Student unions across Canada and our student union, UMSU, participate in a series of “Days of Action” every year to promote tuition freezes and reductions in student loans, amongst other things. In Manitoba, opposing tuition fee increases has been a primary issue for every slate that has decided to run for UMSU. While understanding the rationale behind making post-secondary education affordable for students from different social classes, UMSU seems to be overlooking a major issue at hand. Every student, regardless of qualifying for scholarships or bursaries, is often forced (if not, the potential penalty is their grades) to purchase textbooks for their classes.
A comparison of statistics reveals that while tuition fees have been at a relative constant (due to tuition freezes), textbook prices have been skyrocketing. From 2010/2011 to 2011/2012, the average undergrad tuition fee in Manitoba changed from $3,593 to $3,645, a difference of 1.4 per cent compared to the national average of a 4.3 per cent change. In this same year, Manitoba’s inflation rate—based on a change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—has fluctuated from 3.0 to 1.6 per cent. Based on this stat, our tuition fees have actually decreased from 2010-2011.
In fact, based on the 2012 Annual Report of the U of M, “The 2011-2012 provincial budget provided for an operating grant increase of five per cent in the 2011–2012 fiscal year and in the subsequent two years, as well as a commitment to tie future tuition increases to the rate of inflation, subsequently confirmed by the province to be one per cent for 2011-12.”
Funding from the Council on Post-Secondary Education (COPSE) provides roughly 59 per cent of the University of Manitoba’s budget; this is followed by tuition fees, providing 23 per cent of the budget. So the fact that real tuition fees have decreased in 2010/2011-2011/2012 (based on Stats Canada data) is a concern to address. While making university affordable for students, it will come at a cost of other income sources, mainly by increasing the burden on other taxpayers in the economy (as COPSE is a provincial program, thus funded by our tax dollars).
Although UMSU and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) promote tuition freezes, they fail to acknowledge the problem of textbook price increases. In the United States, from 1978 until 2012, textbook prices have increased 812 per cent vs. the 250 per cent increase in the CPI. These figures could be similar in Canada; it is quite possible that textbook prices increased more in Canada due to pricing differences (even though our currency is at par). In the core textbooks for undergrad students (i.e., calculus, economics, etc.), publishers have been releasing new editions or having electronic testing banks packaged with their textbooks to force students to purchase these updated texts.
Information that is available in these first-year textbooks have been known for centuries, and often do not require “new” or “updated” textbooks for something as simple as F = ma. While student unions propose to make university more affordable for students, they are not focusing on the textbook hikes that are threatening our wallets and that seem to be increasing at an unprecedented pace. I, for one, would certainly want student groups to raise awareness to the broader student populous of these astonishing increases in textbook prices and to focus on controlling these rates.
