All Posts Tagged With: "bursaries"

At Dal, number of students applying for need-based awards increased by 62 per cent

With summer jobs in short supply, many university and college students now face the prospect of trying to get through the school year on less money or looking for other sources of cash.

So it may not be surprising that along with the spike in the jobless rate, there’s been a corresponding rise in traffic to websites offering information on scholarships and bursaries.

At Studentawards.com, a free scholarship search service, the cumulative increase in registration was 15 per cent in July compared to last year, said Suzanne Tyson, president of Studentawards Inc., the company behind the website.

Parents’ RRSPs and the education savings plans they set up for their children have probably taken a hit amid the economic turmoil of the last year, she noted.

“(Parents) may be losing their jobs and their children aren’t finding jobs, it is leading us to believe that this fall will be difficult financially for a number of students,” she said.

The student unemployment rate was 20.9 per cent in July, according to Statistics Canada.

Matt Scriven is one of the lucky ones.

The 19-year-old was able to find work this summer, but says one of his friends in Vancouver handed out between 30 and 40 resumes and received one or two calls – and didn’t get a job. Another friend in Ottawa handed out 20 or 30 resumes, and got a job that gave him five to 10 hours a week – not really enough to help with his expenses in the coming school year, he said.

Scriven found his own eventual job as web designer for the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association through a listing at Studentopolis.ca – the student jobs website he founded.

The Carleton University student started developing his website after speaking with a friend who said he wasn’t able to find an easy source to access student job listings online.

“A lot of adult workers were laid off their other jobs and now people will do pretty much any job to try and supplement their income because they’ve got families and such, so a lot of students are displaced from positions that they would otherwise have,” Scriven said from Ottawa.

More students means a higher cut-off average for many exclusive programs

A tough economy is being cited as the reason behind record-level university application numbers in Ontario.

The Council of Ontario Universities says 84,300 applications have been submitted this year – a 1.1 per cent increase over a record set in 2008. The council says the figure is 42 per cent higher than the 59,197 applications made in 2000.

Peter George, chairman of the Council of Ontario Universities, says more people see a university degree as key to a successful career, “particularly when economic conditions are challenging.”

The only year with a higher total was the “double cohort” year of 2003.

That’s when 102,618 students applied to universities after the cancellation of Grade 13, causing two classes to graduate in the same year.

The council said the number of people applying for university typically increases during economic downturns.

“Applicants know that this is a good time to attend university and get that degree or to upgrade their skills, Paul C. Genest, council president, said in a release.

Last year, some 84,000 high school students applied for 64,000 spots at Ontario’s 20 universities.

Grade cut-offs change every year, and vary for each program in each institution. Last year, most schools made offers to students with minimum grades averaging in the mid-70s or 80s.

Several stringent programs made offers only to students whose average grade was in the low to mid-90 range. Those programs included McMaster University’s health sciences, York University’s Schulich School of Business and biotechnology at the University of Waterloo.

Some universities begin making offers of admission as early as February, but most institutions send out rolling offers until late May.

- The Canadian Press

Schools considering cuts to spending, scholarships

With the value of university endowment funds decreasing across Canada, students at post-secondary institutions may soon experience cuts to scholarships, student aid, and program funding.

Many Canadian universities are already reporting million-dollar losses from endowment funds as stock markets around the world plummet. Endowment funds are created entirely by donor contributions. The capital from these charitable donations is invested and the income is distributed annually, providing long-term and relatively stable funding for universities. Donors allocate funds to the areas they are most interested in financing, such as a university’s general mission or scholarships and bursaries.

Canadian universities currently have an estimated $11 billion in endowment funds. On average, Canadian schools invest over half of their endowment and pension funds in world markets, which have dropped more than 30 per cent in 2008, falling 17 per cent in October alone.

According to a Nov. 13 report in the Globe and Mail, some universities have already taken measures to brace themselves for projected further negative economic impacts. Hiring freezes are in place at several institutions, while others have begun to cut their distributions from endowment funds.

For Queen’s University, an institution that boasts a huge endowment fund, the loss could be more than $100 million. As of March 30, the market value of the school’s pooled fund was $632 million. This has dropped to $507 million as of Oct. 31, according to a report in the Queen’s Journal.

McGill University is facing similar losses from their fund, which had $928 million in endowments and has lost approximately 20 per cent – about $185 million – of its value.

The University of New Brunswick’s $170 million endowment fund has devalued by 20 per cent as of October, according to university president John McLaughlin. The school’s two pension funds have also dropped between 15 and 20 per cent.

At a recent meeting of the University of Ottawa’s board of governors, university treasurer Barbara Miazga said on March 31 the total market value of the school’s endowment fund assets was $139 million. By September this had dropped to $133 million.

These losses come at a difficult time for educational funding. Across the country, government cash and tuition-fee increases have failed to keep up with operating expenses and Canadian universities have already begun to cut costs.

Although dealing with the current economic situation will be a challenge for the universities, university administrators say it is not projected to have serious lasting impacts.

“Over the long term, we expect that at some point the economy is going to turn around and markets are going to recover,” says Miazga. “So that’s not where the risk is. The risk is in the short term.”

The greatest danger in the short term, she says, is that scholarships and bursaries to students could be significantly affected.

- with files from Maclean’s OnCampus, originally published in the The Fulcrum