University

N.S. students need action, not questions

If the government doesn’t act soon, there won’t be any students left to help

Being a student is expensive and, if you don’t want your studies to suffer too much, there are not a lot of opportunities to make money on the side. It’s especially hard in Nova Scotia, where unemployment is higher than in most parts of the country and tuition costs are among the most expensive in the land.

While student advocacy groups have cried for years that low opportunity coupled with high costs makes Nova Scotia an increasingly unattractive place to study, provincial authorities have done little more than dither back and forth about the answer.

And as the new NDP government just announced a third round of “consultations” with students to figure out the best answer, student groups have been through it all before.

“Students have already made their voices clear,” a representative from the Canadian Federation of Students told the Dalhousie Gazette. “We feel like the NDP is stalling.”

They can be forgiven for thinking so. This is the third time students have been through this exercise, and with talk of consolidating and restructuring universities and tuition deregulation, it’s time these students were given some answers about their future.

In reality, the equation is pretty simple. A province with low opportunity, but high cost of education and low chance of employment on graduation means fewer and fewer students will choose to study there. As more students come to this realization, they will escape to better funded options, in provinces where their chances of getting a job on graduation are higher, too.

In fact, it’s already begun.

Nova Scotia needs to stop consulting and start acting, or there soon won’t be any students left to help.

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