Current funding agreement means New Brunswick students pay three different prices for tuition at Mt. Allison
When Mount Allison announced tuition rates this year, much of the attention was focussed on a 4.5% increase that most students would see on their tuition bill.
But there was one cohort whose increase was lower.
Mount Allison students from New Brunswick who started school before last fall had a tuition increase of just 2%, very close to average inflation levels before the pandemic.
The relatively low increase came thanks to an agreement signed between Mount Allison and the provincial government in February 2018.
It imposed an annual 2% cap on tuition increases, but only applied to students who started school that year or the year before. Anyone starting in 2019 — known as the Class of 2023 — faced a hike in tuition of 5.7% that year, and another 4.7% increase this year.
The policy effectively created a tuition gap between two cohorts of New Brunswick students.
And this year, with no cap in place, Mount Allison eliminated the discount for New Brunswick students previously in place.
New Brunswick students starting their degree in 2020 will pay $915 more than their fellow New Brunswickers who started school two years before, in 2018. That’s an 11% difference.
So, if you’re a New Brunswicker attending Mount Allison, you are paying one of three different prices for your tuition: The class of 2022 or earlier pays the lowest price at $8,250 for this year of study. The class of 2023 pays $525 more. And the class of 2024 pays the highest, at $9165 this year.
The MOU between the university and the province spans into 2021, and guarantees an annual increase in provincial operating funding of 2% this year. So it’s not clear why the cap on tuition increases only covered students already registered at university the year the MOU was signed.
And now, universities in the province, Mount Allison included, are looking at negotiating a new funding deal, with yet another provincial government.
University president Jean Paul Boudreau said earlier this summer that Mount Allison and the province had started talks looking at a new MOU before COVID ground everything to a halt. He said he expects to return to those discussions in the fall.
In light of the upcoming election, CHMA decided to ask candidates their thoughts on how and by how much higher education is and should be funded in New Brunswick.
Green candidate Megan Mitton says that the ultimate goal in higher education should be to aspire to what some countries have done, and establish free tuition. Mitton says she’d like to see both daycare and post-secondary education included in public education and made more accessible.
“So in the long term that needs to be the goal. And in the short term there does need to be an increase in providing adequate funding for universities over time. The amount of funding that the public universities get has decreased relative to bringing in money from tuition to pay for the different costs. And I think that’s not the direction we should be going in, relying more and more on students and then students being saddled with higher and higher levels of debt, especially New Brunswick students.”
Indeed, with a mostly 4.5% raise in tuition this year and only a 2% raise in operating funds coming from government, the amount of money that Mount Allison gets from students could very well surpass the amount it gets in provincial operating funding in 2020-2021.
Mitton says there are specific things that are part of the Green platform that will help students with access and increased costs, like eliminating interest on provincial student loans and eliminating credit checks for loans and bursaries.
She’d also like to reinstate programs that have been eliminated, such as the tuition access bursary program and the timely completion benefit which gives students a debt cap of $20,000.
“So we need to make sure that we are not just making reducing debt and helping students deal with the debt that maybe they already have, but making sure that it is accessible at the front end as well, for students. So making sure that tuition is not too high and that ultimately, like I said, it gets lower.”
Milton also mentioned that universities are often taking on services, like mental health care, that could be more centred in the community. She points out that services delivered through the public health care system are accessible to both students and the rest of the community.
Liberal candidate Maxime Bourgeois says that universities across the province need to be well funded, but that he’d need more budget details before recommending an increase in public funding.
“I don’t know exactly what are the needs of the university, but I highly value education myself. I mean, I spent about eight years in university so I know and then it gave me all the tools I needed to be successful in my life. So I definitely a big fan of university and just education in general.”
Bourgeois says that longer term agreements could provide more stability for institutions like Mount Allison.
“Mount Allison here is a wonderful university, it has been recognized one of the best universities in the country. So obviously, we need to provide the proper funding for the university to keep being successful and attracting thousands of students to the area.”
Independent candidate Jefferson George Wright sees the problem of paying for higher education as needing a more fundamental, philosophical shift.
“We have the opportunity to ask a much bigger and broader question that I think extends more significantly than a memorandum of understanding between one government who’s probably not really telling the truth and a group of faculty who probably aren’t really telling the truth, either. And that will never come to a satisfactory conclusion, because corporatist government is serving the corporations and not the people or the institutions where the people learn.”
Wright sees one major problem with the current system in the imposition of government policies on universities, and cautions against the spectre of performance-based funding which had been discussed in New Brunswick shortly before the pandemic hit.
People’s Alliance candidate Heather Collins did not respond to a message requesting an interview, and PC Candidate Carole Duguay declined an interview based on her schedule.
