THE Canadian Federation of Students, its member unions and allies will step up the fight for accessible education in Newfoundland and Labrador against a 30 per cent tuition and residence fee hike for students attending Memorial University.
Students demonstrated outside Gushue Hall last Thursday, where Memorial University’s Board of Regents was inside voting through a budget proposal to raise tuition fees for graduate and medical school students, as well as on-campus residence fees, by 30 per cent.
A coalition of unions representing MUN students, faculty and staff says it will continue to fight for more accessible post-secondary education before the hikes come into effect in 2016. The decision to raise the fees comes two and a half months after the provincial government announced $50 million in funding cuts to the university.
Student union leaders say non-Canadian students, as well as those living in residence, are among the most financially vulnerable students at MUN and will be negatively impacted by the fee increases. ‘An increase in tuition fees for groups of students who are already struggling will only drive them out of the system, sabotage their future, and undermine the future of this province,’ Memorial University Students’ Union Director of Student Life Brittany Lennox told the crowds of protestors outside MUN’s University Centre last Thursday.
‘We need to keep the tuition fee freeze, not only because our individual futures depend on it, but also because our collective future, and the collective future of Newfoundland and Labrador, depends on this tuition freeze,’ she said. In 1999 tuition fees were reduced 25 per cent and frozen for students at Memorial University and College of the North Atlantic campuses, a provincial government policy that has been maintained for the past 16 years due in part to lobbying by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), which represents five unions and all 27,000 post-secondary students in the province.
‘The last thing we need right now is to jeopardise the fragile gains that the tuition fee freeze has lent us,’ CFS N.L. (Canadian Federation of Students Newfoundland) Chair Travis Perry told the crowd gathered at MUN on Thursday. ‘It’s the tuition fee freeze, not oil revenues, that has been pivotal in increasing enrolment at our institution, in boosting immigration, in strengthening our labour market, and in ensuring we can say that we are the best province for accessible post-secondary education in the country.’
Perry argued that maintaining the tuition freeze significantly lessens the burden of debt and stress for students in Newfoundland and Labrador, giving them a better opportunity to pursue careers they’re interested in rather than ones that will most quickly help them pay off their debt. The coalition has also argued that the tuition freeze has helped alleviate demographic challenges facing the province, such as an aging and declining population and lack of skilled workers.
Maryam Shaheen, Director of Student Life for MUN’s Graduate Students’ Union, said that students at MUN are ‘already struggling to get by’ for various reasons and will be negatively impacted by the fee hikes. Here at Memorial we have some of the lowest funding packages in the country. Many students don’t have funding at all,’ she said.
‘In order to conduct our research or to share our work at conferences, we have to factor in considerable travel costs to get there. There is a very limited market for part-time jobs that graduate students can access. For those of us with families, childcare is too expensive,’ Shaheen continued, listing some of the factors potential students will think about when considering MUN.
‘Many of us haven’t seen our families in four years. Not to mention the weather, the lack of public transit, the higher cost of living, and the other day-to-day challenges of living here. The fact is the tuition freeze is the single biggest factor drawing students to this university. If our fees go up graduate studies simply won’t be sustainable here – certainly not for the best and brightest, which our university is currently able to attract thanks to the freeze.’
A 2008 report by the university’s Centre for Institutional Analysis and Planning revealed 82.8 per cent of students surveyed in 2007 said MUN’s ‘financial affordability’ was an important reason they chose to attend the university. It’s a harsh and frustrating reality when the hard work we contribute to this university and to the province goes unrecognised and unacknowledged by the very well-paid administrators and government officials whose budget proposals will now make it even more difficult for us to continue contributing our work and our ideas to this institution,’ said Shaheen.
‘Even though many of us struggle by without funding, without jobs, without even earning enough to make it above the poverty line, we are not asking for much. We are just asking to be allowed to continue our work, our studies, our contribution to this university.’
Perry said provincial student grants only account for 40 per cent of students’ post-secondary funding – the other 60 per cent comes from federal loans – and that the tuition and residence fee hikes will still mean greater financial burden on poorer students since there is a cap on the grants. Students who are already qualifying for the maximum amount of student financial assistance wouldn’t qualify for any additional funding when their fees increase,’ he said.
‘This means more of their grant and loan would be going to pay for tuition fees, so they would have less money for things like rent, groceries, childcare, or other costs of living. So the poorest, most vulnerable students would be the ones hit hardest by a tuition fee increase. Also, students from outside of Newfoundland and Labrador don’t qualify for our grants programme so a tuition fee increase would be harder for international students and students from the rest of Canada to bear. ”More student debt cannot be the answer to funding our public post-secondary education system,’ Perry said.
• ‘The provincial government’s rush to privatise long-term care is a tremendous disappointment and flies in the face of tradition,’ Wayne Lucas, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Newfoundland and Labrador, said on Sunday. ‘We have organised a P3 Symposium for next week to give government, business, and agency decision-makers an opportunity to learn about privatisation and how it has affected services in other jurisdictions,’ Lucas said.
‘The provincial government would have been wise to wait until they heard the facts before risking the health and welfare of our most vulnerable citizens on a dangerous experiment.’ Lucas said the P3 Symposium (which took place yesterday, Tuesday, July 14) would bring together some of Canada’s top economists and policy advisors to look at the record of P3 projects across the country.
Speakers included CUPE National President Paul Moist, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Hugh McKenzie, and Council of Canadians’ Newfoundland and Labrador representative Ken Kavanagh. ‘When we consider an important programme like long-term care, we need to think first about the people the programme is meant to serve – our elderly moms and dads, our disabled brothers and sisters, our chronically ill children,’ Lucas said.
‘Profits shouldn’t be anyone’s first motive in public policy-making. ‘Our province has refused to jump on the privatisation bandwagon because we have a tradition of strong public services,’ Lucas said. ‘We know that public sector workers provide the best care, in part because they are accountable to the public – not to shareholders’ he continued. ‘It’s time the government of Newfoundland and Labrador listened to the citizens and put a halt to ill-thought out privatisation plans. Withdraw this RFP until experts and citizens alike can have their say.’
