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In the next academic year, average
tuition fees for first-year Canadian students attending medical
school in their home provinces will surpass $10,000 for the first
time, data compiled by the Canadian Medical Association’s research
directorate suggest.
The average fee for these students
reached $9,814 in 2004-05, and an increase to more than $10,000 is a
safe bet next year because the average jumped by $1,085 in 2003-04
and by $732 in 2004-05.
The data are most worrisome in Ontario,
where the average fee reached $14,544 this academic year and now
stretches past $15,000 annually when compulsory fees are added.
However, the most notable trend apparent in this year’s data is that
medical schools in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan are
quickly catching up to their Ontario counterparts.
In a recent address to first-year
students at the University of Ottawa, CMA President Dr. Albert
Schumacher noted that dental students at the University of
Saskatchewan are now paying tuition fees of $32,000 a year, and he
worries medicine is headed in the same direction. “If you think your
fees will stay frozen,” he warned, “I don’t share your optimism.”
The data support his theory. Across
Canada, fees have tripled since 1995-96, when the average stood at
$3,408; in 1995, Ontario’s fees stood at $3,430, less than 25% of
today’s total.
When Dr. Schumacher received his
medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1982, his
tuition fees were approximately $1,000 annually.
Other data include:
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Highest fee: University of Toronto,
$16,207;
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Lowest fee: University of Montreal,
$2,224;
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Average compulsory fee (to cover
campus fees, etc.): $720;
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And, average combined
tuition/compulsory fee: $11,267.
Tuition fee increases have been at the
top of the agenda for the Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS)
since 1997, when Ontario announced the deregulation of tuition fees
for professional programs at its universities. This left fee
decisions entirely in the hands of individual universities, which
were suffering because of government cutbacks and seeking new
funding sources. Within three years the fees tripled, to more than
$10,000.
In a 2003 letter to Ontario Liberal
Party leader Dalton McGuinty, who became premier later in the year,
then CFMS President Danielle Martin praised McGuinty for promising
to once again regulate medical school fees if his party took power.
“While Ontario’s medical schools do face significant financial
challenges, the answer is not to turn our medical schools into
exclusive places where only the rich can send their children,” she
wrote. |
