StatsCan report on N.S. fees not accurate -- students

Provincial 'rebate' for N.S. students shouldn't have been listed as tuition reduction - CFS

The largest student lobby group in the country is blasting Statistics Canada for reporting a drop in tuition fees at Nova Scotia's universities.

Kaley Kennedy, who is the Nova Scotia representative for the Canadian Federation of Students, says that, in 2007, the authoritative agency caved to pressure from the Nova Scotia government to count their then-new bursary program as a direct tuition reduction.

She says that this resulted in two consecutive years of "flawed" reports, which indicated an 8.5 per cent fee reduction in the program's first year, followed by a 2.9 per cent reduction this year, making Nova Scotia the only province where fees dropped in 2008.

The Nova Scotia University Student Bursary, the government program behind these reported drops, shows up on the bills of Nova Scotia residents studying in Nova Scotia as a credit deducting money from their total fees.

Since the program reduces the bill's bottom-line after the fact, rather than lowering the tuition rate itself, Kennedy says that "it's not a tuition fee reduction, it's a tuition fee rebate."

She says the bursary program is a "band-aid solution" which gives the provincial government the political flexibility it needs to end the program when it sees fit, making tuition fees shoot back up.

Kennedy says she learned in a meeting with senior executives from the Nova Scotia Department of Education that they had lobbied for StatsCan to calculate tuition fees in Nova Scotia in the same way the agency calculates them for Quebec, where there are two different tuition rates paid by in-province and out-of-province students.

Nova Scotia's "argument" with Statistics Canada over the nature of these bursaries is the reason the 2007 report was delayed over a month and a half, she says.

Program fits StatsCan's definition -- official

Wayne Doggett, one of the senior officials allegedly at this meeting, explains it differently.

He says that their discussions with Statistics Canada in the time leading up to the 2007 report were "pretty straightforward, really."

"We made contact with the analysts at Statistics Canada and made sure they understood what our program was about, and that essentially it was the equivalent of a tuition reduction, but the vehicle was just a little different."

Doggett says that the bursary program was considered a direct tuition reduction because it fulfilled the two criteria laid out by Statistics Canada.

The first requirement is that the funding is automatic, and gets to all Nova Scotian residents without an application process.

The second, he says, is that no funds flow directly to the students.

Raynald Lortie, who headed StatsCan's 2007 tuition report, also says that there was never any argument about the nature of Nova Scotia's bursary program.

Lortie, who is the agency's chief of post-secondary education and tuition statistics, says that the Nova Scotia government could not have known the details of the agency's 2007 report in the time leading up to its release, since Statistics Canada's policy forbids sharing information from studies before they are publicly released.

He says that their reports are supposed to "display the actual amount the student is charged."

Since Nova Scotia's bursary program reduced the overall bill for in-province students, and since the money went through the universities "didn't land in the student's hand," Lortie says they had no qualms about reporting it as a tuition reduction.

In fact, he says, StatsCan had surveyed Nova Scotia's universities and learned that fees had dropped for some students even before they had heard about the bursary program.

Once Statistics Canada learned the details of the program, says Lortie, the only change made was with how they calculated the average fee paid by students in Nova Scotia.

They began using the same method that they use for calculating fees in Quebec, where in-province and out-of-province students pay different rates. Their method uses a weighted average, taking into account the different rates and the number of students in each category.

The change in method had nothing to do with StatsCan's initial report being released six weeks late. The only delay it caused, he says, was with the more detailed report that was released later on.

Assuming that Statistics Canada doesn't change how it views the Nova Scotia University Student Bursary, their studies for at least the next two years should continue to report increasing tuition fee reductions.

N.S. students getting $761 from province in 2008-09

Last March, the Nova Scotia government announced that it plans to increase the bursary by $261 each year for three years, in hopes of getting tuition fees in the province in line with the national average.

That means that Nova Scotia students studying in Nova Scotia universities are getting $761 this year.

That's up from the $500 they got last year, in the first year of the bursary program, but it's a smaller reduction overall since in-province students last year also got a one-time transfer of $440 from a federal source.

Next year, in-province students will get $1,022 from the bursary program, and then $1,283 the following year.

Out-of-province students will get $261, but not until the 2010-11 academic year, the third and final year of the government's plan.

Kaley Kennedy says she's worried about this final year, when the bursary - which she compares to a coupon at a grocery store - could expire.

If it does, says Kennedy, we're likely to see fees skyrocket.

Leonard Preyra, an MLA for the NDP and the official opposition's post-secondary education critic, shares Kennedy's views, as well as her fears.

"It's no different from getting a scholarship or a grant," says Preyra, explaining how the bursary program reduces fees after the fact.

"Certainly it's a step in the right direction, but it has no permanent quality to it."

Preyra says he suspects that the government opted for a bursary program instead of an up-front fee reduction because it gives them more flexibility.

An out-right fee reduction, he says, takes "a lot more political capital," and the government would be at risk of taking a lot of flak if they had to raise them again.

"In this situation you don't have to raise them, you just have to drop the bursary," he says.

"Especially given this economic climate, it's quite possible the government will drop certain programs that are considered temporary, and something like a bursary is very easy to write-off."

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