U of T law school students, who pay the highest tuition fees in Canada, are stunned to hear that the figures could be doubled. Regardless of ongoing student struggles against tuition fee increases, the University of Toronto and the provincial government are stoking the engine of skyrocketing tuition with a proposal to up U of T law school tuition to $25,000 in the next five years.
Since Ron Daniels became dean of U of T’s law school, tuition has gone up 380 per cent. In 1997/98, the cost of education at one of Canada’s most widely respected law schools was $3,808. In 1998, the Ontario government deregulated tuition fees for professional and graduate programs, allowing institutions to set tuition fee levels.
“I think that the tuition increase is not unexpected for anyone who’s been around for more than a year,” said third year law and social work student Maggie Went. She noted that this increase has been explicitly part of the dean’s agenda.
Some suggest that since law school students from U of T often get high paying Bay Street jobs upon graduating, they are in a position to pay off high loans. But not all students are interested in corporate law.
Student Administrative Council president Alex Kerner said, “Even our own law school rep said this limits the choices that people have once they graduate because their first thought is: how do I pay off my loans? If that’s your first thought coming out of law school, there is no choice.”
U of T law professor Jim Phillips echoed Kerner’s statement, and added that the trend is already underway. “I’m convinced that this is already happening. I see more and more students saying that they will go to Bay Street for a few years to pay [their loans] off. Of course they end up going for longer than that.”
Went began her law degree at U of T in 1998, when tuition was $8,000. Her major concern with this increase is that it will limit diversity of interest in the student body because students who assume that they’ll have to go into corporate law to pay off their debts won’t go to U of T.
She added that there are a number of individuals who might be adverse to taking on a large debt, such as people from low income families, minorities, and mature students with children.
Both Went and Phillips mentioned last year’s incident in which 25 law school students were accused of forging their grades in order to get summer jobs at Bay Street law firms.
Both asserted that one of the factors contributing to the so-called scandal was that U of T law school places significant pressure on student to get Bay Street corporate law jobs.
Went said that the career centre had recently assigned someone specifically to deal with “alternative” career options, setting up corporate law as the norm.
“There’s been changes in the years that I’ve been there in terms of the curriculum and the professors. A lot of the professors who are disturbed by the increase in corporate climate at the school have left the school to go to York, or to go to other universities,” said Went.
Daniels has justified the tuition increase by proposing to make U of T a “world class” law school that would be able to compete with law schools like Harvard. But Went and Phillips are of the camp that disagrees with the entire proposition.
“Certainly there have been some professors that we’ve been able to attract that are good in their field, but that’s probably because U of T has a higher salary grid for their professors.
There’s certainly a lot of professors with research interests more like my own that have left,” said Went.
“I think this will do nothing for the quality of education that students receive,” said Phillips. “The quality of education students receive has got most to do with commitment of the institution to providing good education.”
While the tuition increase is supposed to provide smaller classes, Went has not seen a decrease in class size, and Phillips said that his class sizes have remained exactly the same.
Dean Daniels could not be reached for comment.
