Students at UPEI have let their student union know what they want from the province this fiscal year, and those priorities are reflected in a 2024-2025 advocacy document brought to the legislature on Wednesday.

The document is called “Reimagine: Affordable, Accessible and Sustainable Post-Secondary Education in Prince Edward Island,” and it contains six recommendations when it comes to financial aid, international student support, tuition and employment.

“The cost of living has gone so far up and the support and services, they really just haven’t kept up,” said Shreesh Agrawal, the UPEI Student Union’s vice president external, who brought the advocacy document to the legislature along with student union president and CEO Zhaorongyao (George) Jiang.

“The document really takes a few very strong priorities together, finds a way to make them practically applicable to P.E.I. and our political landscape, and put[s] them forward for the government to consider.”

As well as presenting the proposals to MLAs, the student union has been meeting regularly with Minister of Workforce, Advanced Learning and Population Jenn Redmond, said Agrawal.

Annual exercise

Students at the university are asked to fill out a policy priority survey every spring so that the incoming student union executive members know what the student body wants them to tackle.

This year’s first three priorities are related to student financial assistance, calling on the government to:

• Remove “unfair” barriers to financial aid so that parental income is no longer considered or assumed when assessing need.

• Expand the George Coles Bursary to $3,500 a year and loosen eligibility criteria.

• Increase the ceiling for student financial aid support from the weekly maximum of $217 to $300 a week.

Agrawal said the first priority would require a regulatory change. Currently, students looking for financial aid are required to submit documents attesting to their parents’ income, regardless of whether the parents intend to contribute to the cost of their education.

“It is assumed that, provided they’re above a certain income threshold, they are giving me money for post secondary,” he said.

Students arrive on campus to begin the 2024 school year at the University of Prince Edward Island. (Mitch Cormier/CBC)

The fourth priority focuses on tuition, calling for increases to be predictable and capped at an affordable level tied to the annual rate of inflation, Agrawal said.

“As a student myself, until it’s April, I have no idea what to tell my father back home, how much tuition is going to be next year,” he said. “And then I have those four months to come up with an extra $1,000 [or] $2,000, if that’s what it is.

“Students just need the predictability and the stability.”

The final two recommendations relate to the academic experience at UPEI, especially for international students who can struggle to build networks compared to students from P.E.I. or other Canadian provinces. The international student body in the 2023-24 academic year was just under 2,000 people, the document notes.

The student union wants the province to earmark $215,000 annually to fund a wage subsidy program called the International Student Employment Support Program with UPEI’s Experiential Education Department, taking it through the summer of 2026.

UPEI’s student union made six recommendations to the provincial government that Agrawal said would help struggling students. (Stacey Janzer/CBC)

“This program we’ve had over the past few years, but the agreement has now lapsed and really just looking for the province to renew this agreement and continue funding the program,” Agrawal said.

The final item on the UPEI students’ wish list is a new part-time work internship program for 20 graduating students, with an annual price tag of $65,000.

“‘What do employers want the most? They want fresh talent who are about to graduate, who had their degrees and they’ve proven themselves in an academic environment,” Agrawal said.

UPEI’s Experiential Education Department would also be involved in this proposal, weighing applications and matching students with employers in their field.

“This way, they work part-time for a semester and at the moment the graduate, they hopefully have a full-time offer with the same employer,” Agrawal said. “Who you know almost matters more than what you know. It’s really important to build those connections.”