On August 20, 2009 the Province of British Columbia announced that the provincial dollars to support public libraries would be $13,700,000, which is about 78% of previous years. While this represents a reduction, the libraries of BC are pleased to see that the provincial government recognizes the integral role public libraries play in community development and literacy.¹

While I disagree with the ‘pleased sentiment’ (being happy with a cut in funding to important services isn’t the best approach, in my humble opinion), I think that what’s happening to the public libraries in the province should be making us in advanced education start to brace for impacts.

CBC reported today that the Finance Minister of the province is telling BC voters to get ready for a “very, very difficult budget.”  According to CBC,

“We are desperately trying to maintain the critical services in health care and education and the social services. So it’s definitely been a challenging summer,” the finance minister said Wednesday.

I would not be surprised to hear that provincial funding transfers to universities were to be impacted in much the same way that the libraries have been.  This will be an incredibly difficult budget for universities to cope with, especially since they’re already five months into a fiscal year.

In short, I think we should be bracing for the impact – and getting ready to say no.

I am currently a member of the Board of Governors, elected by and from the students, and I voted against the budget for a number of reasons, some of which I will detail over the next couple of days. Importantly, you will note that I said that the budget was approved — while I voted against it, this was my action, and the views I express here are my own, shared as they might be by members of the SFU community.

In this update, I will focus on the issues of student aid, as they are affected by the budget. First, the budget document (in an appendix to the main document) raised most tuition fees by 2.0%, which is the most that the Board can raise tuition in any one year.

This quite simply means that education is again more expensive for students.  Assuming a 30-credit year, a domestic undergrad student’s tuition will be $4,719.¹  That breaks down to about $589 a month, assuming an 8 month year, but tuition needs to be paid in full at the beginning of each semester.  Likely kind of difficult.

It’s made even more difficult by the cuts to student aid that were passed in the budget for 2009/10.  I apologize in advance for the amount of numbers coming up, but this story is best expressed in numbers.  And the cuts are in big numbers.  More after the jump.

First, this is the amount (rounded to the thousand) that SFU spent on student aid in 2008/2009:²

This is the budgeted amount of student aid –  that is, this is how much we had actually planned to spend:

You’ll likely note that we spent more than we had planned to.  Here’s how much extra we spent this year on things like scholarships, awards, and bursaries:

We spent nearly a million dollars more on student aid than we had planned on.  As many members of the university administration have noted in Board Finance Committee meetings, it’s not a bad thing, necessarily.  What the overspending means is that the university gave more students bursaries, awards, or scholarships than it had planned on.  The notes to the financial statements explain that the increase is attributable to a higher than expected acceptance rate on bursaries, scholarships, and awards.

So what are we planning for next year?  Well, here’s the budgeted amount of money that the university is planning on student aid in the next year:

You’ll note, likely quite quickly, that this is an increase from this year, both in terms of budget and project actual amount of spending.  The budget document argues that student aid has increased 5% year-to-year, but what’s important to note is how small the increase is from what we actually spent this year:

So this means that we’re only increasing next year’s student aid budget by $33,000 over what we spent this year.  If you’re a grad student, you’ll notice that this amount is only equivalent to about 5 graduate fellowships.  If you’re an undergrad, we’re looking at about 16 average scholarships; less than ten full-year scholarships.

What’s even more frustrating is when you realize that next year’s budget for student aid has been increased by targeted funding for specific new graduate students we hope to recruit.  This money can’t be spent on anyone else; indeed, SFU does not get it unless we recruit the students that the funding is targeted towards.

How much is the targeted funding?

So in the budget for 2009/2010 — which was only increased from what we spent this year by $33,000, there’s a hidden $1.294 million reserved fund.  Since that money is not available to anyone else, I cancel it out (control for it) when I run the numbers.  So what’s the budget for student aid, next year, when we control for the targeted funding?

Which is a considerable decrease from both the actual spending done this year, and the budget spending this year.  How much?  Well, here’s the decrease from budget, which is less than we actually spent:

And here’s the decrease from the aid we actually gave to students:

This means that once we factor out the targeted money — which can only apply to the targeted, new, graduate students — we see that there will be $1.261 million dollars less in student aid in 2009/10 than what we made available to students in 2008/2009.

Add onto this the fact that tuition is going up by 2% in most cases, and the fact that SFU requires that students be approved for BC Student Loans before they’re eligible for bursaries, and I fear that education will be altogether too unaffordable for some students next year.

What are your thoughts?  I’d like to compile comments on student aid for use at Senate and the Board of Governors.