Tuition fee increases at post-secondary institutions will be lowered from five to three per cent annually for the next four years, the Ontario government announced March 28.
This figure is a decrease from the five per cent per year rate that has been in place since 2006.
Liberal MPP Brad Duguid, minister of training, colleges and universities, said in a statement that the new policy “strikes a balance.”
“We are increasing fairness and affordability for students and their families while providing institutions with the long-term financial stability needed to provide a high-quality education for our students,” Duguid said. “We will also continue to ensure that students have access to higher education based on ability to learn, not ability to pay.”
The announcement noted that the new tuition increase rate is just one percentage point above Ontario’s average inflation rate during the past decade.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) said in a press release that Ontario students were “pleased” with the announcement, despite the government not going as far as they had hoped.
“Students are disappointed that the government has not frozen tuition for a year, nor limited all future increases to no more than the rate of inflation,” OUSA president Alysha Li said.
“Although today’s tuition framework announcement does not reflect many of the recommendations of Ontario’s students, we do recognize that this is a more affordable alternative to the framework that has been in place for the last seven years,” she added.
But Nora Loreto, a former communications and government relations co-ordinator for the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario, said the government’s announcement represents “smaller steps in the same direction.”
“The strategy is to make it look as if the Liberals are trying to address the affordability problem,” Loreto said, calling the policy a “public relations exercise.”
“Because tuition fees have already increased by up to 71 per cent since 2006, [students] are still going to be paying more next year,” she said. “There’s no way that you can claim that that’s fixing the problem. Anything that isn’t a reduction of tuition fees is not going to help students.”
Loreto is currently in a master’s program at the University of Saskatchewan, where she said she enrolled because the tuition was so much cheaper than in Ontario.
Loreto said it’s up to current Ontario students to fight for lower tuition fees.
“What students in Ontario need to understand is they have a responsibility to stand up to the government and to people who are saying they should pay more and identify the hypocrisies that exist within the system,” Loreto said.
“High tuition fees, when explained like it’s an investment in your future, students have to be saying ‘what future?’ and ‘who’s deciding this on our behalf?’”
