Student organizations across the province—including the Camosun College Student Society—are fighting against the unfair lack of international-student tuition regulation by the provincial government.
This is a big concern, as the BC government’s deregulation of international-student tuition allows tuition prices to rise uncontrollably. In BC, the lack of regulation allowed average international-student tuition to rise by an exorbitant 64 percent since 2006. Because of this, international students don’t have the luxury of knowing how much their schooling will cost when they start their post-secondary careers.
Meanwhile, tuition for domestic students is regulated—it’s only allowed to rise by 2 percent per year, meaning that the most it could have risen since 2006 is 28 percent. This is in part because international students’ tuition is a huge source of revenue for universities and colleges. In 1996, provincial grants made up about 60 percent of post-secondary funding. Now, that number has shrunk to 40 percent, meaning that universities and colleges are relying more heavily on fees to pay for their expenses. Since they can only raise domestic students’ tuition fees by 2 percent each year, they exploit the loophole in the law that says that they can raise international tuition fees by whatever percentage point required. International students bring enormous amounts of money to the economy, especially in BC, one of the top destinations for students in the world.
This raises an issue of ethics. How morally wrong is it to charge someone more for the same service just because they are not from Canada? (The government subsidizes tuition costs for domestic students.) Moreover, how many good and talented students are barred from coming to Canada to further their studies because of the skyrocketing price of tuition? Even if they can somehow pay the tuition, if they want to come to Victoria, there is the issue of the local housing crisis to contend with.
It’s currently an uphill battle for international students to come to Canada and study here when it really should not be, and a viable solution is more government subsidies for post-secondary schooling, as well as government regulation of their tuition fees.