Despite pleas to the board of governors, international students at the University of Victoria have been handed a tuition-fee increase twice that given to domestic students.
Tuition fees for international students, currently about $8,700 a term, will go up four per cent. Domestic students, who pay about $2,700 a term, face an increase of two per cent.
Students, who characterized the disparity as unfair, gathered and held signs outside the board’s meeting room and sat in during the vote.
Alysha Flipse, the students society’s director of outreach and university relations, expressed disappointment at the outcome.
“I think a lot of students were quite upset … that we were there and we put in all this effort to tell the university that we were really unhappy with this and we weren’t heard,” Flipse said.
UVic has more than 20,000 students, including about 3,775 international students. The university’s tuition fees for international students are in the bottom third nationally.
Gayle Gorrill, UVic’s vice-president finance and operations, said the increase for international students reflects the true rate of inflation at universities.
