Stephen Von Sychowski
Communist Party of Canada
Prince George Collective
Imagine you are working at a minimum wage job. You have a husband or wife, and a family. And you simply can not make the amount of money necessary to properly support your family. You may work full time, but it is full time at $8 per hour, or if you are really unlucky, at the new $6 training wage that those friendly liberals have given us. You want to get a better job, one that will provide you with the necessary amount of money, but you can’t get a better job without a better education. The grade twelve education provided to you” free” by the government hasn’t got you anywhere. But can you afford to get yourself a post-secondary education and support your family while working at a minimum wage job? Probably not when tuition costs over $100 per class and books cost at least as much.
The above is an example of a particularly bad situation, but tuition costs affect us all, regardless of your age, where you live and who you are. The cost of tuition for three classes in the September 2002 semester, at the College of New Caledonia, was $492.18.The mandatory books for the same three classes cost $389.68; this does not include any optional (but suggested) materials. Of course these are just classes where few materials are needed, and this is certainly not a full course-load. Imagine the cost of a full course load, perhaps one that requires even more books and other materials.
Of course, as many fellow students have pointed out, the cost of books and other materials at the college store went up significantly when the NDP put a tuition freeze in place. And now that the tuition freeze is gone, tuition is sky rocketing, and the cost of books has not gone back down. The current cost of post-secondary education is enormous, and won’t be going down anytime soon. If anything they will continue to rise due to reduced funding.
Where will relief come from for the impoverished students of British Columbia? Scholarships and bursaries are a solution only for a minority of students. And student loans leave most students graduating with $25,000 or more in debt. As a result, fewer students can afford to attend post-secondary school and it becomes more and more a privilege of the rich. The Liberal government would like to make this even worse; they support privatization policies in virtually every area. This includes education. In Ontario this has already begun, many Universities have deregulated fees which means that students are looking at tuition fee’s of $25,000 per year. The idea of any public education is considered nothing more than a barrier to “free trade” and “free enterprise” by the leaders of the capitalist governments of the world and big corporations. This is why not only post-secondary education is being effected but elementary and high schools are as well, with an influx of corporate involvement, which has even lead to some corporate owned schools in the United States.
Free education is a right! All people should have the right to free education to the best of their ability. Education should not be a merely a privilege of the rich. Where is the democracy in a system where only the ruling class can afford to be educated? Reducing education to this level is a giant leap backwards. In time’s like this, where dissident is being suppressed more than usual as part of the so-called “war on terror” it’s no wonder that the ruling class wants to limit our education, thereby leaving us to watch the corporate controlled media on T.V. and read the corporate controlled press. We need a drastic change in our education system. We need free universal education to the highest of ones ability. We can not achieve this with our current system. Communist countries have proved time and time again that nationalized, public education is the way to go. Even right now, Cuba and Vietnam have much better education systems than the capitalist countries in their areas.
Now imagine this. You want to go to school, so you go. There’s no $25,000 debt to worry about, there’s no threat of not being able to support yourself or your family. You can actually achieve the goal that you want to achieve, and come out in one piece. Only socialism can achieve this for the people of B.C. and all of Canada. That’s what we should be striving for. Tuition reductions for the present, free education in the future!
Union resolution on the tuition crisis