N.B. university students fear tuition hike

A lobby group that represents more than 16,000 university students in New Brunswick is concerned that tuition will be going up again next year.

Joey O'Kane, president of the New Brunswick Student Alliance, said a meeting with the province's post-secondary education minister last week, left him with the feeling that tuition would be hiked in 2012-13.

If costs keep rising, he said, students will start leaving the province and looking elsewhere for their education.

"So, whether that means the students are going to be leaving in the short-term, or whether students will just look into other options,"O'Kane said Wednesday.

"Maybe we'll see more students just going directly to work after they graduate from high school, and different issues like that."

In March, the government changed funding to post-secondary education including the removal of a tuition freeze put in place by the previous Liberal government.

A department spokesperson said Wednesday that the government is developing a four-year funding model for the province's universities.

Sarah Daneff, a third year nursing student at UNB Saint John, pays $6,000 per year in tuition, and its a financial reality that has forced her to move back home.

Daneff said her debt load means she may have to make some tough choices after graduation.

"I owe quite a bit of money in student loans, so probably what's going to happen is I may have to move away to the States to pay off my student loan," she said. " You make more money in the States than you do here."

In New Brunswick, the average 2011 tuition for fulltime students in undergraduate programs is $5,853, according to Statistics Canada. That's an increase of 3.6 per cent from 2010.