MONTREAL: Canada’s Quebec province bowed Thursday to criticism over plans to double tuition for nonresidents at universities that teach in English, and will now impose a smaller hike, albeit with strings attached.
Tuition for students who are not from Quebec will now go up from around Can$9,000 (6,500 US Dollars) to Can$12,000 in the next school year, not to 17,000 Canadian dollars as originally proposed two months ago, announced Pascale Dery, the province’s minister for higher education, AFP reported on Friday.
But in exchange for this, 80% of non-Quebec students must take French language classes so they can have an intermediate level of oral proficiency by the time they graduate, he said in a letter to the three universities affected by the changes.
With the extra money from the tuition increase, Quebec hopes to “correct a financial imbalance” between its French and English language universities and lure more French-speaking international students.
Quebec’s fear
Quebec has had a long-running fear that its unique French-speaking identity in an otherwise Anglophone nation is under threat of English intrusion – particularly in the metropolis of Montreal.
The province has three universities that teach in English, two of which — Concordia and McGill — are in Montreal.
The third one, Bishop’s University, is two hours away from Montreal and located in the heart of a francophone community. So the language disappearance problem does not apply and this school will enjoy an exemption from the tuition increase.
The original tuition increase proposal triggered cries of protest and fears of students leaving the universities en masse. Many firms and other organizations joined the schools in demanding for the plan to be axed.
Responding to the new, smaller tuition hike, McGill University principal Deep Saini said the hike was still “devastating.”
Saini said that the government of Quebec’s incoherent policy based on emotions and impressions rather than evidence-based decision making, simply does not serve Quebec well.
