End of restrictions in other provinces has led to large increases

A9

BY GREG WESTON
TIMES & TRANSCRIPT STAFF

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FREDERICTON - While university tuition levels remained the same in New Brunswick this year because of a government-mandated freeze, student groups say that lifting that cap will lead to huge fee increases, as it has elsewhere in Canada.

"All of New Brunswick has been under a tuition freeze, so our numbers did not change," says Jon O'Kane, president of the University of New Brunswick Fredericton Student Union. "It's interesting to see a situation that we may be in shortly; in provinces where a tuition freeze existed and was lifted, there were dramatic jumps in tuition."

The average tuition cost for a full-time undergraduate student in New Brunswick for the 2009-10 academic year was $5,479, according to numbers released by Statistics Canada this week. After being frozen for the second consecutive year, the province dropped from the third to the fourth-most expensive in Canada, behind Ontario, Nova Scotia and Alberta.

With an average tuition cost of $5,951, five per cent higher than last year, Ontario became the most expensive province in which to go to university this year, surpassing Nova Scotia, the only province to see a decrease.

In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where fees were unfrozen this year, tuition increased by 4.3 and 3.4 per cent, respectively.

While O'Kane says the government has taken many steps to help its students, such as the tuition rebate and loan repayment assistance programs, he says that progress could be undone if fees are unfrozen next year.

To that end, the student union submitted a pre-budget plan to the province that proposed a fully funded tuition freeze for four years.

"If we see the tuition freeze lifted when the Dec. 1 budget is announced, what's going to happen is the universities are going to need to compensate for the year where they didn't get an increase.

"We should, unfortunately, see a dramatic rise in tuition unless the provincial government puts in place some policies to protect the students' costs."

Such funding was provided in the Saskatchewan budget in March. After a five-year freeze ended, the provincial government increased funding to post-secondary institutions by $23.5 million dollars in an effort to prevent large tuition hikes.

In 2004, Ontario had only the fourth-highest tuition rates in Canada when it instituted a two-year freeze. Since lifted, fees have increased by at least 4.5 per cent each year, meaning it now costs more than $1,000 a year more to go to university in that province than it did four years ago. That increase outpaces the national average by about five per cent.

Donald Arseneault, New Brunswick's minister of post-secondary education, training and labour, says the province's universities won't need to boost tuition rates if the freeze is lifted, since the government increased its funding during the past two years.

"The first year of the tuition freeze, we put in $5.25 million. This past budget we put $6 million for the second year of the tuition freeze. There wouldn't be a sharp increase in the tuition, in the sense that they've been funded throughout the last two years," he says.

David Stewart, vice-president of administration at Mount Allison University, agrees provincial funding during the freeze hasn't negatively affected the school's bottom line or its ability to deliver a quality education.

"They gave us what would have been the equivalent for us of a five per cent tuition fee increase the year before this and a 4.4 per cent increase for this year, so we were compensated," he says, although he adds the province did freeze the university's annual grant.

But Katherine Giroux-Bougard of the Canadian Federation of Students says frozen fees are important to making education costs more predictable and affordable.

She says maintaining the tuition freeze would be the province's best option to help more NBers attain higher education.

Arseneault says the government has not yet decided whether the tuition freeze will be extended.

"We're going through the budget process, so there's all sorts of things that can happen. We'll have an answer for that, at the very latest, Dec. 1. "