Posts tagged with alberta.
Alberta student aid: the poor got stiffed
This week's Alberta Budget took an axe to student assistance. The provincial Student Loan Relief Benefit, which cost the government a little over $34-million last year, was eliminated, and the overall grants and bursaries budget, which provided support to students from rural and remote areas, single parents, etc., was reduced from $30-million to $13.5-million. All told, non-repayable need-based aid was reduced by almost 80%.
The rationale for this was that the government was having to spend a lot more money on student aid. Not only is loan volume way up - the government is expecting loan volume to double between '08-'09 and '10-'11 - but, judging by the provisions they are making for future loan losses, it would appear that loan defaults are up, as well (which, in a recession, is not really a surprise).
Notably spared from the cuts - because they mostly come out of the Heritage Fund rather than the Consolidated Revenue fund - was any change to the Alberta Heritage Scholarships (which are merit-based and slightly favour students from wealthier backgrounds) or the Alberta Centennial Education Savings Plan (offering an RRSP top-up to every child born in Alberta, but which is predominantly being taken advantage of by better-off families).
In other words, when faced with a fiscal crisis and an increase in loan costs, the Alberta government's immediate reaction was to claw back money from those with high need, but leave untouched the universal benefits - the ones that most benefit the middle-class.
This is almost exactly the scenario my colleague Sean Junor and I predicted a couple of years ago in our 2007 paper The Student Aid Time-Bomb. I expect we will see this pattern repeated over and over again across the country as provincial budget cuts take hold - governments on the look-out for savings will try to keep their more recent initiatives, which tend to be universal in nature, and cut-back on the need-based programs which have historically been the rationale for student aid.
I don't want to be too hard on Alberta here. Historically, the province has been more generous than others in terms of student aid and remains one of the most generous funders of PSE overall. The stereotype of Alberta Conservative governments being anti-education is lazy and inaccurate.
However, all of this comes at a time when it is quite likely the Alberta government will be green-lighting some significant tuition increases. Tuition increases such as the ones being proposed by the Universities of Alberta and Calgary can make sense if they are offset by protecting poorer students through increases in student aid (certainly, the demand to allow tuition in professional programs to rise closer to the national average makes good sense). However, what Alberta is doing is essentially the exact opposite - allowing tuition to rise substantially while cutting the need-based aid and maintaining the aid to the middle-class. In doing so, the province is opening itself to the charge that it puts short-term budget considerations above the principle of fair access to universities.
The real disappointment here is that it is all so predictable. Access policy in Canada is essentially pro-cyclical, not counter-cyclical. In good times, Canadian governments like to freeze tuition and hand out grants. In bad times - when students actually need more help - they let tuition rise substantially and cut the need-based aid. We saw it in the '90s; we will see it again this decade. Alberta is likely but the first of many governments who will go down this path.
The reason for this is both simple and depressing: Canadian governments actually do not have any serious, principled views on post-secondary education and access the way they do on health or K-12 education. Instead, it's basically an excuse to deliver vote-buying subsidies.
If there's a choice between funnelling money to the middle-class through universal subsidies, merit awards or tuition fee freezes rather than targeting aid to those who need it most, our governments tend to do the former (an honourable exception here is the Harper government, which took the latter option when replacing the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation with the Canada Student Grants Program). Similarly, if there's a choice between handing out cheques - even targeted ones - and implementing community or school-based programs to raise educational expectations and achievement, they will always choose the former even though research is increasingly showing the latter to be the more effective use of funds.
In short, whether budgets are in surplus or in deficit, Canada simply does not act like a serious country when it comes to student aid and access. This week's Alberta budget was an unfortunate reminder of that fact.
(GlobeCampus ed: You may also be interested in Coleman's Campus on application fees.)
Tagged with
middle,
class,
poor,
cut,
budget,
student,
alberta,
need,
aid
| Comments (5)
| 
ALEX USHER
