Groaning under debt weight

The woes of student debt

KERRI WOLOSZYN STAFF

It seems like an unfortunate inevitability that university students should be stuck with a mountain of debt after they have completed their degree. Tuition is increasing and loans are sometimes the only option. Lobby groups such as Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), of which UMSU is a member, and Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA), claim to be working towards easier access to university for those who wish to attend. This generally means organizing campaigns that attempt to prove to the government that we should not be paying so very much to attend university. We are trying to better ourselves, to get jobs and to become responsible citizens with decent living standards, aren’t we? Surely our hard work and sacrifice of time are payment enough.

However, do these campaigns by students’ lobby groups work?

According to the CFS website, the Federation prefers grants to loans (with a British study that backs them up). The site explains that they are working on “halting tuition fee increases and restoring federal transfer payments for postsecondary education.” The CFS claims that their campaigns have resulted in some success in freezing some tuition rates but also points out that in all Canadian provinces, there have been nominal to significant increases in tuition since 1993-94. Ontario’s tuition went up by a whopping 100 per cent. Many of CFS’ campaigns include petitions and protests urging the government to change their tune on tuition. CASA has used such tactics as large-scale wall installations and meetings with the Finance Minister to achieve similar goals.

And the government may be listening to what they have to say. As reported in the Dec. 6 issue of the Manitoban, the Manitoba government and the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation created a program to reduce the debts of aboriginal students and students from low-income families. The article also explained that Manitoba has the second-lowest student debt levels in Canada, after Quebec, approximately $6,400 per year of school.

So, should we be complaining at all? Should we jump on the lobby group bandwagon and protest our hearts out? Should we be concerned with the large amount of money that we do not have that we somehow must pay off? Are students spending loans wisely and can we accurately measure why we are in so much debt in the first place?

Paying for university on your own with no help from your family is a difficult to nearimpossible task. Living on your own while going to university makes this challenge even more difficult. There is so much money leaving our pockets on a daily basis that debt seems to be a way of life.

I do not suggest that we necessarily grin and bear the burden, but is it possible to live debtfree in our society? Is it possible to get the topnotch education that we demand without paying anything at all?

Perhaps the real and more concerning issue is that once we have achieved our goals of completing a degree we may not have anything to do with it. The fact is that we would not be so worried about paying off massive debts if we knew that a satisfying and lucrative job was waiting for us just around the corner. But the problem is that we don’t. In a study published in 2006, Statistics Canada found that many people are simply overqualified for the jobs that they eventually hold. The study found that “nearly one out of every five people in the workforce who had a university education had worked in a job that required at most a high school education at some point during 2001.” A degree does not necessarily result in your dream job and by that virtue the same degree does not necessarily result in a large paycheque.

The government isn’t likely to pay for everyone’s post-secondary education any time soon. We must consider how our money is being used by our post-secondary institute of choice to better our university careers as well as the university as a whole. We must consider as well what we want from our education and judge whether our money is making us the upright, upstanding citizens we want to be.

Kerri Woloszyn is the Manitoban’s roving reporter and a fourth-year film studies student.