Car rental companies are infamous for encouraging customers to sign up for expensive liability insurance policies. Since many renters already have coverage from their own automotive insurance policies or can rely upon insurance coverage provided by their credit card issuer, the decision whether to sign up for a costly additional policy frequently depends upon who is paying the bill. If the individual is on the hook, they will often decline coverage and rely on their existing policies. If someone else is paying, it becomes easier to justify signing up for the additional coverage.

Last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada, which represents dozens of Canada’s leading universities, signed up for one of the most expensive copyright insurance policies in Canadian history. The policy comes in the form of a controversial model copyright licensing agreement with Access Copyright, a copyright collective that licenses copying and distribution of copyrighted works such as books, journals, and other texts. Should AUCC members sign the agreement – it falls to each individual university to decide whether to do so – they will pay $26 per full time student per year for the right to copy works from the Access Copyright repertoire.

The deal marks a significant increase from the previous agreement, which had cost students less than four dollars annually plus ten cents per page for materials included within printed coursepacks. The new fees are likely to be passed along to students, who will ultimately bear the burden of the copyright arrangement with higher tuitions.

Those students may be puzzled by the AUCC decision to settle on an expensive new licensing model. Over the past year, many universities, including York, Queen’s, UBC, and Waterloo have operated without Access Copyright altogether.

Those schools have identified licensing alternatives such as campus wide electronic database licenses that offer access to thousands of journals and electronic books that can be incorporated directly into electronic coursepacks. Universities already pay millions of dollars for these licenses with the money flowing to database companies, publishers, and authors.

Moreover, open access licensing, where research publications are freely available online, constitutes a growing percentage of published research, with thousands of open access journals and hundreds of thousands of articles posted directly by the researchers themselves. Add public domain works, fair dealing, hundreds of millions spent on textbooks, and pay-per-use licenses for the remaining works and the decision to forego an Access Copyright licence becomes easy to understand.

Even more curious is the timing of the AUCC agreement. Bill C-11, the government’s copyright bill, features several provisions designed to assist education. These include an expansion of fair dealing for education and a new exception for publicly available materials on the Internet. The bill is expected to become law by the summer.

If that wasn’t enough, the model licence purports to grants rights for copying that does not require permission. For example, it defines copying as including “posting a link or hyperlink to a digital copy”, yet linking to content can hardly be described as copying materials. Moreover, the licence comes packed with onerous restrictions such as blocking the ability to store articles in online services such as Mendeley or Dropbox.

And the millions of dollars collected by Access Copyright? Last year, the collective spent 30 per cent of its licensing revenues on administrative expenses, including over two million dollars for Copyright Board applications and professional fees involving lobbying against copyright reform that might benefit educational institutions.

Given these circumstances, the AUCC decision to sign the model licence represents a stunning abdication of leadership that will cost students millions of dollars and slow innovation in Canada’s higher education community. So why sign an agreement when there are other options? Expensive additional insurance policies are easy to sign when someone else is paying the bill.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can be reached at or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.

< http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1165965–geist-the-most-expensive-copyright-insurance-policy-in-canadian-history >

Everyone loves all-day kindergarten. In Ontario, where it was introduced in 2010, it’s wildly popular with parents. Grade 1 teachers like it because the students arrive better prepared. All-day K is the signature social initiative of Dalton McGuinty, who wants to go down in history as the Education Premier. The only drawback is the cost – $1.5-billion a year by the time it’s fully implemented. Although monster deficits have forced the Education Premier to morph into the Austerity Premier, he promises he won’t put his favourite baby on the chopping block.

According to its advocates, all-day kindergarten is much more than a perk for young families. It offers a crucial leg up for disadvantaged children. For this reason alone, it’s essential to our economic prosperity.

“We can’t afford not to do it,” argues Charles Pascal, the Premier’s early learning adviser. Twenty-eight per cent of kids who enter Grade 1 are “vulnerable,” meaning they arrive with learning, social or behavioural problems. Without an early learning boost, they’ll never catch up. In the long run, Mr. Pascal told CBC Radio, early learning will pay off in better human capital and higher graduation rates. Every 1-per-cent decline in the number of vulnerable kids, he says, will add 1 per cent to GDP. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Actually, it’s a brainer. Here’s why. The world’s biggest early learning program, involving millions of children and billions of dollars of public investment, has now been exhaustively evaluated. The results are unequivocal: It doesn’t work.

