CalgaryLiberal

The question for a lot of students is how they’ll fund their education at the post-secondary level. This tends to be answered by pursuing debt, through government lines of credit, bank loans, and working.

As it currently stands more and more students are going into debt to fund their educations. And policies enacted at all levels of government are not helping. In fact, I’d argue policies enacted over the last decade have made things worse.

Specifically, the incentivising of debt.

As it currently stands the Albertan government is creating a system in which students can pull out debt from the government to pay for their education that would, after exceeding a certain limit, be paid back up until that limit. Say, for example, I take out $30,000 to pay for my education (I wish) and the cap is $25,000–I would pay back $25,000 after my degree has been completed.

That ‘cap’, as it were, can also be called “loan relief”.

What is does is two things:

(1) It creates a situation where an institution can continually increase tuition seeing that there is no downward pressure on prices due to students possessing a feeling of separation from the actual costs of university. This helps no one, and transfers the majority of funding of student education solely on the student when/if the loan program ceases to exist.

(2) It creates the financial disconnect for high school students and parents. Going into post-secondary education is a serious endeavor not to be taken likely, and financial issues presses this firmly into the minds of attendees and funders. Without this pressure on the part of student and parents students end up attending university not as a desired path for their self-improvement but simply because they can and society/family encourages them.

The second increases attendance at university dramatically but doesn’t contribute to any gain to society, as per the universitys’ function. The first point harms the student and their family. Both points gorges both government and student, while giving our underfunded universities a way to increase their coffers, albeit at a cost that is too high for Canada to bear.

Compounding all of this is the insistence that there isn’t a problem and no solutions are being actively floated by political folks. Reliance on debt and fundraising on the backs of students is seen as the status quo right now and will likely continue on, with Conservative funding cuts harming institutions thus forcing them in crease revenues via tuition. As noted in “(1)” above the academic institutions of Canada can continue to increase tuition with limited response by students, government, and funders, which ultimately creates a situation where tuition, year by year, is growing at an incredible speed.

Students still are graduating with more and more debt, thus harming their ability to perform to their maximum when they graduate, and an unproductive system continues in its existence. The current financing system in place is both detrimental on the short term and long term–and nobody is talking about solutions to this.