MHC president and CEO Kevin Shufflebotham meets with Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides in the fall. College administrators are proposing a seven per cent tuition hike.--NEWS PHOTO JEREMY APPEL
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Medicine Hat College administrators will come to Tuesday’s board of governor’s meeting with a proposal to increase tuition by seven per cent after the students’ association agreed this was the most prudent course of action to weather the province’s cuts to post-secondary funding.
The government cut the Campus Alberta Grant to post-secondary institutions by five per cent in its October budget, part of a 2.8 per cent cut to overall expenses.
Medicine Hat College Students’ Association president Dalton Ehry told the News a tuition increase is the most effective way to avoid cuts to programming.
“It’s a little unfortunate that tuition does need to be raised,” Ehry said. “Some of the pressure from the government to raise it is unfortunate as well, but I think students overall want their services and are willing to pay for those services.”
Tuition for the 2019-2020 school year at MHC ranges from a low of $2,808 for the third year of the paramedic diploma program to a high of $6,084 for the first year of the power engineering technology diploma.
He said the association met with administration to discuss budget issues twice in November, which he characterized as constructive.
“As far as our conversations have gone, the programming is going to stay at what it is,” said Ehry. “I know from our end, we’re fighting to continue with the services that we’re getting and we’ve had a lot of conversations about the auxiliary services sticking around.”
The association “hit the ground running” as soon as they heard about the cuts to solicit a variety of perspectives from MHC’s student body, he added.
“What we were looking for is what is important to students and what they would not be looking to lose,” said Ehry.
Dean of Student Services and registrar Sandy Henderson says the cut in October’s budget is likely just the beginning of heightened fiscal scrutiny of post-secondary schools.
“It certainly sounds like they’re signalling for further reductions in the next three years, so we’re still waiting to see what the impact of that will be for our particular institution,” he said.
The college is also going to increase its non-instructional service fee, which covers accessibility and counselling services, as well as athletics and recreation, by 10 per cent, which Henderson says will equal about $5.70 per credit.
The government is allowing schools to raise this fee by as much as they need to recover costs associated with these services, he said.
The MacKinnon Report commissioned by the government before its budget suggested “shifting the pie to less reliance on government grants, more on tuition and fees,” so the cut to their grant didn’t come as a surprise to administrators, said Henderson.
As per the MacKinnon Report’s recommendation, the UCP government also lifted a cap on tuition the previous government instituted in 2015, which Ehry says was inevitable.
“I don’t think tuition being frozen for a long period of time is sustainable,” he said. “It was just a matter of time.”
