Post-secondary students from across Alberta took their fight over tuition fees to the steps of the Legislature Monday.
“Repeatedly promises have been broken,” said student Navneet Khinda. “We had budget cuts a few years ago and now they want to pass on tuition hikes and that is unacceptable.”
This fall the province opened the door to market modification, a policy that allows post-secondary schools to apply for permission to hike tuition fees for specific programs with the goal of bringing them into line with what other institutions in Canada are charging.
Market modifiers allow universities to hike tuition for certain programs, for example at the University of Alberta law school by a proposed 58 per cent, Khinda said.
“It goes around the tuition caps,” she said. “We have a tuition cap in place for predictability, but now these market modifiers are increasing tuition above and beyond that. So what’s the point of the tuition cap?”
Opposition politicians declared their support for the students.
“We’re the wealthiest place in the country — in the world — we should have the best, most affordable, most accessible education,” said Liberal leader Raj Sherman.
“The students are fed up with this Tory government and its broken promises,” said NDP MLA Brian Mason. “They promised to freeze tuition and they’re potentially going to allow massive increases for certain types of programs.”
Minister of Advanced Education Don Scott told the students no decision has yet been made with regard to employing market modifiers.
“We’re going to be taking a look at it so I don’t have a fixed date when we’ll have a decision made,” he said.
“I am going to be reviewing them. At this point I’ve still been going around the province talking to the institutions about their concerns.”
