In February, we reported on tuition for Camosun’s Civil Engineering Technology program possibly going up by 43.9 percent, which, as far as Camosun Civil Engineering student Blair Roche was concerned, went against the Ministry of Advanced Education’s two-percent annual tuition-increase cap for existing programs (if program changes are significant enough for the Ministry to consider the program “new,” the two-percent cap does not apply).
Camosun College Vice President of Education John Boraas told Nexus at the time that Camosun “used the wrong comparators” to set the proposed tuition rates, measuring tuition on a national level when they meant to measure it provincially.
Roche started a petition in protest to the proposed increase, and he says he was recently informed by Camosun chair of Civil Engineering Technology Zoë Broom that tuition would not increase for this coming year. Roche says he is considering this “a win,” but he does wonder about Camosun’s claims that they made a mistake in tuition calculation.
“As far as I’m concerned, all those guys are too smart and too well educated to make that kind of a mistake,” says Roche. “They’ve been working on this for years. They all know what they’re doing.”
Camosun Dean of Trades and Technology Eric Sehn says what the government gives Camosun now covers “less than 50 percent of the actual cost of delivering programming.”
“We can understand and appreciate whenever students have concerns about tuition,” says Sehn. “We share their concerns, of course, but what we’re having to try to do is find that balance between sustainability for our programs and shrinking government funding.”
Without a raise in revenue, Sehn says it is particularly important to make sure the program is still run in a “cutting edge” way, and that the skills students learn are still on par with what employers are looking for.
“That’s why we have taxpayers’ dollars to help subsidize the cost,” says Sehn. “It’s a real trick for us to be in Trades and in Technology because of the equipment requirements. We want to make sure that we stay as current as possible.”
Roche feels that his petition, which contained 150 signatures from Camosun students, as well as another petition organized by the Camosun College Student Society, helped put pressure on the college to rethink their proposal.
“I’m thinking that maybe all these complaints and whatnot from the student groups maybe put a little more scrutiny on the process,” says Roche.
Roche recognizes that the overarching problem goes beyond Camosun and is an issue impacting postsecondary throughout BC.
“Higher education is massively underfunded by the province,” says Roche. “In reality, the two-percent tuition cap is window dressing in an effort to keep voters happy that something’s being done about tuition, but, really, it’s so easily manoeuvred around that it has no real value. There’s no teeth to it.”