Posts tagged with increase.

Why are student groups celebrating Ontario tuition announcement?

Joey Coleman, March 29, 2010 at 12:30 PM

Student groups are celebrating a "victory" in Ontario today as the provincial government announced a continuation of the tuition status quo and unveiled some incremental changes to the provincial student loans program.

 

Unless the definition of victory has changed, I don't see why student lobbying organizations are celebrating. Sure, the announcement today only included one cutback - the debt cap for Ontario's neediest students is increasing by $300 per two-term academic year - but it didn't exactly have a lot of substantive benefits for students, either.

 

In the context of the province's record deficit, it is definitely good news that student aid was not cut and the government continues to cap tuition. However, this good news should not be construed as anything more than student lobbying groups holding the line until after the next provincial election.

 

Still, "victory" is not a word I'd use to describe today's announcement. Tuition will continue to increase at more than two times the rate of inflation, and the neediest students are about to carry $300 more in provincial student debt each year. The increase to the maximum amount of provincial student loans is only $320 per academic year - less than the amount tuition has increased since 2005.

 

There are positive changes in this package. The fact that students can now earn more toward their studies without government claw backs has doubled and been indexed to inflation. There are new grants for part-time students, interest relief on loan repayments for the first six months after graduation, repayment assistance for former students with low earnings, and the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) formula is being indexed to inflation for non-tuition educational expense.

 

The battle over the contribution that Ontario's higher education sector will make when the government tackles the deficit has merely been put off until after the 2011 election. If today's announcement is a victory, it is only one battle in a war in which the odds are against the sector.

 

The provincial Liberals have positioned post-secondary education as an 2011 election issues - it's now time to man the barricades.

 

Poll: Does keeping Ontario post-secondary tuition increases at 5% for the next two years help students?

Tagged with student, tuition, ontario, increase, 2010, victory | Comments (13) |

Ontario unis: nursing’s in, journalism’s out

Joey Coleman, January 18, 2010 at 4:49 PM

Ontario's Universities' Application Centre is reporting a 2.7-per-cent increase in high school applicants received by the January 13 secondary school deadline, compared with last year. 

The breakdown of application numbers by university and program shows students are looking to smaller universities and affiliated colleges for a more personal undergraduate experience and turning to fields that lead to steady employment. Students are continuing to shun York University in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 CUPE strike at the Toronto university. They are also turning away from Journalism programs, clearly seeing the problems with a degree limited to the trade.

Two older universities, Trent and Laurentian, have seen double-digit percentage increases in applications. Algoma, Ontario's newest independent university - which was an affiliated college of Laurentian until mid-2008 - has seen a jump of more than 20 per cent, from 413 applications to 560; with a 33-per-cent increase in first-choice applicants.

Trent University is benefiting from high rankings in undergraduate surveys, the implementation of all-day GO transit commuter service from Toronto, and population growth in the eastern region of the Greater Toronto Area. The University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Ontario's newest university institution, continues to experience growth, in part due to its location east of Toronto in Oshawa, but also because of specialized programs in health sciences, engineering, and science.  Trent is seeing an increase of 14.9 per cent in applications, with a 13.2-per-cent increase in students naming Trent as their first choice. UOIT has an increase of 8.9 per cent in applications, with a 13.9-per-cent increase in first-choice applications - the highest of any full-size university in Ontario.

The affiliated colleges of the University of Western Ontario - Brescia, Huron, and King's - are experiencing large increases in applications as students increasingly turn their attention to student-faculty ratios and class sizes in choosing their institutions of study.

Algoma and Laurentian, two universities located significantly north of Toronto in Central Ontario, are both experiencing growth well above the provincial average.

Laurentian University continues to see results from their expansion of francophone course offerings and focused recruitment strategies. This year, the number of students learning in French increased by 26 per cent. LU's new president, Dominic Giroux, personally attends many recruitment events and has focused on outreach in Ontario's francophone communities and secondary schools. He also communicates with potential students as @Dominic_Giroux on Twitter.

Algoma's growth is lead by such programs as biology. Algoma's biology program is heavily focused toward environmental issues - a hot area of study.

Students are applying to education and nursing programs in record numbers. With the recession still battering families, it comes as no surprise that students are seriously weighing their employment prospects before applying to programs. Only three program areas have seen significant decreases in applications: architecture, environmental studies, and journalism. Architecture's overall drop in applications is cushioned by the fact that most of the decrease is not in first-choice students, but instead in students who listed the program as their fourth or fifth choice. Environmental studies was last year's overhyped area of study and the drop is merely a correction. Journalism, on the other hand, is another story, as students are looking at the recession-battered industry and are avoiding a degree with a higher prospect of unemployment than most other fields of study.

Toronto's York University has become a "Last Resort U" for the majority of its applicants. While applications have increased 8.8 per cent compared with last year's retreat in the wake of the disastrous CUPE strike, they still remain significantly below application numbers from 2008. Most concerning for the university is that the majority of applications list York University as third choice or lower.

Institutions will be closely scrutinizing  their individual breakdowns over the next few weeks and figuring out what strategies they need to change as they prepare to recruit the class of 2015, starting this summer.

(See also: In enrolment wars, smaller universities rise to the challenge)

Tagged with employment, university, ontario, centre, increase, application, smaller, statistics | Comments (12) |