The rising cost of education

There’s a lot of talk in the upcoming provincial elections about tuition costs in Ontario. It’s no secret that Ontarians pay the highest tuition in Canada – about $6,300 per year – which is more than a thousand dollars higher than the national average.

Every political party has a plan on how to attack this problem, but what’s often overlooked is the cost that international students pay to attend postsecondary education in Canada. Domestic students’ tuition is controlled by government mandate, but international student tuition was deregulated in 1996 during the premiership of Mike Harris.

Last year, Lakehead University raised tuition on students from abroad by as much as $1,399, amounting to nearly a ten percent increase in fees. While domestic students also felt the sting of increases, the limits on how much tuition can be raised – about 5% – prevented many students from feeling the impact of the rising costs of attending postsecondary education.

It may have been easy to dismiss the matter entirely had almost any university not raise tuition by nearly the maximum amount allowable for the past four years. That spells out an increase of over 20%, and that’s not even counting the international students who have seen their tuition soar to increasingly unfathomable heights over the past half decade.

More and more, international students are seen as a “cash cow,” – ready and willing to offset the costs associated with capping domestic tuition increases. Many students can no longer afford to come to Canada due to this reality, and with their departure they take with them their knowledge, desire, and passion for their fields-of-study.

Future engineers, doctors, scientists, and lawyers – all of whom would proudly wear the colours of their Ontarian university of choice and add to the reputation of some of the most culture- and tradition-rich educational institutions in the world – will be forced to seek knowledge elsewhere, depriving not only Ontario, but Canada, of students who may become some of the brightest, most sought-after individuals in in their fields.

The state of education in Ontario is a hot-button topic in the elections – and with good reason. Students easily boast a controlling constituency in the races – an electorate that, if rallied together with a solid agenda and common goals, would crush mountains and drain oceans.

Our elected officials are hoping we don’t notice the fact that we, collectively, have the power to change the face of not only Ontario, but Canada, in our favour. They pivot and dismiss our concerns in the anticipation that we feel we lack the power to effect change and go back to worrying about where the next big party’s going to be.

I think we’ve noticed, though. That’s why we’re seeing such great movement in the political arena of what to do about Ontario’s education problem. Leaders are talking in ways that they haven’t talked for a long time, and we need to keep up that pressure so that they not only continue talking, but start doing.

Your vote, although one, counts for much more than a single tick on a ballot. With it, you write your own page in the annals of history. Now we have to make sure that our collective pages don’t just amount to a chapter in a dusty, long-forgotten book, but rather author an opus of such legendary scale, that generations from now will talk of the sort of work that we have done.

Don’t forget to cast your ballot on October 6th so we can make history together.

Daniel Bacsa
Editor-in-Chief

Tags: from the editor

Category: Editorials