“These are positive changes that will hopefully lead more Albertans to enroll in post-secondary education this fall,” said Zack Moline, Chair of the Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS) and President of the University of Lethbridge Students’ Union. “We’ve asked for these changes for a while, as they should allow more students to qualify for loans. But we must keep working to ensure students receiving loans are not crippled by debt after their studies.”

CAUS has long advocated for the removal of parental income in student loan considerationns and for increasing grants available to students. Alberta has the lowest post-secondary participation rate in Canada and financial barriers are a big reason of those discouraging figures. Today’s announcement is the right step towards improving participation and our student financial aid system.

“We are happy to see the government taking action by getting more aid to students,” Moline explained. “However, we must take the other side of the equation into account. Student debt is far too high in Alberta. Removing our remission system and replacing it with completion grants just moves money around. More needs to be done so students can finish their programs without the need to take out huge loans in the first place.”

The proposed 2012 provincial budget contains a two per cent increase for base operating funding for Alberta’s public universities, colleges, and technical institutes with a commitment to similar increases over the next three years.

“The increase to operating funds held steady for three years is a positive step,” said Zack Moline, chair of the Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS) and President at the University of Lethbridge Students’ Union.

The funding boost follows three years of budget cuts and frozen operating grants despite increased cost pressures in Alberta’s post-secondary classrooms.

“We hope that 2012’s increases eliminate institutions’ reliance on the non-instructional fees they have been charging to students as tuition by another name,” added Moline.

Alberta has the lowest post-secondary participation rate in Canada and there are no goals to improve it next year. The only foreseeable target is a one per cent increase by 2015, keeping our province in last place nationally. Financial concerns like education costs and rising debt remain a major barrier to getting students to begin or even finish their degree.

“We want our province to set bold goals when it comes to post-secondary education. This modest operating increase will help, but we need to see more. The budget sets a goal no higher than the status quo, which is already the lowest in Canada,” Moline concluded.

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The Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS) represents the interests of students at the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge.

For more information contact:
Zack Moline
CAUS Chair
cell: 403-393-9225
e-mail: su.president@uleth.ca Duncan Wojtaszek
CAUS Executive Director
cell: 780-297-4531
e-mail: duncan@caus.net

We are excited to continue our great working relationship with Minister Weadick and look forward to rolling up our sleeves and working on improving our system in the months to come.

Premier Redford made a strong commitment to post-secondary education over her campaign during the summer, in particular in regards to improving Alberta’s post-secondary participation rate and advancing that goal is important not only to students but to Alberta’s future.

You can view their final report here (PDF).

It is an interesting and timely topic, given today’s uncertain economy and the Alberta’s low post-secondary participation rate.

Check it out at www.albertaprimetime.com.

CAUS would like to offer its congratulations to the new Premier and wish her the very best. It is exciting time in Alberta politics, and it is important that post-secondary education be a part of the conversation. Ms. Redford confirmed that Albertans would be heading to the polls within the next 12 months so now more than ever is the time to get involved, have your voice heard, and make sure that Alberta’s future and our education system from kindergarten to graduate school is being talked about.

Photo: Dave Cournoyer

The winner of that race will join Dr. Raj Sherman, Danielle Smith and Glenn Taylor as new party leaders since the last general election along with Brian Mason who is returning as NDP leader. In each of those recent leadership races, post-secondary education has made it to the forefront in terms of policy and debate and it is good to see a healthy conversation about our university, college and technical institute education – a conversation that we hope continues into the next election.

For those of you inclined, you can take a look at at the three remaining PC candidates’ post-secondary platforms to see where they stand on the burning issues on our campuses:

Doug Horner
Gary Mar
Alison Redford

Of course elections and politics are all about choice – and each of the other political parties in the province also have developed policies regarding post-secondary education in Alberta.

Alberta Party
Alberta Liberals
Alberta NDP
Wildrose Party

Alberta’s political scene is more active and more competitive than ever before – and now, more than ever is the time to stand up and have your voice heard.

It is too simplistic to suggest that tuition alone determines a student’s path into post-secondary education. The study done by Ben Eisen and Jonathan Wensveen takes a cursory look at just that and comes to the conclusion that tuition cannot predict a province’s participation rate, therefore suggesting that there is little harm in jacking up the price of education. By ignoring the plethora of other factors which determine participation rates, Eisen and Wensveen are able to make tuition seem less significant then it is in reality. What they fail to recognize is the bigger picture of cost and other factors which affect access and what we need do to reduce these barriers to education.

Getting an education in Alberta is expensive, and the costs are not just limited to tuition. Going to university often involves leaving home and moving to a new community, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of study. Rent, food and transportation all need to be factored into the price. For many that means borrowing the money through a student loan, which adds further costs in the form of interest and monthly payments.

Many students, when faced with the enormously high cost of their education have to rely on financial aid to pay their way through their program. The availability of financial aid, primarily of up-front needs based grants, is a key factor in determining participation rates across Canada and cannot be ignored.

