Tuition fees for English-speaking students coming from other Canadian provinces to attend an English-speaking Quebec university will practically double, Quebec confirmed Friday.
“We are the first to have the courage to give this big blow,” declared the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, Friday morning in Montreal.
Tuition fees for first and second cycle university students will be subject to a minimum rate.
The fees for English-speaking students from other Canadian provinces, which are currently a little less than $9,000, will increase to approximately $17,000, while those charged to foreign students will reach approximately $20,000. These new floor prices are still approximate and correspond to preliminary estimates, said the minister.
Quebec wants to apply these new floor prices from the start of the school year in September 2024.
Students from France and Belgium, as well as those in the third university cycle and the second university cycle in research, will not be targeted. Neither will those who are already studying in Quebec, said the Minister of Higher Education.
Quebec thus wants to “give itself the means” to finance measures in the French-speaking universities of the network and “to curb the decline of French in Montreal”, justified Minister Déry.
Quebec has decided to double the tuition fees imposed on students from other Canadian provinces who attend an English-speaking university, revealed The Press THURSDAY.
This measure risks leading to significant losses of students and revenue for the province’s three English-speaking universities, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.
The government decision has already led to the postponement of a plan to promote French by 50 million in five years that McGill University wanted to present this week.
“It will potentially have a catastrophic budgetary impact for our university,” indicated the principal and vice-chancellor of Bishop’s University, Sébastien Lebel-Grenier, to The Press.
These changes could “have an impact on [la] financial health” of McGill University, the institution indicated in an email to The Press.
With Tommy Chouinard