The Price of Knowledge

Yes, we have jumped onto the Blog band wagon. I hope that you will enjoy our posts. All five of the executive will be posting on this blog at some point. If you have any comments we would love to hear them.

This weekend I read the 5^th chapter of the Price of Knowledge 2006, a document released by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation (CMSF). The CMSF was set up in 1999 by the Chrétien government to provide grants to Canadian students. The foundation provides $350 million dollars to students each year, of which 95% is provided on a needs base basis with the other 5% going to merit based awards. In addition the Foundation also conducts research and the Price of Knowledge 2006 is its most recent research publication. Currently, only the final chapter is available here with the full document coming out sometime in the next month.

The CMSF does a lot of great work, although that is a point of contention within the Canadian student movement right now. The DSU, however, supports the function that the CMSF fulfills and would like to see that extended past its current 2009 expire date. But that is for a later post perhaps. Here I would like to focus on the observations around student debt provided in chapter five of the Price of Knowledge 2006.

Student debt has become one our biggest problems. Through the 1990’s student debt more then doubled from $11,636 in 1990 to $23,329 in 2000. In the past six years however, debt has only increased by three percent. In 2006, 59 percent of undergraduate students graduated from a university with an average of $24,047 in debt. Atlantic Canada had more student debt ($29,747) than any other region. One would think that the government has finally gotten the message, as student groups have been lobbying on this for at least the past ten years and to a certain degree they have. The creation of the CMSF is an example of that. Any form of needs-based bursary directly combats increasing student debt. Things are about the change. Both provincial and federal governments have made recent policy changes that are guaranteed to increase student debt. The federal government has lowered the expected parental contribution, which will result in students getting bigger loans. In New Brunswick, the provincial government has completely abolished the parental contribution. In Nova Scotia, the government has also decreased the parental contribution. In addition, more college students are graduating with higher debt levels, and the current interest relief programs are not being used as most students don’t know about them. To top it all off, no government has done any thinking about what amount of debt students can actually handle.

So, what are we doing about this grim picture? At both the provincial and federal level we want to see more grants programs; up front, needs-based grants. We want to see a complete review of the student financial assistance program, which currently spends most of its money on tax credits, back-end assistance that most students cannot use for years. We want to see increased federal funding to the provinces in the form of a dedicated transfer so that government funding to universities will increase, resulting in decreased tuition. Let me correct myself, we don’t want these changes, we need these changes. Canada currently lags behind most OECD countries in competitiveness and innovation. If we want to remain competitive in a global economy, we need to increase the number of Canadians going to post secondary education institutions. Saddling them with ever increasing student debt is not going to do that!