N.L. students hail shift from loan program to grants
Daniel Rumbolt is lucky enough to have been born in Newfoundland, the province with the lowest tuition fees in Canada — roughly $2,300 a year compared with $7,500 for Ontarians.
As of this month, the 21-year-old, who is entering his fourth year of visual arts studies at Memorial University this fall, will get his education 40 per cent cheaper, thanks to the government dropping its student loan program. This makes Newfoundland and Labrador the first province to make this move in response to complaints of crippling student debt.
“Now that our government is supporting us and giving us this aid, (students) really feel like we want to stay here and we want to see our province grow,” said Rumbolt, who will now save $4,000 per semester.
Seventy-five per cent of jobs today require some postsecondary education, so why not enable that generation?
But critics say the incentive won’t actually guarantee Newfoundlanders stick around. They’re also dismissive of efforts by the Canadian Federation of Students to convince the rest of the country to follow the province’s lead.
The federation believes grants will lift students out of debt and turn them into productive citizens, buying homes and starting families instead of boomeranging back into their parents’ basements.
“Seventy-five per cent of jobs today require some post-secondary education, so why not enable that generation?” said the student federation’s national chairwoman, Bilan Arte. “Why not provide upfront grants, which is what they’re doing, in order to provide more money for young people who, when they do graduate and get good jobs, feel more comfortable reinvesting in the economy?”
Newfoundland’s shift from loans to grants is part of the province’s Population Growth Strategy, a 10year plan to reinvigorate a region that has seen residents flock to the Prairies in search of well-paid work (Newfoundland’s unemployment rate was 10.7 per cent in July compared with the national unemployment rate of 6.5 per cent).
The Atlantic province has spent another $15 million over the past two years to phase out the loans, and are bringing in a “Part-time Incentive Grant Program,” which offers $500 per semester to people who are trying to get a university degree while working.
But ditching the loans program is nothing more than a “blunt instrument” to deal with a “small problem” that affects a small cohort of taxpayers in the province, said Jason Clemens, executive vicepresident of conservative thinktank the Fraser Institute.
“If the premier came out and said ‘Hey look we have a new policy to transfer income to children in highincome households,’ I don’t think any Newfoundlander or citizen in the program would be cheering the program, because they’d be forced to think through ‘who is actually benefiting?’” he said, adding that loan forgiveness might make more sense for people from lower-income backgrounds who truly cannot afford to pay back a loan.
He remembers a similar discussion about investment in education-as-economic engine in Saskatchewan 15 years ago: The government had considered lowering the price of tuition so students would stay in the province and contribute to the economy. It never happened.
“By and large, people agreed the problem wasn’t the tuition costs — it’s that there were no jobs once they were done school. So they were going to (the University of Saskatchewan) and then moving to Calgary,” he said.
“The point is not that you want to make school cheaper for kids coming from middle income or affluent households. It’s ‘How do you invigorate and create a more robust economy?’ That has to do with competitiveness, it has to do with the regulatory regime, it has to do with tax rates.”
He also believes taxpayers will foot the bill for the new grants in some way. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Minister of Advanced Education and Skills, Clyde Jackman, was not available for an interview Thursday.
But Arte of the student federation says the systems — both federal and provincial — designed to administer loans from Canadian students are actually more expensive to maintain. The money would be better spent by replacing the loan system with grants, she said.
While some of his fellow Visual Arts classmates might seek work out west when they graduate, Rumbolt wants to remain in the St. John’s area — a choice many of his friends have already made.
“I’ve been noticing fewer and fewer people leaving,” he said.