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"U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration recently announced a long-awaited student loan forgiveness plan , reigniting the debate in Canada about how, and how much, we (should) invest in post-secondary education.  Significantly, while the initial response in the U.S. focused on who would benefit from loan forgiveness, the discussion  has broadened to include what’s driving debt—the high cost of tuition. And it makes sense. If we’re going to address where we’re at, we need to understand how we got here.  In the mid-1990s, Canada’s federal transfer mechanism for funding higher education changed, but it also meant less money going towards universities and colleges from the federal government.  As a result, we began to see variations between the level of financial support on the part of provincial and federal governments and the degree to which costs were downloaded onto students and their families as part of a user-fee model.  This meant students in some provinces paid significantly less than those in others. As the user-fee system became more entrenched, even more tiers of payment were introduced: deregulation for international students and for some programs, higher fees for out-of-province students, additional, and largely unregulated, compulsory fees above and beyond tuition fees.  And while there are some notable—though temporary—exceptions, on the whole, fees have continued to rise across the board.  At the other end, students who cannot pay the entirety of the cost of their education up front graduate with significant debt as fees generally continue to rise throughout the duration of their program. Unfortunately, the preferred method of dealing with debt tends to be targeted grants, loans or implementing a repayment threshold. While debt forgiveness does provide relief for some students, other initiatives are more about extending or postponing repayment, which only delays the problem and doesn’t solve it—certainly not in a comprehensive way.  While provinces and the federal government have a range of student assistance programs , they are largely after the fact, complex, and hard to navigate. They can also change mid-degree, which is particularly challenging for students who may have made their choice of institution based on assumed debt forgiveness upon graduation only to find that the program has changed or no longer exists, although their debt still does.  Given this policy context—and the immediate context of the new school year and today’s new tuition fee data from Statistics Canada—what should we know about costs, debt, forgiveness and investment in higher education?      Because these are undergraduate averages, they do not indicate whether there are different fees for in-province and out-of-province students (Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Nova Scotia and others) and what those often significantly higher costs are. They do not reflect the range of different fees for certain programs (professional programs have significantly higher fees—an average of over $23,000 for dentistry, and over $15,000 for medicine). Other undergraduate programs, like engineering and management, also have fees that are higher than the national average. And none of these tuition fees include additional compulsory fees, which are, on average, $1,000 a year. For 2022-23, Alberta’s additional compulsory fees for undergraduate students are almost $1,300.  And while we understandably focus on tuition fees, they are by no means the whole story. It’s not abnormal for costs to reach $20,000 each year for students not living at home.       Half of all students graduate with student debt.    A third of all graduates have at least $30,000 in debt.    Women on average are more likely to have over $30,000 in student debt.  Students from lower- and middle-income families have more debt.   Source    25% of all federal student loans are in some form of difficulty (in default, delinquent, or require some federal assistance).  Current threshold for debt repayment: $25,000.  Current total accumulated student debt, federal only: $22.3 billion (2020)."
<https://monitormag.ca/articles/putting-an-end-to-the-student-debt-sentence/>