or from their parents,” he said.
Nick Stark, national executive representative for the Canadian Federation of Students-Nova Scotia, said student debt across Canada “has to do with extraordinarily high tuition fees.”
Stark said both tuition fees and student debt are lowest in Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec as students have campaigned and won on tuition fee reductions.
“I hope that those results can be achieved by [StudentsNS],” he said. “It’s worth noting the Canadian Federation of Students has been advocating for the same kinds of proposals . . . for years now, so it’s great to see that Students Nova Scotia is getting on board.”
Stark said with enough student pressure, results can be achieved.
