Newly released university enrollment data from the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC) show that the numbers of students originally from the Maritime provinces attending Maritime universities declined by 7.8% between 2003-04 and 2007-08 (from 54,620 to 50,367).
Earlier this year, the MPHEC reported that the numbers of Maritimers enrolling at Memorial University of Newfoundland increased by 15% between 2007-08 and 2006-07. In fact, in 2007-08 there are were over ten times as many Maritimers at Memorial compared to 7 years earlier.
I expect the population’s changing age structure is at work here to some extent, but I continue to wonder about the role of rising tuition fees, if any, in these trends. For example, tuition fees at Memorial are $2,633 per year on average while students in Nova Scotia pay $5,868 per year on average.