First day of the CFS conference was a short but interesting one. Attending the BC delegates meeting with my fellow KSA delegates, including Matt Todd, Reena Bali, Harj Dhesi, and Matthew Dimera, we listened to the opening speeches. The agenda was brief and to the point for the night:
7:15 pm Check – in
8:00 pm Introductions and Overview
8:30 pm Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence
To start off, we are attending the conferences at the university of Ottawa not Carlton University. Myself and the other delegates slipped into the introductions and introduced ourselves as follows:
Name
Local
Something exciting in the past few months
Each KSA delegate spoke stating their name, their school (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) and the exciting news. None of our delegates mention our Local as the other BC delegates did as the is a student organization not a union, and each school is associated with their students not their number therefore Kwantlen Student Association Answers to the KSA not Local 26.
When it came to the Educations shouldn’t be a debt sentence, I was slightly interested. With the rising debt in the country it seems like a good idea to attempt to lower the amount of debt taken on by students. Although, most individuals consider their forms of debt an investment into their future, as most would work simple jobs without a proper education, students that take on debt to obtain an education, pay their debt with the increased wages obtain through a higher education. The biggest flaw I found in the debt sentence program was the issue of “access to equality.” Sounds good in writing till it is explained. The access to equality is a program that explains that it is unfair that those in rich /wealth family have the capability to go school and obtain a higher education without taking on any form of debt while to poor, or unwealthy must obtain loans to go to school and pay off at a later date.
It seems that the CFS argument is that the wealthy should help pay for those your are “unfortunate” enough to have to incur the cost of student loans. How is this “fair” to those who work hard to earn their money and live their “wealthy” lifestyle.
While I do agree with some of their solutions, including increasing the amount of grants available for students that do not have to be repaid to the government and encouraging the province to provide interest free loans to students would be an effective way of lobbying for students, not walking out on a meeting break and march to Parliament to complain during the conference, and achieve an affordable post secondary school system.
That is a shpeal about the first couple hours of the BC delegates prep session, we have an interesting day tomorrow including,
9:00 am – overview of the General Meeting
9:45 am – General Meeting Decision – Making Structures
10:15 am – Rules of order
11:00 am – Review of motions and elections
2:00 pm – Opening plenary
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I agree on having interest free student loans and increasing grants. The assumption that all students go on to make higher wages after getting a post-sec education though is false. During an economic downtown, and depending on the type of degree one gets, they may not be able to get a job, may not get one in their relevant field of study, or may get a regular wage job that they could've gotten before going to University. They might have just taken the program out of interest and not have any job plans at all. This puts a lot of students in a situation where they can't pay off their student loans with increased pay. Many students also exceed a 4 year stay in University as they experiment with other programs and such, so their bills rack up even higher. As a result, they're now bound to this debt which can be quite substantial. The real kicker is that declaring bankruptcy does not erase your student loan obligation! It will accumulate interest for an eternity until you actually pay it off.
ReplyDeleteA possible alternative I figured was to charge higher interest rates to programs which are statistically more likely to provide one with more job prospects and a higher income. However this may backfire and just discourage students from pursuing those programs. Banks take a reverse approach though, where they charge higher rates of interest to students pursuing programs that don't result in good job prospects. I understand their need for security, but if they can't get a good job how can they pay the higher interest rates? Just puts them in a worse position. It does provide more of an incentive to go into a better program though.
Overall I'm very interest in this issue and will like to see what you report back to us with.
- Shanal (who else would post here, honestly?)
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