Engineering students at the University of Manitoba have spoken: their tuition fees are too low!
In a landslide 430-239 referendum vote, the engineers at the university voted to ask the university to raise their tuition fees by up to 40 per cent, in order to rescue their bankrupt department. The results of the referendum are non-binding, but dean of Engineering Dr. Douglas Ruth, along with 64 per cent of U of M’s roughly 1,200 engineering undergrads want the school’s Board of Governors and Manitoba’s Minister of Advanced Education and Training to approve the hike, which would break the province’s seven-year-old tuition freeze.
“We’re about a million and a half dollars in the hole,” said Ruth in a presentation to students earlier this month. He warned undergrads and alumni that if the Faculty of Engineering loses its accreditation due to shrinking budgets and declining quality, the value of all their degrees would drop sharply.
“If things do not improve, we’re probably looking at a time frame of four to five years before we have serious repercussions,” he said.
-André Bovee-Begun
