Why Students Will Protest Today

See related photo gallery: A Study in Protest

Why will thousands of B.C. college students be skipping class today to join a 'Day of Action" protest?

Because the cost of our tuition has more than doubled in two years, forcing families to pay $210 million more last year in tuition fees than they did when Premier Gordon Campbell took office.

Why should that price gouge matter to anyone not striving for a degree at the moment? Democracy itself may be at stake, as well as its sustaining "genius", says one of Canada's leading thinkers.

"Wherever tuition goes down, enrolment goes up," writes John Ralston Saul. "And where does the increase in students come from?  From those with less money. In other words, the lower the fees, the more egalitarian the society. The lower the fees, the more we are able to release the genius of the citizenry as a whole. And that genius, that collective unconscious is the key to a successful democracy."
 
And yet, students across this province are bracing for another round of massive tuition fee increases, some to rocket up by a third next year.

This is in part to offset next year's five percent budget cuts to post-secondary institutions announced by the Liberals.

Result: The third year of massive tuition fee increases since 2002, when Premier Campbell broke his promise to freeze tuition fees.

Pocketbook vs. merit

In the last two years, tuition fees have increased by more than 80 percent at BC universities and by more than 100 percent at BC colleges.

Now administrators at Simon Fraser University have proposed tuition fee increases of up to 35 percent for the coming year, which would take fees at SFU to almost $5,000 per year.

Students at the University of Victoria expect to face another 30 percent increase.

"Tuition fees at Okanagan University College have nearly tripled after this year's increase" said Shayne Robinson, a student at Kelowna's Okanagan University College (OUC).

Tuition fees at the Penticton Campus of OUC, which has no real library, increased from $1,400 in 2001-2002 to $3,800 this year.

At Vancouver Community College, College administrators plan to implement fees of $280 per course for adult basic education (grade 4 to 12) courses. Adult basic education courses are offered to those attempting to complete or upgrade their high school equivalency, and until recently have been provided at no cost.

Bottom line: Many students will be forced to drop out of school because they simply cannot afford an education. Earning a degree is no longer a matter of merit, but rather the size of a students' pocket book.

Just ask Shayne Robinson at OUC. "The truth is, some of my former classmates aren't in classes this semester simply because the cost of an education has gotten out of hand."

College affordability at historic low

Such rapid fee increases clearly hurt students' chances of pursuing post-secondary studies, according to Statistics Canada's Youth in Transition Survey, released in January 2002. It found that over 70 percent of high school graduates who wanted to go to college, but didn't, listed their financial situation as a main obstacle preventing them from attending.

A similar percentage of college drop-outs cited financial barriers as the reason they quit.

But when it comes to making post-secondary education affordable, B.C. is at an all time low, according to a recent study by the Canadian Association of University Teachers.  

The report examines changes in tuition fees from 1857 to 2002. When fees are adjusted for inflation, undergraduate university students today are paying more than at any other time in the past century, and six times what a student was charged in 1914.

The Premier likes to assert that higher tuition fees make a quality post-secondary education more available. But numerous studies show otherwise for low and middle-income students. A University of Western Ontario study, for example, found that as deregulated tuition fees rose, the percentage of students from low-income families in post secondary education declined by half over a four year period.

Such common sense backed by hard facts doesn't faze Gordon Campbell, who seems bent on being remembered as the Premier who skyrocketed the cost of getting an education.

This growing crisis on our campuses, and in our democracy, is why the Canadian Federation of Students took its "Bring Tuition Fees Back to Earth Tour" to more than 40 communities throughout B.C. in the past four months. And why we are demanding that the B.C. Liberals:

• Legislate tuition fees to be set at 2001-2002 levels
• Increase post-secondary education funding
• Increase significantly the number of fully funded spaces available to students at BC's public post-secondary institutions
• Maintain and augment the needs-based, non-repayable grants program
• Call on the federal government to restore federal funding for post-secondary education and to negotiate a national agreement on standards of quality, accessibility and mobility for post-secondary education

For more information on our campaign and how you can add your voice of protest, go to www.cfs.bc.ca

Summer McFadyen is BC Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students which unites more than 450,000 college and university students across Canada through a cooperative alliance of over 70 students' unions.