Judging by Dean Mayo Moran’s comments at the October 16 town hall, the Faculty’s financial aid system is the lynchpin in the administration’s defence of high tuition.
And, in some ways, that makes sense. After all, there’s an admirable egalitarian philosophy behind high tuition coupled with generous need-based financial aid.
But, at the risk of stating the obvious, the gap between tuition and the financial aid pot is growing. Consider, for instance, that students from the lowest income brackets used to get a full ride — financial aid covered their tuition entirely. Now, nobody does, and few students get more than half. The financial aid program is underfunded, and the problem is getting worse.
It’s an American model. And, in the US, it works well (at least comparatively), largely because of their billion dollar endowments. We don’t have that, so financial aid is paid out of tuition and operations money. And that means we’re effectively just shuffling money between students.
For 3L students, financial aid has fallen noticeably — dramatically — even over the course of our time at the Faculty. As Katherine Georgious rightly pointed out at the town hall, for students like her (and many of us), the proportion of unmet need covered by financial aid shrunk from more than half in 1L to roughly 30 percent this year.
As a result, the total financial aid package a student will receive over the course of their degree is a mystery to each incoming student. It makes planning unwieldy, even impossible, which is in turn a source of anxiety. Or it would be, if incoming students were advised that their bursaries are likely to decline in 2L and 3L.
What they do with unmet need not covered by bursaries is also disingenuous. Financial aid gives students “interest free student loans” — which of course aren’t loans at all. The interest free loan amount is a calculation of interest on commercial debt. In other words, the faculty provides a few hundred dollars and claims that it’s $10,000 or more. But since the money’s coming from the same pool — the financial aid pot — it’s really just a few hundred extra dollars, however welcome, of financial aid. As students we might characterise this as a “don’t spit on me and tell me that it’s raining” scenario.
All of these figures are based on the shadowy calculation of unmet need. Students submit inputs — our rental agreements and parental income, our travel expenses and computer claims — and financial aid generates a dollar number: how much money the student is short for covering expenses. But because this figure doesn’t line up with our actual experiences, it can cause cynicism. For example, interest on student debt from private loans from previous degrees is not accounted for. Mature students have also been voicing concerns about the base budget. It assumes that we are all at the same stage of life, which of course we’re not.
These distortions have have knock-on effects, most obviously on post-graduation debt relief. That program only covers debts incurred from unmet need on the basis that the program is only intended to cover reasonable expenses. It’s rational, but only if unmet need is rational.
Not that the post-grad program is working. The uptake remains very small, and the program horizon, 10 years, is too long to give students considering public service jobs any certainty during the crucial early years. And there will always be the risk that you exit the program early. For instance, if you exit the program after two years, you will have to repay 80 percent of the forgiven loan.
And this doesn’t even begin to account for students who miss the cut off for eligibility, or international students who are excluded entirely.
Of course, the rise in tuition is happening in a world where low and middle income Canadians can’t afford a lawyer, and where few lawyers are providing affordable legal services. In other words, the stakes aren’t just personal; they’re affecting access to justice more broadly.
Our point is not that financial aid needs to be reformed. That’s obvious. But the financial aid review currently underway can’t possibly hope to address the problem. The very fact that this review is of financial aid, rather than tuition and financial aid, means that the review simply doesn’t have the scope necessary to achieve meaningful change.
Rather, our point is this: the faculty cannot justify high tuition on the basis of financial aid now, if it ever could. Our financial aid simply system does not play the role the faculty says it does.
At their current dollar figures, tuition and financial aid do not add up. Either the financial aid pot must be bigger, or tuition must be smaller. And in the meantime, the administration can’t in good conscience use the financial aid system to defend high tuition. And it certainly shouldn’t trot out financial aid to persuade prospective students to come to U of T — at least not without realistically representing these significant shortcomings.
