Monday, March 31, 2014
Canada needs to embrace a not so radical idea: free post-secondary education. We need to stop raising tuition fees and instead invest in Canadian education.
Barrier-free access to higher education is urgently needed in Canada. In 1988, 12 per cent of university revenue came from students' pockets via tuition fees. Fast forward some two decades later and by 2012, 41 per cent of university revenue was generated by tuition fees.
That's an average 1.2 per cent increase in tuition fees per year. At this rate, tuition fees will cover 100 per cent of university costs by 2061. Or even faster when you consider that in 2010, the University of Toronto became the first public university to receive more funding through tuition fees than government grants.
