Student debt an election issue in B.C.
The Victoria Times Colonist notes that the average debt of British Columbia university students has gone from the lowest in Canada to one of the highest in the past seven years:
Students in B.C. graduate with some of the biggest debtloads in the country. They average about $27,000 — the highest in Canada except for the Maritimes and thousands more than the national average of $24,000. That’s a dramatic increase from the average of $18,500 in 2001, when B.C. had the lowest student debt in the country, the Canadian Federation of Students says.”
The average student debt is a big student debt,” says Shamus Reid, chairman of the student federation’s B.C. branch.
“In the last couple of budgets, student loan disbursements and loan applications have dropped,” Reid says. “Low- and medium-income students are simply not applying.”
Students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds — women, aboriginals, working class people and recent immigrants — are especially affected. Current debt is “up from $17,000 in 1999-2000,” says NDP critic Rob Fleming.
But Advanced Education Minister Murray Coell points to the $78 million in debt relief provided to post-secondary students. Fleming counters that $40 million of that total will disappear in 2010 when funding from the federal Millennium scholarship program ends.
‘In terms of what was offered in 2001, there’s been a $35-million reduction of what the grant program used to have,” Fleming says.
The NDP is campaigning to re-instate the grants eliminated by the Liberal government and top-up the shortfall when the Millennium contribution ends.
It’s true that over the half-decade to 2005, primarily due to a very significant reduction in provincial grants, there was a notable increase in student debt in BC.
But to suggest that BC had the lowest student debt in the country in 2001 is simply wrong. Need in BC has always been very high because of the high cost of living. In fact, if you look at the previous National Graduate Survey (class of 2000), average debt at the Bachelor’s level in BC was $20,100. That was higher than the national average ($18,900), as well as that of provincial averages in PEI ($17,900), Quebec ($12,300), Manitoba ($17,600) and Alberta ($17,900).
Another way to look at this is to note that student debt overall across Canada is up by 27% in nominal terms, but is up by 34% in BC. What matters here is that 7% gap. Arguably, that’s amazingly low given the reduction in grants (which was largely unmatched in the rest of Canada) and the fact that the increase in tuition over that period in BC was about 60% (about $2000/year) while in the rest of Canada it was about 10% (about $400/year).