Improve quality and accessibility instead, they say
Some graduate students in Ontario were “concerned” that the Government of Ontario announced 6,000 new master and PhD-level seats yesterday. The Ontario Graduate Caucus of the Canadian Federation of Students says the money should have gone to addressing quality and accessibility problems faced by the current 50,000 graduate students instead. Those problems include high undergraduate debt, lack of research funding and graduate tuitions that average $9,000 per year. “This announcement will simply add more students to an over-crowded and underfunded system, leading to a decrease in the quality of graduate education,” Kimalee Phillip, Chairperson of the OCS-CFS said in a press releases. Financial pressure on graduate students is so intense that roughly half of them don’t finish the degrees they start, according to Phillip.