The program is Head Start, an iconic preschool program launched in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.” Today, it includes nearly a million children. These are the ones who need help the most – the poor and minority kids who are at high risk of dropping out and winding up jobless or in jail. The rationale for the program, which offers not only preschool education but also family support, health and dental services and social and mental health services, is that it saves money in the long run. Since its inception, it has cost more than $100-billion.

In 2002, the U.S. government launched the massive Head Start Impact Study to determine how well the program worked. The final report, released in 2010, was devastating. It found that the modest gains achieved by Head Start students wore off by the end of Grade 1 – they wound up no further ahead than those who weren’t in the program.

You’d think these findings – involving one of the most ambitious social programs in U.S. history –would have been widely publicized. They got almost no coverage at all. Head Start is a classic example of a giant public program that doesn’t produce results but creates so many jobs and has so many defenders that no one can get rid of it.

There are big differences between Head Start and all-day kindergarten in Canada, of course. Head Start is aimed at disadvantaged three- and four-year-olds; kindergarten reaches all four- and five-year-olds. It may be that Canadian teachers are so much better that they can achieve results that have eluded the Americans for decades. Maybe Head Start is just a bad program. Or maybe disadvantaged U.S. children are so much worse off that nothing works.

But what we can conclude, from this and other studies, is that the benefits of early childhood education have been vastly overstated. It’s not a magic bullet. Which isn’t to say that all-day K has no value. It’s fabulous for working parents, and a whole lot cheaper than daycare. Mothers who might otherwise stay home may choose to work, and it creates extra jobs for teachers. But they aren’t the benefits we’ve been sold. And in a world of excruciatingly tough choices, that matters.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/margaret-wente/is-all-day-kindergarten-really-a-leg-up/article2337095/ >

She has $70,000 in student debt, a 14-year-old child, five university courses and two part-time jobs. Yet single mother Melissa Rae Stewart can’t get Ontario’s new tuition rebate.

Why not? Because the 33-year-old waited more than four years after high school to decide to go to university — she had a child when she was 19 so didn’t go back until she was 26 — and she does not qualify for the $1,600 annual rebate launched earlier this month.

That’s the fine print many failed to notice about Queen’s Park’s $430 million rebate plan that gives $1,600 back to university students and $730 back to community college students whose annual family income is below $160,000: it does not apply to students who have been out of high school for more than four years.

The plan was meant, said Premier Dalton McGuinty, specifically to help high school students overcome any immediate financial roadblock to higher learning.

“But I’m baffled — I pay $880 a month in rent, plus hydro, plus the costs of raising my daughter, so why am I less qualified for help than a kid out of high school who has the luxury of living in a house with four other students and paying $250 to $300 in rent?” said Stewart, who is finishing an honours degree in political science and certificate in ethics at the University of Western Ontario.

She is one of thousands of Ontario students whose age will exclude them from the rebate. Cindy Brownlee has been talking to many of them as director of education and equity for George Brown College’s student association. She said dozens of students have been rushing into her office every day for tips on how to apply, but only two or three actually were eligible; the rest were mature students like her. The 26-year-old single mother will graduate this spring with her diploma in early childhood education and autism and behavioral science.

“I waited a few years after high school to go to college because the cost of education put me off so I took time to save some money, but I still have about $31,000 in student debt and that rebate would have helped,” Brownlee said.

The ministry of training, colleges and universities explains on its website that while mature students are excluded, as are part-time students, graduate students and Ontario students enrolled outside the province, mature students often qualify for more student aid than other students.

Still, mature students are doubly hit by the rebate because the province scrapped a $150 textbook grant to be able to afford it, leaving some 100,000 mature students without either, noted Sam Andrey, executive director of the Ontario Undergraduate Students’ Association.

Because people with children and aboriginals both tend to be older when they enter post-secondary education, both groups appear worse off under the rebate plan.

“You’d think if you’re going to spend $400 million on something new, you’d make sure it benefitted the most needy groups,” said Andrey.

