High cost of higher education
Lack of summer jobs, rise in already lofty tuition fees forcing university students to sink deeper into debt
By SHARON LEM, SUN MEDIA
The Toronto Sun
TORONTO -- Nineteen-year-old Rodney Diverlus was desperate to take whatever hours he could pick up in part-time and casual work.
Cassandra Thompson, 19, marketed herself as a maid, while Vashti Boateng, 22, juggled three part-time positions to earn as much as she could.
Struggling to cope in a lousy student job market, they are three of thousands of undergraduate students who couldn't find full-time work this summer but had to line up this week to pay mounting tuition fees to register for the fall semester.
Ontario's university tuition fees are the second highest in the country -- almost $1,000 over the national average.
And fees for professional programs such as medicine are the highest in Canada, averaging $9,000 per year.
This combination of high fees and the worst job market in the country for student employment in decades has hit students hard.
'ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED'
Diverlus, 19, is already $10,000 in the hole with student Ontario Student Assistance Program loans. OSAP applications have surged 5.7% for colleges and 4.6% for universities this year.
"I feel angry and frustrated. Summer is a time to make money for school and now I'm going to be saddled with even more OSAP to pay back when I graduate," said the second-year Ryerson University dance student.
"What pisses me off more is that not only was I not able to find full-time work this summer, but tuition fees also went up $500, so it's a double whammy," Diverlus said, adding he'll need to secure a part-time job during the school year.
With the sagging economy and the worst job market students have seen in 32 years, Thompson was willing to get her hands dirty.
"No one was hiring. I couldn't get a job anywhere, so I decided to work as a self-employed maid. I'm relying on help from close friends and family and if I keep my grades above 80 again, I'll receive a $1,000 scholarship, so that will help a bit," said Thompson, a second-year sociology student at Ryerson.
Boateng said she took the three part-time jobs this summer to avoid adding to her $10,000 debt in school loans.
Student debt across the country has surpassed $12 billion.
Meanwhile, Ontario ranks dead last in per capita funding for post-secondary education, tuition fees continue to rise and students increasingly are hit by additional, ancillary fees for libraries, information technology and labs.
"The simple cost of going to school keeps going up and it's so unfair that getting your degree has become so expensive.
"(Premier) Dalton McGuinty needs to make post-secondary education more affordable and accessible as a basic right," said Boateng, a University of Toronto fourth-year political science and equity major who has worked since she was 14.
McGuinty has preached the need for the province to shift to a "knowledge-based economy" since before he was elected premier.
Sandy Hudson, president of the University of Toronto's students union, says in the last seven years that shift has been underway.
Hudson argues that approximately 70% of newly listed jobs in Canada require some form of post-secondary education, increasing the necessity for a degree in today's competitive job market.
"With the student unemployment rate at 21%, a huge number of students will not be able to access education if they can't get jobs to pay for tuition," she said.
"On a pretty regular basis, we are hearing about students in the awkward financial position of being unable to maintain a job or find employment and this is disturbing for most students," Hudson said.
Student unemployment rates spiked to 20.9% for July --the worst since 1977, when Statistics Canada started monitoring it.
Comparatively, in July 2008 the student unemployment rate was 13.8%.
Meanwhile, July's overall national average unemployment rate sat an 11-year high of 8.6%.
"Youth workers have less seniority and have less experience, so they faced the brunt of the recession, with 205,000 student jobs lost in Canada since October 2008," Sal Guatieri, senior enomonist with BMO Capital Markets, said, adding 84,000 of the 205,000 were in Ontario alone.
Over the next three years the University of Toronto will also be hitting up students with a new policy in which students pay a flat fee for tuition, regardless of whether they take three courses or six.
It's expected to generate around $10 million annually in net revenues for U of T.
"It's just another cash grab," Hudson said.
The recession has also contributed to more students applying for loans.
The take-up rate of student loans at U of T is 12% higher for this coming fall than last year and the rate of student loans at Ryerson is 10% higher over last year.
"Obviously when student unemployment is high, it will have an impact on the take up rates of student loans," Shelley Melanson, chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students Ontario, said.
"It's important to recognize the government has the ability to change public policy and change the cost of our education. In 2010, it will be the expiration of a four year tuition fee framework that saw tuition fees increase from 20 to 36% over the four years," Melanson said.
Ballooning student debt, at $12 billion and increasing by more than $1.5 million each day, is further compounding difficulties students face.
In Ontario, student debt has risen 300% -- to $28,000 from $8,000 in 1991.
"I'd like to tell Dalton McGuinty that the best way to improve the economy is to invest in education by increasing access to post-secondary education and reduce tuition fees to ensure easy access for students to learn," Melanson said. "It's a question of investing with more public funding and making it a priority.
"We've seen government after government not make education a priority," she said, adding former premier Mike Harris chopped education funding by $400 million a year while he was in office, which eventually caused tuition fees to skyrocket.
DECLINE IN FUNDING
School budgets have also been eroded by the global recession. According to the Council of Ontario Universities, the stock market meltdown will hammer endowment revenues by $180 million and lead to sky-high solvency payments to maintain schools' pension funds.
Years of funding neglect on top of current troubles has put Ontario is in last place in Canada for per capita funding for post-secondary education and second last based on per student funding, according to the Canadian Federation of Students.
Melanson says there's been a steady decline of provincial and federal funding for post-secondary education over the last two decades, which has results in higher tuition fees and users fees.
In the early 1990s, user fees accounted for an average of 21% of an institution's operating budget, but today user fees cover almost 50% of the institutions’ budget.
"One of Dalton McGuinty's election promises was to invest new money into education. Well, the $6.2 billion he's investing in post-secondary education isn't going very far because of the cuts in the 1990s. The new money wasn't enough to keep pace with the enrolment expansion we saw," Melanson said.
"We're seeing many institutions with tremendous shortfalls and not enough money in the system.
"Using public funding to lower tuition fees will make post-secondary education more accessible for all students, rather than hiking tuition fees," Melanson said.
Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities John Milloy said his government's five-year investment of $6.2 billion to support the post-secondary sector -- called the Reaching Higher plan -- is working.
"(It) is the biggest investment in over 40 years and half a billion of it was targeted to student aid," Milloy said.
Milloy said the tuition fee framework, which ends in 2010, worked by capping tuition fees at 4.5% in its first year and 4% in the three years following.
"We realize people are struggling everywhere ... I'm always the first to ask if we could do more, but I'm very, very proud of the progress which has been made," he said.
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UNIVERSITY FEES
Across Canada comparison
Ontario university tuition fees are the second highest in the country. Here's a look at average undergrad fees for 2008-09:
AVERAGE FEES
- Nova Scotia: $5,952
- Ontario: $5,643
- New Brunswick: $5,590
- Alberta: $5,361
- British Columbia: $5,040
- Saskatchewan: $5,010
- P.E.I. $4,530
- Manitoba: $3,276
- Newfoundland: $2,632
- Quebec: $2,167
- Canada average: $4,724
ONTARIO FEES
Sample undergrad programs
- Dentistry: $12,906
- Medicine: $10,392
- Law: $7,720
- Engineering: $5,310
- Computer science $4,947
- Business: $4,828
- Humanities: $4,478
- Social sciences: $4,318
- Nursing: $4,298
- Education: $3,666
Source: Statistics Canada