Tuition fees have been at the forefront on Carleton’s campus recently, given the recent decision by the Board of Governors (BoG) to raise tuition again for the upcoming year.
At a board meeting on March 21, the board voted to increase domestic undergrad tuition by three per cent, on average.
Tuition fees for undergrad students in programs such as engineering will increase by five per cent, while international students in these programs will see an eight per cent increase.
At the meeting, Fahd Alhattab, the president of the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), and undergraduate student representatives Mohammed El-Kousey and David Andrews each abstained from voting on the motion.
According to Alhattab, CUSA abstained as a protest vote given that the options they were presented with were both unfair.
“On the one side, they’re saying ‘if you vote yes, you are voting yes to increased tuition for students,’” Alhattab said. “If you don’t vote yes but you vote no, then you are voting yes to cutting nine million dollars worth of services.”
These cuts to services could be reflected in larger classroom sizes, lower enrolment standards and poorer student services, according to the presentation given at the Board of Governors’ meeting.
At its core, however, Alhattab said he thinks the issue of tuition fees is one with no clear solution.
“It’s . . . easy to say no to raising tuition if you don’t see the trade-off,” Alhattab said. “But in basic economics—and business and organizations—there’s always a trade-off.”
The Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) organized a rally at the meeting, as well as a campaign in the lead up to the meeting to educate students on the issue.
According to GSA president Michael Bueckert, fighting tuition fees cannot be done on only one level.
“It has to be fought on all these different levels . . . We can’t focus our energy only on the university level—we have to look at these broader structures and be fighting all of them at the same time,” Bueckert said.
Bueckert said fighting tuition involves challenging the university’s framing of the issue, where it presents it as a cut-and-dried situation: cut staff or increase tuition.
“The university is in a very healthy financial position. We need to continue to challenge these assumptions that they use to tie our hands,” Bueckert said.
In 2015, the Board of Governors created a task force comprised of various representatives from the university to come up with alternatives to tuition fee increases.
The majority of members of the task force agreed that there was no feasible alternative to raising tuition fees.
According to Statistics Canada, undergraduate students in Ontario pay the highest tuition fees in the country. The university states tuition fees are contingent on the number of enrolment.
“A zero percent increase would force Carleton to seek 12 per cent high enrolment,” said Chris Cline, the media relations officer at the university, in an email.
According to Cline, Carleton’s average undergrad tuition for 2015-16 was in line with that at 10 other major universities in Ontario.
However, students are still fed up with the rising costs of tuition fees. Jacob Archer, a human rights student at Carleton, started an online petition that has since reached 1,920 signatures.
In the petition, Archer called on Carleton president Roseann O’Runte to freeze tuition fees.
“What really pushed me to start the petition was the lack of action I was seeing by CUSA against this hike in tuition, and the understanding that this type of hike is just going to make post-secondary education even further out of reach for children from families in middle class and the working poor,” Archer said in an email.
Although he doubts the petition will do anything to change the proposed hikes, Archer said he hopes it “really shows those in the Carleton establishment that students are feeling disenfranchised by their school.”
According to Archer, the only way to bring about substantial change in regards to this issue is by organizing a movement to protest against the hikes.
Going forward, Alhattab said CUSA needs to look at finding an effective way of addressing the issue.
“Unfortunately, our abstaining vote is not making a difference and the protests that are happening are not making much of a difference either,” Alhattab said. “So what is making a difference?”
