Student loans: Can’t pay? Don’t pay!

In Canada, the average student debt sums up to $30,000

By KH

This article is an essay of personal experience in avoiding repayment of student loans from the period of 2010-2019. Read on to learn how you might avoid repayment, as one act in a broader struggle for universal free tuition!

Growing up in a single-parent home where we often couldn’t afford the basics, how I was going to pay for university was the last thing to cross my mind. Upon high school graduation, I got accepted to university, ready to start my academic career. I signed the student loan application without even a thought and was loaned $8,000 for my first year at 7% interest. I was 17 years old. Each year the debt kept piling up. At 21 I owed $33,000, and before I was even handed my degree I received a bill for my first loan payment: $600 per month. I hadn’t even graduated yet, and I certainly had no job prospects.

I researched for weeks prior to graduation, knowing I would receive a bill I couldn’t pay. I had heard all the horror stories: harassment by collection agencies, garnished wages, parents still paying off their loans into their 40’s and 50’s. I knew it was an injustice and that I would do whatever it took to avoid 20+ years of debt repayment for an education that is a human right. Nine years later I have not made a single payment, and the debt is legally dissolved. I now have a Master’s degree and am starting a PhD in the fall. Here’s how I avoided paying, and if you’re looking for a way out, you can too.

Student action ramping up for November 2nd

Peter Miller

This November 2nd, students from across Canada will be mobilizing for the Pan-Canadian “Student Day of Action” for free and accessible education initiated by the Canadian Federation of Students. As discussed in the statement from the YCL-LJC on the Day of Action, students are facing attacks across the country but are also fighting back.

Tuition fees: How students are getting it handed to them and what we can learn

Drew Garvie

We hear a lot about skyrocketing tuition fees, but one of the challenges in the student movement is high turnover and a lack of historical memory. Which government did what when? And the most important question, which governments are never truthful about; why did they do it? Here Rebel Youth examines some short histories of tuition fee increases in five provinces in order to help understand the attack we are facing and what we can do about it.

The Rock says: Grants not loans!

Canadian Federation of Students

The Newfoundland and Labrador government’s decision to replace all provincial student loans with grants is a landmark step towards equality of access to post-secondary education.

“By listening to students’ concerns about the growing student debt crisis, this government is helping both young people and the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Jessica McCormick, National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. “This decision builds upon 15 years of growing investments in post-secondary education by successive Newfoundland and Labrador governments.”

The Newfoundland and Labrador government’s decision to replace all student loans with grants, announced in today’s Budget, is a significant step towards fully public, accessible post-secondary education.

The awakening student movement

by Espoir Manirambona
Rebel Youth Magazine

(This article appeared in the Winter 2013-2014 print edition of Rebel Youth together with this commentary.).

Students everywhere in Canada have had it with high tuition fees and are working to build a united student fightback to make education a right, not a privilege.

In many other industrialized capitalist countries such as France, Denmark and Spain post-secondary education is largely free.  Poorer nations, such as socialist Cuba, provide access to education as a guaranteed right.  In Canada students must pay a great deal of money to get the education they need to pursue their dreams or just get a job that’s above the poverty line.

Corporations, of course, want an educated workforce but they are not willing to pay for it through taxes -- and are instead forcing the students and their families to pick up the bill. This «debt sentence» is made heavier by the low wages most youth earn; and doubly hard for aboriginal students, young women, and racialized youth who face additional barriers.

Most students, and a large section of the Canadian people, oppose this full-scale attack on access to education. The challenge for the student movement across Canada is to turn this sentiment into action and mass public pressure. Quebec, which last year saw massive, militant and united student actions that shocked the country, shows the way!

British students push back against Austerity

Special to Rebel Youth

Student activists in the UK were out on the streets yesterday, as part of a national day of action to protest against their government’s plans to privatise the student loan book.

The series of actions were the first step in what is expected to be a longer campaign.

"Student campaigners will be building opposition to the government’s intentions to sell off student debt to private companies before the next general election, which has caused widespread concern on campuses that this will lead to an increase in the financial burdens placed on students and graduates," the National Union of Students said in a press release.

Quick facts on student debt

Education should be a human right, not a debt sentence says major Canadian union

Between 1990 and 2010, average tuition fees for post-secondary education in Canada increased four-fold from $1,271 to $5,139, the United Food and Commercial Worker's union (UFCW) said today.

By the end of September 2010, student debt exceeded nearly $15 billion and growing - higher than the debt of some provinces. The total cost of a post-secondary education - including tuition, school supplies, housing, and other expenses - is roughly $14,500 a year, or close to $60,000 for a four-year program. (Statistics Canada)

Average undergraduate tuition in Canada is $5,366. (Statistics Canada)

More than 60 percent of current post-secondary students will graduate with student debt.
A recent poll showed that 58 percent of post-secondary students who borrow to pay for their education expect to graduate with nearly $20,000 in debt while 21 per cent expect to owe more than $40,000.

The Canadian Federation of Students estimates that average student debt is almost $28,000. According to the Canada Student Loan Program, most students take 10 years to pay off their loans.
Students studying in the Maritimes have the highest average debt loads while those studying in Quebec have the lowest.

