NEWS
4 | November 28, 2018
ultravires.ca
Faculty Council Revisits Tuition, Financial Aid CAMERON COTTON-O’BRIEN (1L)
Mounting frustration from students, faculty over ever-higher tuition Faculty Council met for the third time this year on November 21, where discussion again heavily focused on financial aid and tuition. Campaign for Excellence without Barriers / Barriers to Excellence Dean Iacobucci began discussing these issues by acknowledging the Barriers to Excellence campaign. He tabled questions about the prudence of launching of a “counter-campaign” to a campaign aimed at increasing contributions to financial aid, focusing instead on what he characterized as the campaigns’ joint endeavour to make the law school more accessible. The Campaign for Excellence without Barriers, he said, is aimed at increasing the gap between effective tuition and listed tuition as much as possible. The Campaign has thus far raised roughly $15 million for financial aid, and $25 million overall. Tuition to increase 4% instead of 5% Dean Iacobucci stressed the Faculty is also working on controlling tuition. He said that, subject to formal approval from the Provost, tuition will increase 4% next year instead of the statutory maximum of 5%. Instead of increasing $1,836.00, tuition will now increase $1,468.80, representing a “savings” of $367.20 for students. Many SLS members praised the dean for this move. Dean Iacobucci claims this may be the first time in 15 years that tuition will not increase by the maxi-
mum allowable amount. Question and answer proves heated Professor Mohammed Fadel asked what the average difference was between nominal tuition and effective tuition for students on financial aid. The Dean was not able to speak specifically. Instead, he said that the average bursary was about $10,000. He said many students also received government grants like OSAP on top of that. Professor Jim Phillips pressed the Dean on the average effective tuition. The Dean admitted that the gap between tuition and financial aid has increased dramatically over the past few years. Alex Severance (1L), an SLS representative, asked if more granular budget information was available, such as on compensation. The Dean declined to share that information, citing that it was an “HR matter”. [The Government of Ontario publishes salary information for public employees earning $100,000 or more as part of the “Sunshine List”. The highest earner at the Faculty of Law is Dean Iacobucci, who earned $359,999.34 in salary and benefits in 2017. The next highest earner is Professor Arthur Ripstein. He earned $325,116.12 in 2017.] The Dean stated that, historically, 96% of graduates receive articles. SLS President Solomon McKenzie asked if the Faculty tracked alumni past articling. The Dean said no. The Dean mentioned that the Post-Graduate Debt Relief program was also available for alumni but did not give specifics on how many graduates used the program.
Professor Denise Reaume said much of the frustration from students and alumni over tuition is because the school says it is trying to do its best every year and treating the problems as new, when in fact they were “100% fully anticipatable and anticipated” when the Faculty, under the direction of Dean Ron Daniels, first started to increase professor salaries and tuition in 1995. She said there is frustration because it seems that there is no way the school can “get its head above water”. The Dean once again defended his position because it was the “hand he was dealt” when he became Dean in 2015. He says that the school is doing the best it can. Dean Iacobucci resented the notion that present circumstances were foreseeable and claimed that faculty budgets are crafted on five-year horizons. He did acknowledge, however, that present options are delimited by decisions taken in the past. Related to these budget issues, the Dean also discussed recent provincial government decisions regarding post-secondary institutions, including the cancellation of proposed satellite campuses in Markham and Brampton, as well as the November 20 decision to deny funding to Ryerson University’s proposed law school. While the Dean noted that these decisions were perhaps justifiable on an independent basis, he did say that the general attitude displayed was disconcerting. The law school receives only 13% of its operating budget from the provincial government at present, but any decrease would compound the budgetary problems already facing the school.
Both SLS and the GLSA noted successful fall social calendars, with SLS hosting HalLAWeen and a Coffee House, and the GLSA holding a number of social activities for grad students, including a pumpkin carving contest and ping pong tournament. SLS president Solomon McKenzie also marked the launch of 1L exam study groups. Faculty Council learned of a new Global Legal Studies certificate that may be offered as early as next Fall. Prof. Albert Yoon said the program, to be launched in cooperation with the Munk School of Global Affairs, would allow JD students interested in global studies to formalize these interests. If the program does get off the ground next Fall, students entering their final year who have taken some courses in the area would be able to add the specific requirements to their schedules and earn the certificate. No time for mental health Yukimi Henry’s presentation on the “Student Mental Health Survey 2017-2018 Results” was pushed to the next Faculty Council meeting. Recording, questions not welcome Dean Edward Iacobucci reminded attendees that recording was not allowed at Faculty Council. He later clarified this was due to his understanding of Robert’s Rules of Order. The Dean also declined to allow many non-Faculty Council students to ask questions, citing time constraints.
