On the contrary, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says Newfoundland is some sort of post-secondary paradise.
The centre’s 32-page report — called “Tier for Two: Managing the Optics of Provincial Tuition Fee Policies” — is concise proof that the war on the young continues unabated in almost every corner of the country.
Nationally, university tuition and required fees have almost tripled since 1993-94. During the next four years, the price will rise by another 13 per cent, the report says.
In 1993-94, the average university tuition and fees in Canada was $2,320. In 2017-18, the average university tuition and fees will be $7,755.
“As core government (public) funding for post-secondary education has declined as a share of university operating revenue from 79 per cent to 55 per cent from 1991-2011, governments and individual institutions have turned to students to make up the difference with tuition and other fees,” the centre’s report states.
“Over the same period, the share of university operating revenue coming from tuition fees has increased from 18 per cent to almost 37 per cent.”
This is nothing short of a national scandal and a national shame. The hypocrisy involved is staggering.
Most cabinet ministers in any given province, likely in the general age range of 35 to 60, will have enjoyed the benefits of a much more affordable and accessible university campus.
If they enrolled in the 1970s, for instance, their annual tuition would have been in the range of $400. By the early 1980s, it would have risen to $600 or so. It doesn’t take nostalgia to recognize this was a terrific bargain, even with the vast differences in wages, the cost of living and musical tastes.
Ponder a 50-something cabinet minister who started university in the late 1970s. He or she would have paid $400 in tuition. Assuming an annual inflation rate of three per cent — and a corresponding three per cent rise in tuition — he or she would have paid about $1,100 in tuition in 2014, if he or she had opted to be a professional student rather than run for office.
But average university tuition in Canada in 2014 is nowhere near $1,100. It is $6,885, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Justice may be coming. More accurately, poetic justice may be coming. The baby boomers’ greed and selfishness just might come back at them.
Someday, some of those students who have to go $30,000 or $40,000 into debt to get a university degree will become ministers of health and ministers of finance and premiers.
Surely, one of them will look at the public ledger and proclaim, “We just can’t afford to keep paying for all these hip and knee replacements.”
If baby boomers are then required to pay 37 per cent of their own health-care costs, justice will indeed have been served.
What my generation has done to younger generations is a travesty and a betrayal. We benefited from affordable university tuition, and then denied it to others.
Newfoundlanders (and Labradorians) are apparently the most enlightened crowd in the country.
This year’s tuition and fees at Memorial University, at $2,871, are by far the lowest in the country. The next-lowest tuition and fees are $3,865, in Quebec. At the upper end are Ontario ($8,474), Saskatchewan ($7,226) and Nova Scotia ($7,067).
By 2017-18, average tuition and fees in Canada will have increased by $870, the centre’s report says. In Ontario, they will have increased by $1,010. In Nova Scotia, by $694. At Memorial University … by $16.
Newfoundland “is unique,” says the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The tuition freeze policy puts the province in first place, for a change.
Brian Jones is a desk editor at The Telegram. He can be reached at [email protected] and can be found on Facebook.
