Acfas | Spotlight on student finances

Despite the increase in financial aid ten years ago, Quebec students still earn the vast majority of their income from work. The situation among part-time students is such that it could harm their success, according to a conference held at the Acfas annual conference.

“The students work a lot,” says Nicolas Bolduc, researcher at the National School of Public Administration (ÉNAP), who participated in the conference. “They want to limit their debt or think that they are not eligible for government student financial assistance (AFE) programs. »

Part-time students work almost full-time. “At this level, there are impacts on academic success, according to studies,” says Mr. Bolduc. Full-time students work just under 20 hours per week.

However, these studies generally involve full-time students. We must therefore examine in more detail the number of hours of paid work per week that harms a student enrolled in one or two courses per session, says Mr. Bolduc. “We are also studying ways to bring part-time students to study full-time, to take full advantage of the AFE. » About one in five university students is part-time.

The study by the Quebec Student Union, published this fall, found it worrying that 40% of loans taken out by university students were with banks rather than through the AFE, because there are more of charges. Another important conclusion is that students prefer the current terms of the AFE, rather than having access to larger amounts, but with more loans, or more grants, but a smaller total amount.

Was Mr. Bolduc surprised by this result? “Yes and no,” he said. My approach is a little more economical and aims to minimize the amount of loans. But students prefer to keep their current level of spending, and therefore the AFE status quo. »

Parental contribution

One of the inequities of the loan and bursary program is the parental contribution, according to Mr. Bolduc. “For a first baccalaureate, the AFE considers that parents help their children, and therefore takes parental income into account. But this is not necessarily the case. And after a baccalaureate, we have access to AFE regardless of parental income, even though we know that some parents continue to help their children. »

The parental income threshold where students no longer have access to AFE was raised after the student strikes of 2012.

Mr. Bolduc also thinks that amounts withdrawn from registered education savings plans (RESPs) should be taken into account in the calculation of the AFE. Currently, only returns accumulated in the RESP are included in students’ income when withdrawing from RESPs. The capital that was initially deposited is not, even if it constitutes a form of parental assistance, according to Mr. Bolduc.

Mr. Bolduc’s master’s thesis focused on RESPs. More than half of parents earning more than $100,000 per year contributed, compared to less than a third of those earning less than $50,000. This inequality was partly corrected by the automatic registration of children from poor families in RESPs, according to Mr. Bolduc.