This is the year the tuition fee freeze will end

For years, freeze has existed only in name — it's time for a more responsible and realistic policy

Tessa Vanderhart, staff

When the provincial budget is released on April 9, I predict that it will include a retraction of the government’s tuition fee freeze policy.

Of course, there is no way to know for sure — only hours before this was published, Advanced Education Minister Diane McGifford assured me that the decision had not yet been made — but there is a glut of evidence to suggest that the freeze, in place since 2001, is crumbling.

And, as nice an idea as the tuition fee freeze is, it was never intended to last forever. In fact, it has been less of a freeze than a farce.

Much to its credit, the provincial government contributes 10 per cent to all students’ tuition through the tuition reduction program; through the Council on Post-Secondary Education, it is providing the largest total amount of funding ever, and the largest increase to each institution was awarded last year. However, provincial funding to universities has also sunk to its lowest level since 1995, the year the federal government stopped providing direct education grants.

And while tuition has been frozen, so have universities’ budgets: a “generous” 6.7 per cent increase in U of M’s operating grant last year meant that on top of their bare-bones budget, allowing for absotutely no additional expenditures, they were allowed to spend an additional 6.7 per cent for things that have been increasing faster than inflation, like professors’ salaries and lab equipment, generally everything a university needs to thrive.

Therein lies the problem: there is literally no room for growth. The university’s inability to increase tuition has led to more than $500 in additional ancillary fees in the last three years alone. It has led to a $211-million infrastructure deficit. It has led to faculties voluntarily increasing tuition through student referenda, first Dentistry and Pharmacy in 2001 (only one year after the freeze and not decided by general plebiscite, like subsequent tuition increases), then Law in 2003. This has been possible only because of criteria McGifford set for fee increases, that demanded programs be in demand, lead to in-demand jobs, and that fee increases be student-supported, which all of these stark increases (Law tuition went up by 91 per cent!) were.

Then in 2006, Engineering students pursued a more modest increase of 40 per cent. Because Engineering students voted to increase their own tuition last year, they avoided the 2007 laboratory fees that amounted, practically, to a 30 per cent tuition fee freeze for Science students. (Even many Arts students are required to pay these “laboratory equipment” fees for dry labs.)

But those student-led tuition increases haven’t been the only ones. When the MBA program was restructured in 2005, full-time students received a reduction in fees — but part-time students now have to pay the same amount as full-time students. It’s the same cash grab that the Faculty of Graduate Studies attempted in 2007, when students would have been charged a differential on top of tuition fees for each year of study beyond one — essentially being charged double for taking two years to complete a two-year program.

And in 2006, all of the province’s universities increased the differential fee for international students from 90 per cent — meaning they paid that and tuition for the equivalent of double domestic tuition fees — to 180 per cent, meaning that they pay three times the worth of domestic students’ tuition fees.

All of this adds up to something dramatically different from a tuition fee freeze. If anything, tuition has been going up for students in all faculties — even those that haven’t increased their tuition voluntarily.

On Tuesday (after the publication deadline for the Manitoban), the university’s Board of Governors approved Project Domino — a “secret” infrastructure plan passed by the U of M Senate — and will receive millions of dollars from the provincial government to refurbish buildings. This is a huge investment from the provincial government to solve the university’s $211 million infrastructure deficit. Many of U of M’s buildings will soon be declared uninhabitable without it. However, unless the province is having a great year financially (which it isn’t), these millions will certainly come out of the pot available to fund the university with. And that can mean only one thing: less money for U of M to operate. As the university relies on the province for two-thirds of its funding, the only way it will possibly make do with less money is by making more from students.

In this climate of chronic underfunding, crumbling infrastructure and dismally low Maclean’s rankings again this year, the only responsible choice for the government is to lift the tuition fee freeze. This is politically difficult in a province where 82 per cent of residents support the freeze (according to the CFS); however, the year after winning its biggest majority ever, the NDP can safely make their move now.

Lifting the farce of a freeze could pave the way for more responsible policy — small annual increases, in the order of three to five per cent per year, put into law to ensure that universities comply. When this was attempted in Ontario in 2006 it failed miserably, and the province needs to ensure that regulated tuition increases are adhered to, if only to avoid looking stupid. The case study of British Columbia is much more compelling: tuition increased by 30 per cent a year for three years after tuition was deregulated. That must not happen here.

When Manitoba’s freeze is lifted, the province needs to force the universities, upon receipt of these additional millions in student fees, to stop adding illegal ancillary fees, and to divert additional money into bursaries. Until Ontario’s tuition fee freeze the U of T was required to put 30 per cent of tuition revenue into bursaries; U of M, on the other hand, spends just $3.7 million on bursaries of its $400 million, much of which is specifically donated to help students. This is shameful.

All of this demonstrates why the provincial government will, rightly so, disarm the so-called tuition fee freeze and replace it with small annual increases. That, in the end, is what will make post-secondary education accessible for all — much more effectively than a freeze that exists in name alone.