Student Debt by Province in 2011 dollars:

Alberta: $25,698

British Columbia: $29,497

Manitoba: $21,564

New Brunswick: $34,413

Newfoundland and Labrador: $35,703

Nova Scotia: $35,642

Ontario: $26,480

Prince Edward Island: $32,960

Quebec: $15,195

Saskatchewan: $31,061

Discussion: the student movement is my movement

The Canadian Federation of Students has released a new and polished video about the necessity for the student movement. Without making an over-analysis of a simple video, the Youtube can kick-off wider discussion about the situation of the student movement today and what needs to be done. Here are five quick proposed questions. Comments are open here, and on our RY facebook page.

1. What do you think about the problems or grievances listed in the video. Do you have experience with these concerns? How or how not? What is going on at your campus?

2. The goal of the film is to draw more people into a united student movement. Do you think the message is complete? How or how not? If you had only three minutes to talk to a student about the importance of united action, what would you say?

3. Would you make reference to the Quebec student struggle? Why do you think the video does not? What would you tell students about the Quebec student strike? What about other struggles, like Idle No More or against Bill 115?

4. In the dynamic of the student movement, is unity -- or as this Youtube says being 'united' -- enough? What is the connection between unity and struggle? Could they be opposites? Could they be linked?

5. How does this film compare with the YCL's perspective towards the student movement and our demands?


Note: RY will have news shortly about the big announcements in the past few days about Quebec tuition fees.

Political parties and student struggle

Jean Chrétien, Liberal Prime Minister
of Canada from 1993-2003 

Commentary
By Rebel Youth

Other articles and series on this theme: the student fight back and struggle today; our coverage of the Quebec Student Strike; Students of Canada Rise Up; YCLer Marianne Breton Fontaine speaks on Student Solidarity tour; Call to 2013 YCL student conference.

Can elections be used as markers in time and struggle? Perhaps only with the full knowledge that, as Marxists understand, history is not made by the comings and goings of bourgeois political parties in polite rotation through their bourgeois parliaments, like so many characters in a Swiss Cuckoo Clock -- but by the struggles of the masses.

Still, the Canadian federal election in October 1993 is significant moment to tag. The outcome shaped the terrain of struggle of the youth and student movement in many new ways. The unpopular Conservative government (formerly led by Brian Mulroney) was swept out of office in crushing defeat -- reduced from 156 seats to just two, it lost official party status. The landslide victory of Jean Chretien's Liberals began thirteen years of that party's rule.

Swept to office on somewhat vague promises of change and anti-Free Trade sentiment, the Liberal's quickly dropped their proposals like renegotiating NAFTA and made their true colours clear to all by shifting attention towards balancing the budget -- ie. paying back the big capitalist creditors. Still in their honeymoon period, the Liberal's announced that all of Canada's social programs would be reviewed with sweeping and significant changes likely to come. Cut backs would be deep.

Students of Canada: Rise Up!

This documents reflects discussions in the YCL about the way forward for the student movement today. We welcome opinions and comments. It was originally published in the print edition of Rebel Youth, number 13-14.

Other articles and series on this theme: political parties and student struggle; our coverage of the Quebec Student Strike; Students of Canada Rise Up; YCLer Marianne Breton Fontaine speaks on Student Solidarity tour; Call to 2013 YCL student conference; and student actions step ahead but not enough.

* * * *

We are living at a time when a sea change is beginning in people’s way of thinking, not necessarily towards revolution or even progressive politics, but searching for new alternatives to cut-backs, privatization and austerity.

Nowhere is this clearer than among the youth and students, and who is surprised?

At first glance, it might seem like there is an inter-generational war going on – in Québec, the rest of Canada, and around the world.

Youth are being denied even the hope of a future better than their parents, economically and ecologically.

But the austerity budgets just passed on the provincial level, and the Federal Harper Conservative government‘s omnibus Bill C-38, are really a sort of class warfare.

As has been said before, we are being forced to pay for an economic crisis we did not create.

In the gun-sights of the Harper Tories is the labour movement and especially public sector workers, as well as aboriginal people, women, immigrant and non-status workers, the environment, and now even our democratic rights.

An important part of this offensive is spinning the neo-liberal wrecking ball at the foundations of accessible, affordable, quality, public, not-for-profit education from cradle to grave.

A picture of crisis in numbers

Is the Quebec Student Strike is leading to a new discussion and sense of solidarity among
young people across the country, objectively based on class-lines?

Richest 1 per cent increased their share of total income from 8.1 per cent in 1980 to 13.3 in 2007
Richest 0.1 per cent doubled their share from 2 per cent to 5.3
The 100 best-paid CEOs made an average of $6.6 million, 155 times the average wage of $42,988
Tax rate for richest dropped from 43 per cent in 1981 to 29 per cent in 2010
Cost of corporate tax cuts: more than $10 billion yearly

Richest 10 per cent made 24 per cent more in 2006 than the richest in 1976
Middle earners: 6.4 per cent more
Poorest: 10 per cent less

Average tuition in Quebec: $2,500
Average in rest of Canada: $5,000
Average in Ontario: $6,307
Tuition as a percentage of total university and college revenue has doubled, from 10 per cent to 21
Quebec's tuition hike: $325 a year for the next five years (amended to seven years), totalling a $1,625 increase