FEATURES
Financial Aid Changes Edge Towards Implementation MELODY CHAN (1L) AND JAMES FLYNN (1L)
Rising tuition fees prompt financial aid restructuring, a donor drive, and student dissent Changes to the Faculty of Law’s financial aid program, approved at a March 2018 Faculty Council meeting, are set to be implemented in the upcoming academic year (beginning September 2019). In the 2017-2018 academic year, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law distributed approximately $4.3 million in bursaries and loan interest payments to approximately 48 percent of its current students. Tuition Fees The Faculty of Law has the highest domestic fees of any Canadian law school, at nearly $37,000 for first-year students entering in Fall 2018. In comparison, Osgoode Hall Law School charges approximately $29,000, Western University Faculty of Law charges about $24,000, and Queen’s University Faculty of Law charges about $21,000. At the same time, U of T is the only law school in Ontario to offer strictly needs-based student financial aid. “The University of Toronto Faculty of Law has the most robust student financial aid program in Canada, and we focus all of our student support on needs-based financial aid,” said Dean Edward Iacobucci. Approximately 50 percent of JD students receive financial aid from the Faculty of Law through bursaries and interest payments on debt. The Faculty also maintains the Post-Graduate Debt Relief Program, a low-income protection program for graduates who have lower incomes following graduation. The program assists graduates with the repayment of eligible academic student debt after graduation. A graduate will qualify for the program by making an annual income below or just above the Faculty’s Basic Income Level of $58,438.
Government Funding The law school has four sources of funds: the government, the University, tuition fees, and philanthropy, said Iacobucci. “Government funding per student has been flat since the early ’90s; university funding has been declining since the mid-2000s. This puts pressure on tuition—and philanthropy,” he added. “The Faculty of Law’s priority is to address these pressures with prudent fiscal management, raising the share of the Faculty’s operating budget devoted to financial aid, and by raising money primarily for student financial aid.” Thus far, the Campaign for Excellence without Barriers has raised over $24.7 million (with $15 million going to financial aid). Of the $30 million target, $20 million will be allocated for student financial aid. Privately supported endowments provide about onethird of the Faculty’s annual financial aid budget. In an email to Ultra Vires, Merrilee Fullerton, Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, declined to say whether the government would increase government funding per student. “Our government has a mandate to restore respect for taxpayer and tax dollars. Part of that process is making sure that the Government’s services and programs are efficient, effective, and conducive to job creation,” she said. Financial Aid Program Changes The current financial aid system provides applicants with a percentage from a pot of bursary money relative to the needs of other same-year applicants. The school calculates each student’s unmet need by subtracting assumed assets—deemed parental contribution, employment income and government loans—from standardized annual expenses based off
current tuition, room and board, and personal expenses. The faculty will pay interest on a line of credit that students may use to pay the difference between their bursaries and unmet need. The Faculty will adopt specific changes to the financial aid calculations in 2019 with the goal of making the allocation more progressive. These changes—which were developed by the Financial Aid Committee following a mandate by Iacobucci—increase the available bursary funds for students by requiring that the first $5,000 of all students’ unmet need be provided in the form of interest-free loans. This will leave a larger portion of the financial aid pot for those with higher levels of unmet need. Additionally, the sibling adjustment for parental deeming will be removed for siblings who are above 18. In the past, a student’s deemed parental contribution would be split evenly among the number of children in the household who were attending a postsecondary institution. With the changed calculations, this division will be removed. This ensures that a student’s socio-economic background will be more accurately reflected by the parental deeming. The financial aid committee stresses that while not all parents may actually contribute to a student’s tuition, parental deeming accounts for the safety net that students have when taking out loans or paying debt. The goal of the changes is progressivity: to shift the model to provide more aid to those with more need by finding ways to better account for those with larger safety net and available resources. The committee decided on these two changes by using a model developed by Professor Adriana Robertson based on financial aid data from student applicants. After considering different possible changes and variables, they settled on their proposal, which will hopefully increase the percentage of unmet need
fulfilled through bursaries from 36 percent to above 40 percent, maybe even 45 percent for those with the highest levels of need. “I summarize my understanding of it with three goals,” Robertson said, “we want it to be budget neutral, progressive, and relatively easy to understand and implement.” Law students are expected to access a variety of funding sources for their education, including personal resources, parental and spousal contributions, and government aid. Student Advocacy Barriers to Excellence (B2E) is a student-led advocacy group formed as a response to the faculty’s alumni fundraising campaign, Excellence Without Barriers. It aims to shape the discussion about the school’s tuition and financial aid program through recommendations that reflect student’ concerns about the rapidly increasing costs of attending law school. The focus is transparency: the campaign asks for information like a breakdown of expenses related to student experience and the current fair value of the financial aid pot. Before a complete review of tuition spending and financial aid system can be done, the Campaign requests a moratorium on tuition increases past $40,000. In a Faculty Council meeting in November 2018, Iacobucci addressed the Campaign’s concerns and said it was likely that the law school will only be increasing tuition by 4 percent next year, instead of the governmentally-permitted 5 percent. In a concurrence to the B2E letter, the Students’ Law Society (SLS) agreed “that the increase in tuition has a deleterious impact on the financial and mental health of law students and on the accessibility of the Law School.”
