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Student Fees and Student Aid

Policy Statement

Full access to post-secondary education benefits both individual Canadians and society in general.  Public post-secondary education policy must aim to provide opportunities for all qualified individuals. All barriers to access and participation in post-secondary education, including financial barriers, must be removed. Government programs at both the federal and provincial level must ensure this most basic public policy objective. To ensure this result,

  1. government grants to public post-secondary institutions must be sufficient to cover the real costs of post-secondary education and to ensure a strong, fully public post-secondary education system;
  2. student fees1 must be kept as low as possible, with the goal of moving toward a zero-tuition policy, and should never grow at a rate higher than inflation; and
  3. the primary form of direct student aid must be needs-based grants.

Consistent with these policy objectives, voucher systems to fund public post-secondary institutions must be avoided in favour of direct grants to basic operating budgets.

Programs that regulate student fees and provide student aid must ensure that there are no unreasonable increases in auxiliary fees and no differential fees (e.g., per-program or per-course fees based on market demand), which might discourage full participation of qualified individuals. Student union dues should be set through democratic means by student union members, without government interference.

Although public policy may from time to time require special programs to encourage greater participation from traditionally under-represented groups, student aid programs should be needs-based and must provide adequate support for recipients. Student loan programs should be kept to a minimum, and neither loans nor bursary programs should be used as a substitute for robust public funding of post-secondary education through public grants, as well as affordability measures (e.g., concerning food, public transit, etc.) that ensure a reasonable cost-of-living overall. Income-contingent repayment loans, which increase the costs to low-income people, must under all circumstances be avoided.

The recruitment of international students should not be motivated by financial gain. No differential fees should be applied to international students, and international student tuition revenue should not be used to offset insufficient public funding of post-secondary education.2

Approved by the CAUT Council, November 2001;
Approved by the CAUT Council, May 2026.

  1. In this policy statement, fees are defined as all forms of fee charged to students, including tuition (e.g., per-course tuition, program fees, and continuing fees) and auxiliary fees (e.g., mandatory non-instructional fees, student services fees, and ancillary fees). ↩︎
  2. See the Policy Statement on International Students. ↩︎