By Sasha Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 4, 2012
Could you afford school with a 75 per cent increase in tuition? Dish out an extra $325 per year for the next five years? Quebec students are having the same reaction you would, with tuition increasing $325 each year until an overall increase of $1625 is reached in the 2016-2017 academic year.
The increase in post-secondary education tuition fees was included in the budget by the Quebec Liberal government. According to CBC News, the government named the hikes a necessity, to reverse under-funding and deficits.
According to Statistics Canada, Quebec currently has the lowest tuition rates for residents at $2519 per year. The 75 per cent increase would put them to third of the provinces at $4144, leaving Newfoundland and Labrador with the most affordable at $2649. British Columbia is at fourth, with an average of $4852 per year.
Keep in mind minimum wage and the cost of living: Quebec minimum wage is $9.65 – which sounds pretty good to me, a BC student working at $8.25 an hour for the past two years, even with the recent increases. Our cost of living is higher on average, too. It’s an average of $1003 rent for a two bedroom place, while in Quebec it costs $629, according to the Quebec provincial government webpage. I can’t help but be drawn to Newfoundland and Labrador; it costs $616 average rent for a two bedroom place, and minimum wage has been $10 an hour since 2010.
But the hikes in Quebec are ominous. Julia Wolfe, a student at Concordia University, said the student body is extremely unhappy with the proposed hikes. “Students are out in the streets, every day. Today there was a huge masquerade protest … It’s been a protest marathon these past few days, and that will continue.”
Wolfe said that she is not impressed with Concordia’s fiscal abilities, and the huge tuition increases will not be of benefit to students worthy of such huge hikes. “My understanding and my experience is that there will not be an increase in quality of our education. I mean, I could definitely speak for Concordia in saying that they are experts in wasting money.”
“Frankly, I don’t know why we would give people more money, people who’ve already proven they’re not capable of handling what they have now,” Wolfe remarked. “And why we think that suddenly they would be able to spend even more … I just don’t think students should have to pay for that.”
Wolfe, who is editor-in-chief at Concordia’s student paper, The Link, explained that she is lucky: even if the hikes go through, she only has one more year to go. “I could afford an education, but I am an international student, and I’m going to see my tuition go up a lot more.”
For other students, an affordable education might be placed out of their reach. “I mean, it’s hard. I do believe that education is a right, not a privilege, that no matter where you come from you should be able to go to school. It’s sort of hard to say reasonable cost, you know, I think it differs from province to province. I think in a province like Quebec, where people are paying really high taxes, they should be getting really low tuition fees. That’s reasonable.”
There should be a decent balance between affordable education, and education that has quality. If Concordia and other universities in Quebec are not capable of handling the flow of money to properly benefit students, the hikes will only be a huge strain on student debt. This will lead to a future generation deep in debt and a country struggling to keep its head above water.
The strength of the student protests are promising. “I think the government’s going to have to back down,” Wolfe says. “With the numbers that we have now, we can already see the government start to crack … If we keep pushing we’ll see the deal we think is reasonable.”
Hopefully students in Quebec will find their government more yielding than the BC government is, as far as education goes. Imagine if students had to fight the same battle as the BC Teacher’s Federation? But with such strong dissent of so many future voters, with any luck the Quebec government will back down.