The Canadian Federation of Students’ Ontario office has had more complaints from people excluded from this rebate than they have on any other issue in recent years, said treasurer Nora Loreto. The group will target the rebate plan in its Feb. 1 day of protest about the high cost of tuition.

However Premier Dalton McGuinty told the Star’s Brandie Weikle recently that the government doesn’t “have all the money in the world,” and it drew the line at mature students partly because many have access to help from a re-training program called Second Career.

McGuinty said “the decision we made was to focus on the earlier experience to help kids make that jump from high school to post secondary education.”

< http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/1115343–older-students-not-eligible-for-ontario-tuition-rebate >

Ontario is in the anachronistic position of being the only province that publicly funds one type of religious school (Catholic) to the exclusion of all others. Massive, wasteful duplication and the religious segregation of students are some of the results of this system. Recent events have also shown Catholic doctrine is incompatible with the equality rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms while other religious groups, now seeking access to public schools and public funding, have pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of Ontario’s education policy.

Thus Ontarians face a choice:

1) Continue to fund two school systems and be subject to convincing accusations of religious bigotry from credible sources such as the UN;

2) Segregate all public schoolchildren according to religious denomination and fund every religion — a choice overwhelmingly rejected by Ontario voters in 2007; or

3) Eliminate Catholic school funding and introduce one secular school system for all Ontarians regardless of faith.

Many Ontarians are under the mistaken impression that Catholic schools cannot be defunded because of the Constitution. In reality, all that is required is an act of the Ontario provincial legislature and the consent of the federal government — consent they would almost surely grant following a vote among MPPs. Quebec and Newfoundland have both taken this step in recent years with no recorded negative effects. Therefore, as the constitutional argument made by many Catholic school supporters is a hollow one, Ontarians can debate the subject on its merits.

It’s not uncommon in Ontario to see two half-empty schools (one Catholic, one secular) around the corner from one another or children being bused past a Catholic school to a public school miles away (and vice versa). While there is no firm figure on how much money is wasted, segregating children or maintaining half-empty buildings, estimates run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Ontario government implicitly admitted duplicating school boards was wasteful when, in the case of Waldman v. Canada brought to the UN Human Rights Committee in 1999 by a Jewish parent alleging religious discrimination, the government argued against creating other religious school boards on the grounds that the cost would be prohibitive. Ontario lost the case and as a result of its policy of religious favouritism in education, Canada was found to be in breach of its treaty obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and therefore, in violation of international law.

As the recent controversy over gay-straight alliances has shown, Catholic doctrine cannot be reconciled with the promotion of gay rights. It is impossible to honour gays and lesbians while simultaneously teaching a faith that believes any sexual or romantic expression of their love is sinful. Gay and lesbian Catholic students are taught they have a choice: repress or deny a fundamental part of their identity or go to hell. While some Catholic bureaucrats have argued they can prevent bullying and isolation of gay students while prohibiting rainbows or use of the word “gay” in student groups, their arguments are unconvincing. Imagine if Jewish student groups were prohibited from displaying the Star of David, or black students were told they were loved, as long as they didn’t encourage “blackness.” As a rash of suicides of bullied, gay children across North America has shown, these students’ lives are in danger. For a publicly funded school board to offer them anything less than the same vigorous, full-throated support it offers other students is a contemptible betrayal of some of our most vulnerable children and the values we hold dear as Canadians.

It is also worth mentioning that according to Catholic teaching and the current Pope, gays and lesbians will not be alone in hell; the same fate awaits all divorced or lapsed Catholics as well as every non-Catholic on Earth. This is not to single out Catholics; most religions believe they alone have the key to salvation. The question is whether these exclusionary articles of faith should be taught in public schools.

A further problem arises when other religions begin to demand religious accommodation in public schools (as with Muslims at Toronto’s Valley Park Middle School). While many Ontarians may oppose this, it’s hypocritical to do so unless one supports defunding Catholic schools.

The choice is between an unfair, internationally illegal, discriminatory status quo; a system with dozens of separate religious boards and schools; and one secular school system which respects all faiths, while favouring none.

Joe Killoran is a law and politics teacher at Malvern Collegiate Institute in the Toronto District School Board. He formerly taught religion, law, English and history at Neil McNeil Catholic School in the Toronto Catholic District School Board. He is vice-president of the Ontario Pro-Con Debating Forum.

