TUITION?
We actually hear a lot about tuition fees. (Of course we don’t tend to do much about the problem of tuition inflation, but it is talked about all the time.) Why tuition fees get so much attention confuses me. It feels deeply disproportionate. Tuition, at least for me, was just about the smallest fraction of the total cost of going to school.
I went to three different institutions for three separate degrees. In terms of tuition, $7,000 went to Langara College, $18,000 to SFU, and another $10,000 to UBC. So my total tuition fees came to $35,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money.
Non-tuition fees for these same programs – including application and acceptance fees, student service fees, recreation and activity fees, and degree confirmation fees – came to another $4,000. In addition to these costs there were other required expenses such as books and course fees, and there were labs and equipment and field trip costs too. A generous estimate puts those costs at roughly $4,500. So on top of the $35,000 in tuition there was another $8,500 in unavoidable school expenses.
While being a fairly large number, $43,500 (35k + 8.5k), this school fee figure is still in the ballpark of what people tend to think of as the cost of school. But this only amounts to a fraction of what I think of as my whole education bill. There were still more essential supply costs: I had to get to and from school every day; I had to live someplace and to feed myself. These are the bare essentials. Nobody does school without accruing these expenses. Ignoring all the other essentials of life (underwear, toothpaste, insurance, new brake pads for my bike, etc), these basics make up the bulk of the actual cost of going to school. To be specific, I simply would not have been successful in school, and these degrees would not have been possible, if I had to do all my work in computer labs on campus. Additionally, almost all of my assignments and projects also needed to be submitted physically and not electronically. This being so, the cost of computers, communications, printing, and peripherals across seven years was approximately $9,000. Transportation – mostly biking and busing – cost almost nothing: around $2,900. A generous estimate of my food costs puts that number at close to $18,000. And rent for the period I attended school – in exclusively shared accommodation, mind you – was in the range of $63,000.
These modest figures catapult the non-tuition, non-school-fee side of requisite school expenses up pretty close to $100,000.
So there you have it:
TUITION = $35,000 DOING SCHOOL = $100,000
Given this math, even if tuition were free is there any doubt that tremendous financial barriers (really, the bulk of the cost of going to school) would remain and still make higher education impossible for many?
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