Tuition levels and financial aid are only a part of the equation which influences participation. They are, however, a very significant portion of that equation, and the ones that government has the most power over.

Our province needs to encourage more people to go into post-secondary education, and that extends beyond just universities, but includes options like apprenticeships, graduate degrees and diploma studies as well. The solutions are going to involve changes well beyond just tuition policy. We need to look at our abysmal high school drop out rate, the number of spaces available in our institution, the provision of financial aid, and a host of other factors when looking to increase access.

Alberta’s tuition rates are far from being rock-bottom. Indeed at a cost of $6,264 for tuition and fees for a full course load at the University of Calgary this year, we are anything but. The shock of seeing that price puts the idea of getting a degree seemingly out of reach for many in our society. The study admits that “higher tuition fees might still discourage participation by students from low-income families.” Increasing tuition cannot be a part of our answer to low participation rate, so what is?

It starts early, encouraging and fostering our children to reach their full potential. We have to do more in early intervention for those students who are struggling in K-12 to finish high school and to see post-secondary education as a real possibility. It involves better student financial aid to make sure that students have the means to finance their education without being saddled with massive student debt which makes it difficult to start a family, get a mortgage or start a business when students complete their studies. It also means making sure the sticker price of tuition is not so high as it discourages participation and rises at an amount that is predictable and affordable.

Simply put, we need to make it easier for Albertans to get an education, not harder. Lower tuition alone will not result in the dramatically improved participation rates which our province needs, but it would be a significant part of a more comprehensive solution.

This post is in response to a op-ed piece in the Calgary Herald on September 13, 2011.

As a part of our work on the Public Interest Alberta post-secondary education taskforce, and with representation from across the system, not just university students but students, faculty and staff from colleges, technical institutes and universities from across the province we have been growing in our concern with the impact of recent funding decisions from the provincial government coupled with the impact of the economic downturn on our institutions and on our students.

Over the past two years institutions have seen budget deficits and financial difficulties at the same time as they continue to compete globally for new faculty and protect the quality of our education. Those struggles have been felt by staff and faculty, as we have seen classroom sizes grow, faculty-to-student ratios worsen, layoffs and hiring freezes. Programs are being cut by some institutions, while other programs are seeing a reduction in labs and tutorials in an effort to make do with less.

Students are feeling the crunch too.

Costs are going up at our institutions, at a time when youth unemployment continues to be shockingly high.
Recently many of our institutions are getting around the provincial tuition cap by instituting new non-instructional fees to cover growing costs in a time where provincial funds don’t keep pace. These fees, as high as $450 a year at the University of Calgary, represent a significant increase to the cost of education and were implemented with little consultation and are essentially tuition increases by another name.

Tuition in select programs is also going up. The Government of Alberta recently approved tuition increases in six programs for next September well above inflation, as high as 70% in the case of Pharmacy at the University of Alberta. Add in the fact that in Alberta the cost of living continues to be among the highest in the country and it is no surprise that Alberta has the lowest post-secondary participation rate in the country. The answer to these concerns from the government seems to be that students can simply borrow the money. However, they recently cut over $88 million from our grant, bursary, scholarship and debt relief program, guaranteeing that student debt is going to go up and that this next cohort is going to graduate with more debt than ever before.

These concerns are why we are supporting Join Together Alberta and this initiative to translate our enormous advantages as a province – in resources but especially in people – into a prosperous society that we all hope for. That society is going to take engineers and doctors, teachers and entrepreneurs, people from many industries and the public services – many doing jobs that don’t yet exist.

Making that hope come true requires public services and a public education system, from kindergarten to post-secondary, that offers the opportunity to every Albertan to meet their potential. Alberta’s public sector, the schools and hospitals and the services that they provide in our province took too long to build to just throw away at the first sign of economic decline – in fact it is those services including our post-secondary institutions that will provide the fabric for the economic recovery and continued prosperity in Alberta. We need to speak up and join together to advocate for great public services, including an education system that is world-class, accessible to all, and affordable to any who want to pursue their dreams.

Visit the Join Together Alberta website and see how you can be a part of the solution in advocating for our public services, including post-secondary education.

We set a number of priorities for the year, the most important being to begin setting our province down the path of having the highest post-secondary education participation rate in the country. Alberta is a province with the opportunity and the resources to make progress to increase the number of Albertans enrolled in university, college and technical institutes. That means not just increasing the number of spaces available but improving our completion rate and reducing the financial barriers to accessing a post-secondary education.

CAUS has also elected a new chair and vice-chair to lead our membership in the upcoming academic year. Congratulations to our chair Zack Moline from the University of Lethbridge and Farid Iskandar from the University of Alberta who will serve as our vice-chair. Both of these student leaders are excited about hitting the ground running and working on improving our post-secondary system.