By: Pat Daley

  Last week's, student across the country protested against tuition fees that have increased by 125.9% for undergraduate programs over the last 10 years.
  Imagine if your monthly phone or rent or mortgage payments had gone up that much. Imagine trying to pay $125 a month for your phone and $10,000 a month for rent.
  Ontario Premier Mike Harris met the protest head-on with his remark that lower tuition fees only benefit the rich. His logic is elusive. But it's easy to see how the rich - rich provinces and rich banks - have benefited from higher tuition fees.
  Take the banks ... please. The higher the tuition fees, the bigger the student loans; the heavier the debt burden, the greater the risk of default; the more debtors default, the more work it is for the banks. Why, $100 million from the federal government is a reasonable payment to compensate the banks for the vexation of administering the loans. And of course it makes sense to count that money as federal spending on education.
  Take a rich province like Ontario ... pretty please. Keep raising tuition fees, increasing pressure on the feds to put more into student assistance, and then scoop the money to cover your own grant costs. It's a shell game that's become all too familiar in these parts.
  Ontario has a program to forgive any amount over $7,000 that a student borrows for a year. It's using the federal Millennium Scholarship money to cover that loan forgiveness instead of passing it directly to students to reduce the real amount they have to borrow.
  They did the same thing with the National Child Benefit. Scoop the federal money from social assistance recipients, use it to set up a provincial baby bonus disguised as a child care supplement program - and take all the credit.
  Students and their families are being shortchanged:

• by a federal government that has cut spending on post-secondary education by $3.7 billion
• by big banks that get $100 million to convince them to keep administering a loans program that is the only route for many people to go to college or university
• by provincial governments that dabble in creative accounting while ordinary families and their kids struggle with skyrocketing tuition and hefty loan payments.

Pat Daley is a freelance writer and editor in Athlone in Simcoe County, Ontario.

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For more information about tuition fees and student loans, visit The Canadian Federation of Students: www.cfs-fcee.ca.