Size of savings varies family to family

Throughout Canada, most students headed for university or a trade school do not enjoy the level of financial support Megan and Owen Cox do. The situation is worse in Atlantic Canada than in the rest of the country.

Based on 2016 data from the Survey of Financial Security, Statistics Canada analysts estimate only 16.6 per cent of Canadian households have RESPS. The average amount in those investment vehicles is $18,500 across the country. In Atlantic Canada, only 14.1 per cent of households have an RESP and the average size of those savings for university and trade school education is $14,500.

But things aren’t quite as gloomy as those figures might at first suggest. Those households include single people with no children and seniors whose kids have grown up and moved out.

When those households are factored out, the situation looks quite a bit better for Canadian students.

Almost half of all Canadian families who actually have a child under the age of 18 living at home, or about 46.7 per cent of these families, have an RESP.

Still, they don’t all manage to save as much money for their children’s education.

The size of those savings varies a lot depending on the parents’ income and educational levels. The richest 20 per cent of Canadians put aside more than seven times as much money in RESPS for their children as the poorest 20 per cent of the population.

It all makes a huge difference in the lives of young adults, particularly young men, according to a Statistics Canada report, Investments in Registered Education Savings Plans and Post-secondary Attendance. When students can count on an RESP to cover some or all of their tuition, they are much more likely to pursue their education after high school. Nineteen-year-old men who could draw from an RESP were 7.8 per cent more likely to get post-secondary education and 19year-old women were 4.3 per cent more likely to do so, than their classmates who did not have those financial resources, according to the report released last year. “Youth who had access to an RESP account were more likely to pursue post-secondary education later on, particularly by age 19, although a strong association generally persisted up to age 27,” wrote analyst Marc Frenette in that report. “This was generally the case across the income distribution and for both sexes. However, the association was about twice as strong for young men as for young women.”