Rising tuition fees prompt financial aid restructuring, a donor drive, and student dissent
Changes to the Faculty of Law’s financial aid program, approved at a March 2018 Faculty Council meeting, are set to be implemented in the upcoming academic year (beginning September 2019).
In the 2017-2018 academic year, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law distributed approximately $4.3 million in bursaries and loan interest payments to approximately 48 percent of its current students.
Tuition Fees
The Faculty of Law has the highest domestic fees of any Canadian law school, at nearly $37,000 for first-year students entering in Fall 2018. In comparison, Osgoode Hall Law School charges approximately $29,000, Western University Faculty of Law charges about $24,000, and Queen’s University Faculty of Law charges about $21,000.
At the same time, U of T is the only law school in Ontario to offer strictly needs-based student financial aid.
“The University of Toronto Faculty of Law has the most robust student financial aid program in Canada, and we focus allof our student support on needs-based financial aid,” said Dean Edward Iacobucci.
Approximately 50 percent of JD students receive financial aid from the Faculty of Law through bursaries and interest payments on debt.
The Faculty also maintains the Post-Graduate Debt Relief Program, a low-income protection program for graduates who have lower incomes following graduation. The program assists graduates with the repayment of eligible academic student debt after graduation. A graduate will qualify for the program by making an annual income below or just above the Faculty’s Basic Income Level of $58,438.
Government Funding
The law school has four sources of funds: the government, the University, tuition fees, and philanthropy, said Iacobucci.
“Government funding per student has been flat since the early ’90s; university funding has been declining since the mid-2000s. This puts pressure on tuition—and philanthropy,” he added.
“The Faculty of Law’s priority is to address these pressures with prudent fiscal management, raising the share of the Faculty’s operating budget devoted to financial aid, and by raising money primarily for student financial aid.”
Thus far, the Campaign for Excellence without Barriers has raised over $24.7 million (with $15 million going to financial aid). Of the $30 million target, $20 million will be allocated for student financial aid. Privately supported endowments provide about one-third of the Faculty’s annual financial aid budget.
In an email to Ultra Vires, Merrilee Fullerton, Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, declined to say whether the government would increase government funding per student.
“Our government has a mandate to restore respect for taxpayer and tax dollars. Part of that process is making sure that the Government’s services and programs are efficient, effective, and conducive to job creation,” she said.
Financial Aid Program Changes
The current financial aid system provides applicants with a percentage from a pot of bursary money relative to the needs of other same-year applicants. The school calculates each student’s unmet need by subtracting assumed assets—deemed parental contribution, employment income and government loans—from standardized annual expenses based off current tuition, room and board, and personal expenses. The faculty will pay interest on a line of credit that students may use to pay the difference between their bursaries and unmet need.
The Faculty will adopt specific changes to the financial aid calculations in 2019 with the goal of making the allocation more progressive. These changes—which were developed by the Financial Aid Committee following a mandate by Iacobucci—increase the available bursary funds for students by requiring that the first $5,000 of all students’ unmet need be provided in the form of interest-free loans. This will leave a larger portion of the financial aid pot for those with higher levels of unmet need.
“We want [financial aid changes] to be budget neutral, progressive, and relatively easy to understand and implement.”
Prof. Adriana Robertson
Additionally, the sibling adjustment for parental deeming will be removed for siblings who are above 18. In the past, a student’s deemed parental contribution would be split evenly among the number of children in the household who were attending a post-secondary institution. With the changed calculations, this division will be removed. This ensures that a student’s socio-economic background will be more accurately reflected by the parental deeming. The financial aid committee stresses that while not all parents may actually contribute to a student’s tuition, parental deeming accounts for the safety net that students have when taking out loans or paying debt.
The goal of the changes is progressivity: to shift the model to provide more aid to those with more need by finding ways to better account for those with larger safety net and available resources.
The committee decided on these two changes by using a model developed by Professor Adriana Robertson based on financial aid data from student applicants. After considering different possible changes and variables, they settled on their proposal, which will hopefully increase the percentage of unmet need fulfilled through bursaries from 36 percent to above 40 percent, maybe even 45 percent for those with the highest levels of need. “I summarize my understanding of it with three goals,” Robertson said, “we want it to be budget neutral, progressive, and relatively easy to understand and implement.”
Law students are expected to access a variety of funding sources for their education, including personal resources, parental and spousal contributions, and government aid.
Student Advocacy
Barriers to Excellence (B2E) is a student-led advocacy group formed as a response to the faculty’s alumni fundraising campaign, Excellence Without Barriers. It aims to shape the discussion about the school’s tuition and financial aid program through recommendations that reflect student concerns about the rapidly increasing costs of attending law school.
The focus is transparency: the campaign asks for information like a breakdown of expenses related to student experience and the current fair value of the financial aid pot. Before a complete review of tuition spending and financial aid system can be done, the Campaign requests a moratorium on tuition increases past $40,000. In a Faculty Council meeting in November 2018, Iacobucci addressed the Campaign’s concerns and said it was likely that the law school will only be increasing tuition by 4 percent next year, instead of the governmentally-permitted 5 percent.
In a concurrence to the B2E letter, the Students’ Law Society (SLS) agreed “that the increase in tuition has a deleterious impact on the financial and mental health of law students and on the accessibility of the Law School.”
The SLS committed to working with the law school administration to develop “pragmatic solutions” to the impacts of tuition.
