Affordability
Comments (1)Alberta is one of the most expensive provinces in which to pursue a post-secondary education, which helps explain why our post-secondary participation rate is so low. Recent cuts to bursaries, grants and scholarships have only served to exacerbate the financial barriers faced by many Albertans when trying to attend post-secondary without acquiring a crippling student debt.
The Problems:
Alberta’s institutions charge above the national average in tuition along with the highest non-instructional fees in the country. We also offer one of the lowest offerings of grants and bursaries, preferring instead to saddle students with student debt in order to pursue a degree or credential. The average Alberta undergraduate pays $5,318 in tuition and $818 in non-instructional fees each year. Student debt in our province is climbing, as the government eliminated most grants and bursaries in the 2010 provincial budget. Even before seeing the effect of these recent cuts, average student debt after graduation for undergraduates is $19,182 and rises to $35,655 for those with graduate degrees.
The Changes Needed:
We need to reduce the financial barriers to getting a post-secondary education, which means lowering tuition, offering more grants and bursaries, and ensuring that those improvements do not come at the expense of the quality of the education offered at our institutions.
Public Interest Alberta and our Post-Secondary Education Task Force have been calling on the Government of Alberta to meet their 2005 promise of offering the lowest level of tuition in the country and offering a student financial aid system that guarantees no Albertan will be unable to enroll in post-secondary education because of the cost.
This means offering an aid package that properly takes into account the cost of attending; not just tuition and books, but the cost of living away from home and the other often overlooked costs of attending university, college or a technical institute.
Solutions for improving the affordability of post-secondary education in Alberta:
- Reduce tuition and restore cut student financial aid programs for students and their families.
- Increase funding for graduate students at Alberta’s universities.
Tagged under: I've written extensively on the issue of higher education, and how we as a province sabotage ourselves.
Here are some key, low cost/high return/high impact suggestions:
eliminate credit checks on students
incent Alberta professors to write text books, with a revenue sharing arrangement between the authors and the schools
require any texts used by Alberta to have at least a 7 year life before changing titles
create a text rental facility for Alberta authored texts
require the use of distance learning strategy for all applicable courses
create a university based well funded, school of new media and a school of theatrical arts in each of Calgary and Edmonton, offering 4 year and graduate degrees,
sell or give the naming rights to famous Canadian directors, and stars...
eliminate tuition fees immediately in a two phase program, undergraduate degrees are tuition free, graduate and professional degrees are cost based, but repaid through service in the community.
While its tempting to look at higher education as merely a social welfare issue, its not. The issue of higher education is an industrial policy issue, as much as a social welfare issue. Without those degrees,those arts and new media degrees, and those advanced degrees, the standard of living for most Albertan's will drop and drop significantly over the next 20 years.
