Anyone wonder where all our money goes once we pay our tuition? I mean we pay $10,000 plus a year (if we're lucky) and are in school less than a high school student. Even residence is expensive. Why is it that if you share with one other person it's $4,000 and if you share with three other people it's still $4,000? Shouldn't the price go down if you share with more people?

If you really think about it, the money you pay for tuition per semester is one month's pay for a Professor. Now I completely understand that the Professor's need to be paid for their hard work, but please, please, please don't make the minimum wage barely-hanging-in-their young students suffer.

PLEASE -- Voice YOU'RE opinion...

Let me know how YOU feel.

I think the $10,000+ yellowbug is talking about includes res.

After I finish college I'm going to have a 100,000 doller dept because of the BA I'm after (4 years of schooling for this one plus a manditory 1 year prep class).

Yes, most residence costs are a complete rip-off. No one is forcing you to stay in residence. You can save a lot by finding a sublet or lease nearby.

It seems like a lot of people are choosing very expensive programs and then come here to complain. If you don't like the cost, find a more affordable program! There are plenty of them in Canada.

I agree, most of my friends are just going to a local college to save money. I don't know why the department of education can't just reduce fees instead of coming up with random bursaries and scholarships that only certain people are eligible for.

I'm going to be going into a Fine Arts program in the fall; and on top of tuition, rent (which will be less than rez and I'm only living with one other person), groceries, and just essential things that everyone needs... like soap. I have to buy ALL of my art stuff. from paint, to canvas, to glass, metals... yarn... whatever I need, I'll have to pay for it, so I'm looking at about $1500 in school related expenses that have to come out of pocket!

I just think that Post Secondary Education should teach us how to be the best we can be... and how to move forwards in life... not financially cripple us for the five or ten years that follow our graduation.

Financially, those professional programs offer a very good ROI. You're looking at a 10-1 or greater applicant-to-space ratio for those programs. I don't see how raising or lowering tuition for those programs would change anything.

The cost of university is subsidized by the (Provincial) government heavily. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways for universities to operate a bit leaner and help keep the tuition down, but compare the tuitions in Canada to the costs of places in the states that don't recieve government funding.

One thing about those tuition numbers - there may be a significant difference between "tuition" and "tuition plus mandatory fees" at some schools. The Quebec schools generally have a huge amount of extra fees, such that the difference in cost between attending a Quebec school as a Quebec resident and attending a cheaper school elsewhere (Manitoba, Newfoundland) is negligible. At Acadia at the $8062 number, they did not have a lot of extra fees on that, and it included a laptop lease (note significant changes to that program for the coming year). The health plan and the student union fees were pretty much it. Other places have far more. And Acadia de-bundled their tuition fee this year number, such that it's overall the same with about $600 as a "Technology fee" and $600 for the "Laptop fee" and $250 as the "Health and athletic services fee". The funny thing is their tuition is still more than St. FX's tuition with their "techology fee" included. I can't argue that Acadia is expensive though. In answer to a question like "Would you recommend this school to others", I really would like a way to qualify that with "Yes if cost isn't an issue".

So, having looked at Acadia's finances in some detail (I did my undergrad there), I can say that given that the profs have gone on strike twice recently complaining of low pay, and after ruling out my original theory that they paid through the nose for software licenses because of the laptop program (they don't) the conclusion I came up with is that in addition to probably spending too much on the admin side of things, their residence remodelling/building spree cost them way too much money and the mortgages for that really add up, particularly when faced with an overall declining enrollment (which means declining residence occupancy as well). But they built a building they didn't need (They did mostly fill up the residences the year it opened, but that was the ontario double cohort, and the same year they remodelled a building to be all singles and overall they had about the same number of spaces as before they built the building).

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Some profs will go out of their way to accomodate using previous editions where possible, and only change editions when neccesary, etc.

Others don't go out of their way to look up things like the price of the book, which the publishers usually don't show them when they are selecting the books.

But really here, it's the textbook publishers who pump out a new edition every year or two who are the problem. Changes from a first edition to a second edition usually are fairly substantive. And some books really do need to stay current. But when you get down to the difference between the 6th and 7th edition of a calculus textbook that's being updated every other year, really, they are just trying to sell more books by fixing 5 typos, re-writing 3 sections, and mixing up the order of the problems throughout the book. And very often, once the publisher starts printing the 7th, they stop printing the 6th. So the schools pretty much have to change because they can't guarantee a supply for everyone if they don't (not everyone sells their old textbooks, and not everyone wants used books). Sometimes they can skip an edition, but the publishers definitely aren't going to keep 3 editions in print simultaneously.

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I agree school costs way too much and by the time your done school you're in debt