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The new school year is almost upon us,
the traditional time in Canada for complaining about tuition fees and
how out of control they are, as The Globe and Mail reports.
University
tuition did rise quite a bit in the 1990s. In Ontario, the Mike Harris
government allowed fee increases of 20 per cent each year for its first
three years in office. Nationally, tuition regularly rose by 5 to 7 per
cent a year after inflation. Combine that with some fairly savage cuts
in student grant aid, and you could plausibly claim something of an
affordability crisis. But since 2000, provincial governments have been
reluctant to charge domestic students higher fees. Fees still rise
annually, but at a slow and steady average rate of 2 per cent a year
after inflation.
But that’s not the
end of the story. Over the past 15 years, governments have chosen to
pour money into various types of student assistance, so much so that
every single dollar of new fees taken in by universities and colleges
over the past 17 years has been matched by a dollar in non-repayable
grants, scholarships, tax credits, or education-savings grants.
Here’s
the math: Statistics Canada tells us the total amount of tuition and
fees collected in 2015-16 by universities and colleges was
$12.6-billion, up from $5.8-billion in 2000-01 (in 2016 dollars). This
rise was partly a result of tuition increases, but a bigger factor is
that universities and colleges now have a lot more students than they
did in 2000; full-time equivalent enrollment rose by nearly 50 per cent
over those 15 years. Moreover, a lot of those new students were
international students; if we take out the roughly $3-billion that these
new undergrads pay, the increase in tuition fees for domestic students
since 2000 amounts to a total of about $3.8-billion.
Source: The Globe and Mail
