Tuition fees & maritime student university choices

Tuition fees are the subject of some discussion in Nova Scotia this week. As the CBC News has reported, university students in that province could face a tuition fee increase next fall if the provincial government opts to end the on-going tuition fee freeze as was recommended in the recent Report on the University System in Nova Scotia. Students' out-of-pocket costs may climb higher still in the event that the Nova Scotia University Student Bursary program does not continue beyond the current academic year.

This debate is timely since, as I noted last week, we have recently completed a survey of Maritime students at Memorial University of Newfoundland to better understand why they chose to pursue university studies in Newfoundland and Labrador. Since Memorial University has the second lowest tuition fees in Canada, as a result of a long-standing tuition fee freeze, one of the questions we asked students was "On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being 'not important at all' and 5 being 'very important' how important of a factor were tuition fees in your selection of Memorial University?".

In Figure 1 below, we have plotted the responses to the "tuition fee question" for students from each of the three Maritime provinces. In each case, tuition was a very influential with 80% or more of the students from each of the provinces giving it a 4/5 or 5/5.

While the overall average score on the tuition fee question was 4.18, there was also a significant difference between the responses of migrant students (4.35) and distance students (3.94), F(1,322) = 12.916, p = .002. Figure 2 below plots the responses for migrants (i.e., students who re-located their residence to Newfoundland and Labrador) from each of the three provinces. About 92% of the migrant students from PEI scored the influence of tuition fees at 4/5 or 5/5, followed by New Brunswickers (~91%), and Nova Scotians (~87%).

The plot below is for distance students (i.e., students who remained in their home province and and were completing studies via distance education). While their overall assessment of the importance of tuition fees is a bit lower, depending on the province 70%-80% of distance students scored the influence of tuition at either 4/5 or 5/5.

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