By Bethany Horne, Copy Editor
By increasing first-year auxiliary fees by 45 per cent, Dalhousie’s school of dentistry has taken the drills in their own hands.
This year, first year dentistry students will pay $15,506 in instrument fees, on top of their tuition: a $4,806 increase when compared to last year. Their total first year will cost them $30,453.
Dean Tom Boran says the increased fee will buy better equipment and services for the students in their programs.
“We wanted to address the fee so that i would address replacement of equipment and supplies, and provide services for the students … We looked at how we would do an increase and how, in the long term, we wouldn’t need to do it again.”
The equipment the fees will buy include new drills, and digital radiography. The services the fees will pay for will include regular maintenance and sterilization of the tools students use. The new drills alone will cost a total of $1.5 million, Boran says.
Even after the fee increase, when compared to other dentistry schools, Dal’s total tuition is one of the lowest.
“You can’t compare us to Quebec, because they’re so heavily subsidized,” says the dean.
But Dal’s instrument fee is now among the highest.
Boran says this is because other schools hide those costs in other places
“It’s not just the equipment, it’s the services that go along with maintaining those that you don’t see in the others schools’ instrument fees. Those fees might be somewhere else: in another fee, in tuition, or not really published until the student arrives. You’re not going to pick it up on a website,” he says.
“It’s a little bit like comparing apples and oranges.”
He says at other schools, students are responsible for buying their own drills, or for maintaining and sterilizing their own tools.
“We did it as a package, rather than piecemealing it out. The students certainly appreciate it. They don’t have to worry about those parts of it; it’s there for them.”
Boran says that the fee increase was introduced to students at a packed meeting in May, during a lunch hour.
After presentations and a 40 minute Q&A session, Boran says the students appeared satisfied with the schools’ plan to pro-rate the costs.
“No one likes a fee increase … but they could see what we were doing.”
First year students will see the steepest increase because they will reap the highest return on investment. Student in their last year face a fee increase of $2,595, or 39 percent higher than last year’s auxiliary fee prices.
After this meeting, the increase went to the Dalhousie Board of Governors, who approved it in July. As part of the Memorandum of Understanding with the province, tuition at Nova Scotia universities is frozen, but auxiliary fees are governed by the university.
Krista Higdon, spokesperson for the Department of Education, says that the university only has to advise the department about the increase, and that any “fees that are charged need to cover the cost of what they’re for.”
They have not received any complaints from students about the new costs.
Boran says he only received one email from a student about the increase.
“No, they didn’t like the increase but they understood what we were doing, and supported our endeavours.”
Sarah Orser , a second-year dentistry student, says that dentistry is an expensive program to begin with, and the fee increase won’t affect her much.
“My parents help me out,” she says.
She says that she is glad for the new equipment she will get to use as a result. Price of tuition and quality of equipment were not huge motivators in her decision to leave home in British Columbia and pursue her studies at Dal.
“I wanted to be by the ocean, but I did not want to go to UBC. I find them a bit stuck up, actually. They are extremely costly and don’t have a great reputation.”
She decided that the grade requirements, smaller class sizes, and the laptop program, which has the school set every student up with a MacBook Pro containing all the textbooks and software needed for the year, available at Dal fit her best.
*Instrument fees are charged starting in second-year at Quebec universities
** Called clinical fees, kit costs, or auxiliary fees depending on the school. We have not include any other fees, such as student union fees, in these figures.
*** UBC’s website was down at press time, but their total fees over four years are the highest in Canada.
The original version of this article misspelled the name of the dean of dentistry as “Tom Moran.” We regret the error.
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