Tuition fees protested in Halifax
Posted Feb 4, 2015 11:20:55 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A major student protest will get underway Wednesday afternoon in Halifax.
Several hundred students will make their way from Victoria Park to Province House to protest rising tuition fees.
Ali Calladine sits on the council of the Dalhousie Student Union, and helped organize today’s rally.
She says the overall message is the cost of post-secondary learning in Nova Scotia is too high.
“To break it down a little bit more, that means not looking at very high tuition fees, and tuition fee hikes; looking at more of a grants, rather than loans, program; and in general, having more funding going towards university across the board,” Calladine said.
Calladine says education should be a right, and high tuition fees act as a barrier to access.
“It’s really starting to pigeonhole who’s allowed to get higher education and who isn’t, making inequality across the board incredibly worse when people can’t afford to go to university,” she said.
Nova Scotia has the third highest tuition fees in the country, behind Ontario and Saskatchewan.
Calladine says she’d like to see us take our cues from Newfoundland, which has the lowest.