< http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Should+Ontario+keep+funding+separate+Catholic+schools/5939559/story.html >

About two-thirds of post-secondary students are ineligible for tuition rebates introduced this month by the provincial Liberals, according to the Canadian Federation of Students.

“There are a lot of exclusions to the grant that really don’t make sense,” CFS chairwoman for Ontario Sandy Hudson said Tuesday.

She said the province is refusing to make changes to the policy even though most students are ineligible.

The Ontario Tuition Grant is a new rebate effective Jan. 5 that offsets tuition costs for dependent full-time undergraduate students within four years of graduating high school. The annual rebate is $730 for each college student and $1,600 for each university student from families with incomes under $160,000 a year.

Although the Liberal government said more than 300,000 will benefit from the rebate program, the CFS said there are too many students that it does not apply to. Hudson said less than 50 per cent of all students in the university sector and one-third of college students will benefit.

The CFS presented a petition to the legislature signed by 40,000 students proposing that the $423-million to be spent annually on the rebate program be applied to all tuition fees. This would reduce tuition costs for everyone by nearly 15 per cent, Hudson said, adding the current application process to determine who is eligible is elaborate and also costly.

David Raymont, director of communication for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, defended the program.

“The new Ontario tuition grant is progressive,” he said. “It provides help to families and students who are most in need.”

MPP Teresa Piruzza (L – Windsor West) said there are other grants available for students who are excluded from the tuition rebate.

“We actually have one of the most generous assistance programs in the country,” Piruzza said. “There are a number of different types of grants and assistance that are available that open the doors to those people that may not be eligible for this program but may be eligible for another program.”

Piruzza does not foresee any changes to the program but Matt Caron, St. Clair College Student Representative Council president, said there are some “tweaks” that need to be made.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction but hopefully within the next year or two, there are less restrictions on applying for it,” he said. “But as of right now, any money off for students is fantastic and hopefully with the years to come it just gets better and better for students.”

Andre Capaldi, president of the University of Windsor Students’ Alliance, said he believes the grant will improve accessibility and help reduce the stress students are under.

“I think it’s going to do wonders for the students here at the University of Windsor and I really commend the government for making post-secondary education a priority,” Capaldi said. “And I think many students at the University of Windsor are going to see a positive impact in their lives because of it.”

Capaldi, a member of the Ontario Young Liberals, said he is “overwhelmingly in support” of the new program and said he does not anticipate much criticism from students.

< http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Most+students+called+ineligible+tuition+rebates/5943244/story.html >

The various groups that have come out against Ontario’s proposed anti-bullying law are doing a fine job of proving the argument that the province has no business funding a separate Catholic school system.

It was one thing when, last week, religious groups held a press conference to accuse the McGuinty Liberals of, among other things, harbouring a “radical” sex-education agenda. Many of the actors in that drama have been pushing that line for some time now, and the suggestion that Ontario has an agenda to foster homosexuality deserves little more than a roll of the eyes.

More moderate voices, meanwhile, have said they expect Catholic schools to be places of tolerance, although they are leery about the part of Bill 13 that requires schools to allow the formation of clubs such as gay-straight alliances should students choose to form them. But now Teresa Pierre, the director of a group called Ontario Catholic Parent Advocates, is saying quite plainly that Bill 13 would require Catholic schools to accept homosexuality. And that they shouldn’t have to.

She said her group believes that Dalton McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario, wants to force Catholic schools to allow groups like gay-straight alliances that would end up promoting homosexuality as acceptable, something that goes against official Church teaching.

“We would not tolerate negative speech toward anyone based on his or her sexual orientation in our schools,” she said. “Nevertheless, we don’t want society telling the Church what is proper behaviour and what it should teach.”

This is a strange way to promote tolerance: do not say anything negative toward anyone based on sexual orientation. Oh, and also, homosexuality is unacceptable and improper. But again: don’t say that to anyone.

Related

• Anti-bullying bill subverts Catholic curriculum: group

  It’s the second part of that quote that goes a long way toward explaining the fundamental flaw in a system that funds a separate Catholic school system: “We don’t want society telling the Church what is proper behaviour and what it should teach.”

