Board Hikes Foreign Tuition

International students will be paying more tuition this year. On Friday Concordia’s board of governors raised international tuition by 10 per cent, or around $1,000 per student, effective immediately.
The decision comes after months of legal wrangling between the CSU and the university over the increase. The CSU managed to delay the increase four times in the past year, most recently on Aug. 19, when they obtained a safeguard order from the Quebec Superior Court. The order forced the university to put the increase on hold for 10 days while a judge decided whether the board’s June meeting, conducted by conference call, was legal. Friday’s meeting coincided with the expiration of the order, preempting a return to court.
The CSU argued the June board meeting was illegal because Quebec’s Companies Act forbids meetings by phone, unless it is consented to by all board members. According to Elie Chivi, CSU VP Communications, “all of the student governors did not consent and objected to it.”
While Chivi maintains that Friday’s meeting was an admission by the university that the first meeting was conducted illegally, the university disagrees.
“What it is, is an effort to bring closure to this whole thing. There are still students who feel that it was not handled legally, we maintain that it was, but we have to move on,” said university spokesperson Chris Mota.
According to Mota, the increase will allow the university to raise $1.4 million in much needed funds. “It’s not a question of why it is necessary to increase international student tuition, it is necessary for the university to bring in revenues.”
But Chivi thinks the school should be asking the government for more money. “Instead of going back and saying, ‘we need more funding’; they’re going to students . . . they’re exploiting the one group of students that already pay so much.”
Chivi, himself an international student, said he would rather see a small increase in tuition for all students. But he added that any increases in tuition should be a last resort and that the Quebec government should make cutbacks in other areas, in order to increase funding for universities.
According to Mota, Quebec’s universities had long asked the government to allow them to keep some of the extra fees charged to international students.
“The government didn’t do that, but last summer the universities were told, ‘look we’re not going to allow you to keep a portion, but what we will allow you to do is we will allow you to raise the fee for international students by up to 10 per cent and we will allow you to keep that portion.” McGill and Université de Montreal have already implemented the 10 per cent increase.
According to the university, the increase will only affect 2,300 of the over 4,000 international students enrolled at Concordia. Students on exchange, who pay tuition to their home universities, as well as those from the member nations of la Francophonie, who pay the same rates as Quebec residents, are not affected by the increase. Students in the John Molson School of Business, who already pay higher tuition, are also exempt from this increase.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an extra thousand dollars lying around for tuition,” said Concordia International Student Association co-president Catherine Dicaire. She said she’s seen a drop already in how many international students are coming to Concordia. She worries that if the trend continues it could end up costing the university in the long run.
While the increase is in place for the moment, the university and the CSU could be heading back to court in the near future.
During the board meeting on Friday student governor Noah Stewart voted in favour of the increase in an effort to once again delay the increase.
“If somebody’s made a decision and wants to reconsider it, they want to change their mind about it, then they can ask for another vote,” he said. If Stewart’s motion had been accepted, the motion would have been put to another vote in September before it could go into effect. However board chair Peter Kruyt refused to rule on Stewart’s motion, once again opening the university to the possibility of a lawsuit.
Prior to the meeting Chivi vowed that, “if we find that there’s something wrong with the way they voted on it, we’re going to call them on it.”
While Stewart said a lawsuit was, “certainly possible,” he warned that, “the university understands that the CSU will run itself completely out of money taking the university to court over everything that they do, the university essentially has limitless money for legal bills.”

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