By Mark Coffin, Opinions Contributor
Can’t afford school? Don’t worry about it. Anxious about your debt after graduation? Just keep spending. Not sure if you’ll be employable when you graduate? Relax, young scholar. Economist Tim O’Neill has a plan: higher tuitions for all, more student aid for some, and the merging of some landmark universities. All the while ignoring the fact that very few of us can afford to stay here after we graduate. O’Neill has proposed a patchwork solution of loosely tied coverings over the sores of a much deeper ailment affecting our university system: chronic underfunding.
A recent government marketing campaign branded Nova Scotia the “University Capital of Canada.” If we look to recent history, or to the O’Neillian future, a more apt label might be “Tuition Capital of Canada.” For all but two years of the last two decades, students in Nova Scotia have paid the highest tuition in Canada. While the average tuition here is now $5,495. To put this into perspective, when O’Neill did his first degree at Saint Francis Xavier University in the 1970s, tuition hovered at just over seven hundred dollars.
O’Neill proposes a high-tuition, high-aid model, where tuition increases and student assistance dollars (either grants or loans) also increase to protect the neediest students, arguing this to be a more equitable model than the current one. It might be, but he offers few specifics on how much funding is needed to bring our student assistance system up to par. His explicit recommendation for more support for low-income students is much needed, but, he more or less ignores middle- income families, supposedly assuming they will be able to handle further tuition increases or more debt. He also ignores the fact that enrolment will only further decline once some of the thirteen thousand students from other provinces realize that they won’t be getting the same student-aid prescription students from Nova Scotia will receive to make the pain of a tuition hike bearable.
These recommendations come just as we have begun to feel some relief through the near-completion of the last government’s pledge to reduce tuitions to the national average and protect students with a three-year fee freeze. The university system still has a half-billion dollar infrastructure deficit accumulated through two decades of underfunding. Faculty hiring freezes still remain as scars of this underfunding. Now, as the province ambitiously tries to eliminate the provincial deficit, the unspoken solution from O’Neill seems to be this: trade the provincial debt for student debt.
Universities have two main options to support their thinly stretched budgets: tuition fees and government funding. If either piece of the pie shrinks, the other must grow. If government funding drops and tuitions increase, students will be forced turn increasingly to debt to fund their education as the provincial deficit shrinks.
When the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations surveyed over 1,500 of our members last year, we learned that upper year students with over $26,000 in debt would be 20 per centmorelikelytoleaveNovaScotiaafter graduation than their classmates without debt. The most recent statistics from the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation indicate that 69 per cent of all students in Nova Scotia have an average of $31, 900 in debt upon graduation from an undergraduate degree. Those numbers don’t point towards the population growth, economic growth or tax revenue growth that O’Neill suggests we need before we consider increasing university funding.
While O’Neill notes that holders of a bachelor’s degree will earn a $750,000 premium over those with a high school diploma, he forgot to mention that for the province to reap the benefits of a highly educated population, we need to keep our graduates here. Simply put: the latest research suggests that we graduates consume far fewer government services, and would contribute far more tax dollars to support our aging parents, grandparents, and fellow Nova Scotians in need. Debt pushes us away. Student debt isn’t good for students, and it isn’t much good for Nova Scotia either. Our government dishes out more debt per-student than any other province in Canada. Our government would be wise to maintain funding where it needs to be to keep tuitions frozen, to keep our universities competitive and to reduce debt by implementing O’Neill’s recommendation for more grants.
Mark Coffin is Executive Director of the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations (ANSSA), an organization representing the interests of over 35,000 university students in Nova Scotia. Mark is a student in the Faculty of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, and a Dal alumnus.
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