High tuition fees may deter middle class: StatsCan

STUDY OF PROFESSIONAL DEGREES

Ontario’s pricey degrees in medicine, law and dentistry may be discouraging middle class students from pursuing those careers, a new report from Statistics Canada has found.

Only in Ontario — where costs jumped the most and the fastest through the 1990s — did participation decline among middle- income students, from 2% to 1%.

But Ontario was also the only province to see substantial growth in enrolment among poor students, despite the sharp increase in fees.

The research, released yesterday, is among the first to report that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out some students. Previous studies have indicated increasing enrolment levels among all income groups.

But Marc Frenette, the study’s author, concedes the study raises more questions than it answers. “ There are so many things that could have happened to explain this,” he said. “We can’t say for sure that tuition fees are responsible for a decline in access.”

Mr. Frenette examined professional programs across the country where universities can set their own fees, sometimes charging upwards of $ 15,000 a year.

In contrast with Ontario, middle-income participation remained stable in Quebec and British Columbia, where fees were frozen during the same time period. However, participation among the poor did not increase.

“ The gap between the high end and the low end of the spectrum did not narrow [in provinces where tuition was frozen],” Mr. Frenette said.

Middle-income participation dipped slightly in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, where the cost of professional programs increased moderately.

According to Ross Paul, chair of the Council of Ontario Universities, the fact that participation rose among Ontario’s poorest students shows the province has been successful at reaching those pupils. Professional programs must return 30% of tuition money to students in the form of aid. At the University of Western Ontario’s faculty of law, for example, funding for financial aid grew from $50,000 in 2000 to over $ 1- million this year.

“Where there has been a concerted effort to help, it pays off,” said Dr. Paul, also president of the University of Windsor. “The group that didn’t have access to support — those in the middle — had a falling off and that’s a concern.”

He says the province must make more aid available to middle-income families before increasing tuition further, a conclusion also reached by Bob Rae, author of a sweeping review of Ontario’s postsecondary system.

Tuition in Canada rose 80% in law and 160% in medicine, and tripled in dentistry between 1995 and 2001, while undergraduate costs rose by 50%.

These increases were largely the result of a precedent-setting 1998 decision by the Conservative government in Ontario to give universities the flexibility to set their own fees in professional programs. In medicine fees nearly quadrupled, in dentistry they rose almost fivefold and in law they nearly tripled.

Groups lobbying the Ontario government to maintain its current two- year tuition freeze seized the research as evidence the middle class will be further squeezed if undergraduate tuition is allowed to rise.

“ The government has a responsibility to ensure history does not repeat itself,” said Stephanie Murray, a McMaster University student and president of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance.

“ The government must cap tuition fees and develop a sustainable, studentcentric tuition policy that ensures all students have the opportunity to reach their potential.”

Mr. Frenette gauged students’ wealth according to their parents’ level of education, defining as wealthy students whose parents held a graduate or professional degree, middle income those students whose parents had post-secondary qualifications below the professional level and poor those with parents with no university or college education.

The study used data from the National Graduates Survey, which covered individuals who graduated from a university degree program in 1995 and 2000. They were interviewed two years later and asked about any programs in which they had enrolled since graduation.