  Fine, no problem. The Catholic Church has a right to its beliefs. But the fact that taxpayers continue to fund schools that want to teach those beliefs looks ever more ridiculous as stories like this play out.

  < http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/12/14/scott-stinson-ontarios-publicly-funded-intolerance/ >

American legal education is in crisis. The economic downturn has left many recent law graduates saddled with crushing student loans and bleak job prospects. The law schools have been targets of lawsuits by students and scrutiny from the United States Senate for alleged false advertising about potential jobs. Yet, at the same time, more and more Americans find that they cannot afford any kind of legal help.

Addressing these issues requires changing legal education and how the profession sees its responsibility to serve the public interest as well as clients. Some schools are moving in promising directions. The majority are still stuck in an outdated instructional and business model.

The problems are not new. In 2007, a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching explained that law schools have contributed heavily to this crisis by giving “only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice.”

Even after the economy recovers, the outsourcing of legal work from law firms and corporate counsel offices to lower-fee operations overseas is likely to continue. Belatedly, some law schools are trying to align what and how they teach to what legal practice now entails and what individuals and institutions need — like many more lawyers who can serve as advocates for the poor and middle class.

Instead of a curriculum taught largely through professors’ grilling of students about appellate cases, some schools are offering more apprentice-style learning in legal clinics and more courses that train students for their multiple future roles as advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers.

With new legal issues arising from the use of computers in business and government to manage information, some schools are teaching students software code as well as legal code to solve systemwide problems. Some are exploring ways to reduce tuitions and make themselves more sustainable. Potential business models include legal degrees based on two years of classes, followed by third-year apprenticeship programs.

In American law schools, the choice is not between teaching legal theory or practice; the task is to teach useful legal ideas and skills in more effective ways. The case method has been the foundation of legal education for 140 years. Its premise was that students would learn legal reasoning by studying appellate rulings. That approach treated law as a form of science and as a source of truth.

That vision was dated by the 1920s. It was a relic by the 1960s. Law is now regarded as a means rather than an end, a tool for solving problems. In reforming themselves, law schools have the chance to help reinvigorate the legal profession and rebuild public confidence in what lawyers can provide.

< http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/opinion/legal-education-reform.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss >

Last month, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) released Public Education for the Public Good: A National Vision for Canada’s Post-Secondary Education System.

Some of its finding:

• Since the late 1990s, full-time enrolment at colleges and universities has increased 25 per cent.  Enrolment in graduate studies soared 42 per cent between 1998 and 2008.
• But federal funding for postsecondary education has decreased dramatically since the late-1970s.
• The Canada Social Transfer gives money to the provinces but does not require them to use federal postsecondary funding for postsecondary purposes because there are too-few strings attached. For example, in 2008, the Government of British Columbia cut funding to universities by $50 million shortly after it received $110 million in new postsecondary funding from the federal government!

The CFS’s central recommendation is for the federal government to bring in a Post-Secondary Education Act modeled after the Canada Health Act. Under such legislation, the federal government would work cooperatively with the provinces; restore funding to 1992 levels; ensure that tuition fees are reduced to 1992 levels; and provide enough money to universities and colleges that they could undertake much needed capital repairs.

< http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ca9b5c14da55e36f1328eb0f1&id=5111c0b6e8 >

What’s next for educational reform in the schools of Ontario? In the wake of the recent election, and the appointment of a new minister of education, how might Dalton McGuinty sustain his reputation as the “Education Premier”?

His government’s track record to date is striking. It introduced all-day kindergarten, environmental education programming, a safe schools strategy which has refined a blunt “zero tolerance” policy, and partnership “tables” through which educators and community groups have had input into the shaping of policy agendas. The government’s highest priority has been the improvement of test scores and high-school graduation rates that respond to an apparent craving for easily grasped indicators of educational improvement.

The educational system, of course, is never good enough and the premier and minister will, as always, receive lots of advice from educational “stakeholders.” To get the conversation going, here are some modest proposals, informed by research, that would enhance the quality of the classroom experience and increase the likelihood of student success.

