Prince George, B.C. – Post-secondary students across the country are marking a national day of action organized by the Canadian Federation of Students every five years  to draw attention to high tuition fees and mountains of debt incurred by Canadians seeking a higher education.

The Chair of the College of New Caledonia Student’s Union, Leila Abubakar, says the call to action is meant to get the attention of governments across the country and prompt them to either freeze or reduce tuition fees so that more people can get into schools.   Appearing of the Meisner program on CFIS-FM she says “the more educated we are the better we are for society and that means a healthier Canada tomorrow.” Abubakar says an average student right now pays about 6 to 7-thousand-dollars a year in tuition fees compared to 17-hundred-dollars in 1992. She says “it’s gone up four to five times and that is unacceptable. It has gone up higher than the rate of rent, inflation, food, public transit. In 1995 the percentage of students with 25-thousand-dollars in debt was 17 percent, in 2005 it was 27 percent, now it’s over 30 percent. It means more people are graduating with mountains of debt. They’re starting out way below the poverty line.” Abubakar says “at the rate the government is going education is becoming a rich man’s affair. If you are poor you will not be able to afford to go to school.”  She says the whole point of education is to create equality.

B.C.’s Minister of Advanced Education, Naomi Yamamoto, says higher education in this province “is a great story. We’ve got the fourth-lowest tuitions in Canada and that’s for six years running now. That’s because of the 2 percent cap that we have on tuition rate increases.” The minister continues “we’ve added seven new universities allowing students in the rural areas to get a more affordable education closer to home.” Yamamoto says “we’ve got a great student loan program, I think a healthy balance  between what taxpayers pay for students’ education and what the student is obligated to pay.” She says taxpayers actually pay the balance of what the students pay for the cost of their education, students pay less than one-third.