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By KRISTEN LIPSCOMBE
Education Reporter
Lineups outside financial aid offices at Nova Scotia universities could be a thing of the past come January.
The Education Department unveiled its plan on Thursday to let students apply for, access and pay for their provincial student loans over the Internet. But the move to an online system that reduces hassle was the only truly new part of the province’s news conference, which focused on a direct lending system already announced in January.
“The new thing is that students will be now going through a paperless process so the Nova Scotia portion of their student loan will mostly involve financial aid officers having access to an online portal,” said Kaley Kennedy, the provincial representative for the Canadian Federation of Students.
She said the MacDonald government’s streamlined student loan system is a step forward for the thousands of post-secondary students who will descend on the province’s 11 universities and 13 community college campuses over the next week.
“But the reality is that we still have some of the highest tuition fees in the country and that students are still facing huge debt loads in order to attend post-secondary education,” Ms. Kennedy told reporters inside the student centre at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
“Our hope is that some of the cost savings that are seen from these programs, including things like the direct lend . . . will (go toward) more grants.” Direct lending came into effect on Aug. 1 and chopped two percentage points off the interest rate for Nova Scotia student loans. A student who takes out an $8,600 loan could pay $800 less overall, the government says. Nova Scotia now has the second-lowest interest rate on student loans in the country, at a floating rate of prime plus 0.5 per cent.
Halifax Citadel MLA Leonard Preyra, the NDP’s education critic, said direct lending “has been a long time coming” but “this is really just a recycled announcement.”
The Liberal critic, Kings West MLA Leo Glavine, said the new online system “is a good first step in the process of student loans becoming easier and more manageable.”
Education Minister Karen Casey told the media that it “will reduce the amount of processing time from four to five weeks to three weeks.”
“So it’s a smooth process.”
But Gisele d’Entremont of Yarmouth isn’t so impressed. The 23-year-old started paying off her student loan through the Royal Bank but had to switch to Resolve Corp., the company that now handles student loans for the province.
Loans that students started repaying after last Nov. 1 or that were negotiated after that date have been or will be moved from the bank, and the province will handle them directly.
Ms. d’Entremont said Thursday the transition has been less than smooth. She said she has made several phone calls to find out what’s happening with her loan and isn’t comfortable making transactions over the Internet.
“The way it was explained to me was just too confusing,” she said.
But Paris Meilleur, executive director of the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations, said the Education Department’s decision to make the student loan system paperless is a move the federal government should copy.
“That’s got to be the way that we’re going in terms of student assistance,” she said. “One of the things that you’ll see in September when you’re on campuses is lineups . . . students going to get a signature here (and) some information there, and this is a process that is unnecessarily complicated.”
Ms. Meilleur said Nova Scotia can still make improvements such as targeting grants at students who most need financial help and addressing the discrepancy in tuition fees for out-ofprovince students. Nova Scotia had Canada’s highest undergraduate tuition on average in 2007-08 at $5,878. Ms. Casey reiterated that the province plans to lower tuition to the national average by 2010 and pointed to a three-year tuition freeze and a bursary trust announced in March as steps toward that goal.
(klipscombe@herald.ca) |