Sophie Silkes
Last Friday, SSMU hosted its second strategic summit, this time centred around tuition hikes—an issue pertinent to students in Quebec given the impending tuition hikes later in the year.
This meeting was one in a series of strategic summits initiated by SSMU President Maggie Knight. Each summit is designed to address and discuss a different problem that affects SSMU, McGill University, and its students.
Around 20 students arrived at the meeting ready to learn about information on the upcoming 2012 tuition hikes. Facilitated by SSMU VP University Affairs Emily Yee Clare and VP External Affairs Joël Pedneault, the discussions that followed provided an opportunity both to get informed and to express opinions.
Quebec currently has the lowest tuition in Canada, but undergraduate tuition will increase in the fall.
“Starting next September, [Quebec] tuition will be going up $325 a year, over five years,” explained Pedneault. “This adds up to a 75 per cent tuition increase [over those five years].”
Summit attendees discussed why tuition is being raised in the first place. Organizers cited a 2010 university funding plan published by Finances Quebec which estimated that universities in Quebec were underfunded by $620 million. Attendees asserted that the Quebec government is now using these numbers to justify the 2012 tuition hikes.
“These numbers are not calculated based on any need or debt of the institutions,” said a post-graduate student who attended the conference. “They are based on the average of what other students are paying across Canada.”
To some at the meeting, this reflected more of a thirst for money than a legitimate shortage of funding, triggering further debates on transparency and university priorities.
“If the tuition increases are approved by the provincial government and not McGill, are we questioning what [Quebec] is doing with the money or how McGill is spending the money?” another student asked.
In most cases, decisions about the allocation of tuition fees and public money do not depend on the universities themselves. “All the money goes into one pot, and the government redistributes this money to universities using a funding formula,” Pedneault explained.
“McGill has been on the forefront of supporting tuition increases,” Pedneault added. “We need to think about that.”
The Quebec government, which announced the tuition hikes back in March, claims it will recycle a large amount of the money collected in the form of government grants and loans.
However, Pedneault did not feel that additional government grants and loans would alleviate financial need. “Debt loads are only going to increase in the long term,” he said.
Similarly, an attendee expressed concern that the tuition hikes would squeeze the middle class. Many middle-class students find themselves in a tricky situation where they aren’t “poor enough” to be eligible for bursaries, and as a result, have to put themselves in large amounts of debt. Tuition increases might only worsen this problem.
So far, proposed increases in tuition will only apply to in-province students. It has not yet been announced by how much out-of-province and international students’ tuitions will be altered.
“The issues get really thorny when you talk about out-of-province and international students who pay a lot of money,” Pedneault said. “Some people will say, ‘Well those people are just going to leave the province anyway.'”
Pedneault predicted the Quebec government will not alter the out-of-province and international tuition too dramatically, if at all.