The most intractable educational challenge is not really an educational issue at all: it is the enduring problem in Ontario (and Canada) of poverty. Schools and teachers cannot resolve this deep social problem (they have no control over unemployment, low wages and inadequate housing), but they can, and do, offer breakfast programs, subsidized field trips and enhanced counselling for students burdened by the academic consequences of family impoverishment. Some schools located in urban settings where almost all of the children are poor have built bridges with parents in order to facilitate communication about their children’s educational experiences. These efforts should be extended (and funded) wherever they are needed.

So too should initiatives that have demonstrably improved the educational prospects of vulnerable students. Mentoring, employed so effectively by such initiatives as Pathways to Education (begun a decade ago in Regent Park) and the Advanced Credit Experience program at York University (where Grade 11 students from area high schools take a university course), is key. The impact of a caring, perceptive mentor on the life of a struggling student (whether poor or middle class) can be immense and the government should support this practice across the province.

The ministry and the school boards should also encourage every creative attempt to deepen student “engagement” in elementary and secondary classrooms. A 2009 national survey published by the Canadian Education Association found that students learn most effectively when they are absorbed by the subject and stimulated by the teacher. They derive far less from their education when they are shovelled huge amounts of curriculum content, and taught in pedestrian ways by instructors who are required to test them constantly.

It is time to take a step back from the formulaic testing and school ranking regimes and focus on the educational dynamics that really make a difference. As the CEA study noted, the individual teachers that students encounter “from year to year” matter far more than the schools they attend, however the schools place in various provincial and national ranking schemes.

Whatever their socio-economic or family backgrounds, students thrive in educational environments that tap their curiosity, speak to the worlds they inhabit, and recognize their accomplishments. Students with “special needs” require more individual attention than they conventionally receive, but as individuals whose abilities, personalities, and potential vary tremendously, all students have special needs, and the teaching strategies we employ should reflect this. As Star columnist Rick Salutin reported in a series earlier this year, we should pay close attention to the inventive educational practices of Finland, whose educational “outcomes” are recognized worldwide.

Ontario gets a lot right in its elementary and secondary schools. But we have no reason for complacency. Too many students are still burdened and impeded by poverty, isolation or boredom. The “Education Premier,” and his new minister, Laurel Broten, will earn accolades if they provide the means to confront these challenges in the next round of educational reform.

Paul Axelrod is a professor and former dean of the faculty of education at York University. He is the author of The Promise of Schooling, Education in Canada, 1800-1914.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1081878–setting-education-priorities >

University tuition fees in Canada rose again this school year by a margin that easily exceeds the rate of inflation, new data showed Friday.

Statistics Canada said the average annual tuition fee for undergraduate students is $5,366 for the new 2011-12 school year, up 4.3% from last year. That follows a 4% in tuition for the 2010-11 school year.

The federal agency pointed out that the annual rate of inflation was running at 2.7% in July.

“Tuition fees rose in all but one province, Newfoundland and Labrador, where they have been frozen since 2003-04,” Statistics Canada said in a statement.

In other provinces, the hikes ranged from 5.1% in Ontario and 1.4% in Manitoba.

Not only did Ontario see the biggest year-to-year rise in tuition fees, it also had the most expensive overall cost at $6,640 for undergraduates. Perhaps not surprisingly, post-secondary tuition has emerged as an issue in the current election campaign in Ontario.

Quebec is the cheapest province to attend university as an undergraduate this year with average tuition of $2,519, even after a 4.5% rise from last year.

By faculty, the highest average undergraduate tuition cost is dentistry at $16,024, up 6.4% from last year.

That’s followed by medicine at $11,345, up 4.4% from a year before, and pharmacy at $9,806, up 8.8%. Pharmacy studies saw the highest annual tuition hikes among all undergraduate programs in Canada.

The average tuition for graduate programs is $5,599, up 3.7% from a year earlier. Besides frozen rates in Newfoundland, the gains ranged from 5.5% in Ontario to 0.1% in Alberta.

Ontario has the most expensive graduate programs with an average tuition of $7,578 and Newfoundland has the lowest at $2,456.

The most expensive graduate program is for an executive master of business administration, where the average tuition is $37,501, up 1.3% from last year. Law programs saw the biggest increases among graduate studies, up 20.7% to an average of $5,414 a year.

< tp://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/16/university-tuition-fees-rise-again-statscan/ >

< 0916-tuition.jpg >