Government must do more to help post-secondary students
I think about the opportunities I've missed and the extracurricular activities I couldn't participate in simply because I became too busy.
For me, and probably thousands of other students, attending lectures and tutorials has been like a type of commercial transaction. You get in, you get out, and then go straight to work in order to pay for the services rendered.
The increasing tuition fees and commercialization at York have been brought about because government funding cuts have negatively impacted the experience of most students.
In 2003, Premier Dalton McGuinty was elected with a promise to freeze tuition fees, but upon being elected the freeze was cancelled after only its second year. And although McGuinty's campaign has since introduced a five-year $6.2 billion funding initiative for post-secondary education, this does not begin to restore the government funding that was taken out of the system in the 1990s.
Furthermore, the initiative, implemented in 2005 and known as the Reaching Higher Plan, outlines that the average tuition fee for each coming year will increase by about $100 for almost 90 per cent of college students and about $200 for almost 70 per cent of university students. That means that by the year 2010, a four-year program at a university would cost about $6,000 per student.
The reality is many publicly funded institutions have no other alternative than to seek private donations.
In addition to the increase in tuition fees and privatization, the lack of government funding is also what has made my university experience less diverse. Although I was eligible for an OSAP loan during my first year of study at York University, I was rejected for the next three years even when my profile outlined that my family consisted of a single-parent household.
The Canadian Federation of Students indicate that it is because of the strict eligibility requirement imposed by the Progressive Conservative government in 1998 and maintained under the Liberal government that the total number of OSAP recipients has been reduced by more than 40 per cent. In fact, according to the 2007 Ontario Alternative Budget, while the Ontario government has budgeted for an additional $358 million in student assistance funding by 2009-2010, most of this money will be clawed back through tuition fee increases.
Not only will future students struggle with paying the already high cost of tuition fees and books, but finding other sources of revenue to finance their education will be a challenge. How is this fair, you ask? Well it's not, and I'm sure many students have had to suffer the results. Overall, I do believe that without proper intervention, education at a post-secondary institution will continue to be increasingly commodified.
The rising increase in tuition fees and private partnerships will ultimately make post-secondary students' experience at school like a business transaction. For the sake of future post-secondary students everywhere, I truly do hope a change will come about soon.
Charlyn Nuque
