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Students ask: Where’s my promised tuition cut?
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The Toronto Star-
By John Spears
Rodney Diverlus’s parents qualified to vote for the first time in last month’s provincial election after moving to Canada from Haiti — and they voted Liberal.
The reason: With a son and four daughters in or approaching university, they were swayed by liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty’s pledge to slash college and university tuition fees by 30 per cent.
But Rodney — a third-year student at Ryerson University, also voting in his first election, shunned the Liberals.
The reason: He sees too many holes and unanswered questions in the program.
McGuinty’s pledge sounded straightforward enough.
The province would give most undergraduate university and college students a grant amounting to 30 per cent of their fees. The grant would be paid directly to the university or college, which would then reduce the students’ fees accordingly.
Families with incomes above $160,000 would not qualify for the grants, nor would students at professional schools. And the grants would only apply to students within four years of graduating from high school.
The Liberals said five out of six students in the province would benefit from the program, which they said will start Jan. 1.
It was certainly going to cost real money: The Liberals estimated $423 million starting in 2012-13, and rising to $486 million in four years.
Rodney Diverlus was delighted when he first heard about the program. A performance dance student, he was accustomed to regular tuition fee increases. He has a student loan of $16,000.
“To know that the tuition fee would be reduced by 30 per cent, I was dumbfounded,” he said in an interview.
So were his parents. He has an older sister in graduate school, a younger sister graduating from high school this year, and two other sisters only a few years away from college or university.
But Diverlus found his initial enthusiasm cooling as he started pulling back the layers of the promise.
He began to realize, at the outset, that he might not be eligible for the grants on several grounds.
First, the program isn’t open to professional schools. That seemed to be targeted at law and medical schools, where nearly all students have degrees.
But what about performance arts programs, such as dance and music? And architecture, business and nursing? All are undergraduate programs, but could be deemed professional.
And the grant for all students is a flat $1,600 for university and $730 for college — despite the fact that some programs have significantly higher fees than the arts and science fees on which the basic 30 per cent grant is calculated.
Diverlus has another issue. He cut back to part-time status this year because he’s active in student government, but part-time students don’t get the grants.
Student organizations say there are other questions.
Nora Loreto of the Canadian Federation of Students notes that grants are only issued to students within four years of completing high school. Since many students take a year or more away from studies, they’ll lose grants when they do.
Others who work part time and take more than four years to get through a regular course will also be out of luck in their fifth and later years.
This is a particular issue for college students, who have often spent time in the workforce before returning to upgrade qualifications, she says.
Students are also puzzled by how the $160,000 limit on family income will be measured. Universities, who will be given the grant money to allot, don’t know their students’ family incomes.
Who will make the call? The Ontario Student Assistance Program has family income information on some students, but not all students use the program.
There’s even the question of whether the Liberal plan will require legislation or whether it can be set up under existing statutes. Steering new legislation through a minority legislature could be tricky.
When questions about the program’s details were put to the premier’s office, a spokesperson replied: “We’re looking forward to having more to say on implementation in the future.”
Diverlus and Loreto suggest the plan could be made simpler if it reduced fees for all students across the board.
That would spread the available money across a greater number of students, so the fees reduction would be less than 30 per cent, they acknowledge.
But it would be simpler to administer, and would bring part-time and older students into the tent.
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