Tuition hike will turn off international recruits, say MUN students

Hundreds of students piled into a lecture hall at Memorial University of Newfoundland Thursday night to protest against proposed tuition hikes.

The university has plans for a 30-per cent increase in tuition for international and graduate students to make up a $20 million cut in the latest provincial budget.

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At a meeting Thursday in a lecture hall in MUN's engineering building, several students took the time to speak out about their own experiences.

Tamanna Khan, who came to study at Memorial University from Bangladesh two years ago, said the increase hurts those who are a long way from home and fearful about the future.

"When I came in here in 2013, the recruiters of the MUN told me that the tuition is going to be frozen for my whole degree," she said.

"When I see the tuition fee is going to be increasing, my mother back home, she is scared. She can't afford that for me."

Unfair to foreign students and bad for the provincial economy

Brittany Lennox, a member of MUN's students union, said the tuition freeze is one of the reasons international and graduate students come to MUN in the first place. 

She thinks that without it Newfoundland will seem less attractive to those looking to come to Canada to study.

"The primary reason that international and graduate students are attracted here is for that tuition fee freeze," she said.

"If prospective students lose faith in the commitment of our province and our university to that tuition fee freeze, then we will lose the important opportunity to build our economy and help our province recover from the economic and population crisis that it is facing right now."

Lennox is not sure people realize just how little money some of the international students have, given that they already pay twice what Canadian students do.

"The international students that are on campus now are the highest users of the campus food bank," she said.

"Not only that, but international students already pay upwards of three to four times the Canadian students for the same education. We just want to point out the system that we already have is already an awful form of discrimination."