By Gary Zone
Editor, the Gauntlet,
Living in Toronto in 1960, I enrolled in chemical engineering in the faculty of applied science, as it was called back then at U of T.
I am almost positive my tuition was $550. I am not sure if that included an activity fee or whether that was tacked on. It certainly did not include textbooks or anything extra required for labs. It was simple tuition and it was a lot of money back then.
Passing this number through the Bank of Canada Inflation Indicator, I have determined that today this simple tuition would be equivalent to about $3,830 today. The per cent increase over those 46 years has been just shy of 600 per cent.
Do students have that much to complain about or were tuitions frozen or kept far below cost for so many years that they simply became unrealistic?
Gary Zone, retired and sometimes-continuing ed. student