OTTAWA - Stefani Greco has only been to Canada a couple of times and never to Nova Scotia, but this fall she will join some 9,000 other American students flocking north to weather the recession at affordable Canadian universities.
Even after the Portland Maine native pays the $20,000 annual international tuition fee at Dalhousie University in Halifax, she will get her arts degree for half of what it would have cost her to study at her second choice, the University of Rhode Island.
“Money was part of the reason but only part,” says the 18-year-old. “The whole Canada experience interested me. I have family in Montreal and it just seemed like the experience I was looking for.”
Many American families are now looking north to Canada as an option for a university education.
In 1997-98 only 2,317 U.S. students came to Canada to study, but by 2007-08 that had risen to 8,909, according to the Canadian embassy in Washington. In contrast, there were almost 30,000 Canadian students studying in the U.S. in 2007-08, the embassy said.
Now that the shrinking economy is putting ever greater pressure on the average American family’s finances, the cheaper cost of studying here is becoming a much more attractive option than studying at home.
Canadian students can expect to pay about $5,000 a year for tuition while U.S. students have to pay international student rates of about $20,000 a year. But even at those prices, and with the cost of health insurance factored in, it’s cheaper than the $40,000 a year they would pay at home.
“They’re getting an international education without having to go across an ocean to get it,” says Janet Hurd, director of student recruitment at the University of Toronto. “And we know from experience this is helpful when it comes time to apply to graduate school or look for a job.”
Hurd says the University of Toronto has been recruiting aggressively in the U.S. for the past seven years and its number of American students has climbed.
At the University of Calgary the story was similar. The number of applicants from prospective American students there has risen by about 10% over there the last five years and it is expected to keep growing.
McGill University in Montreal has seen perhaps the greatest spike in interest with a more than 20% growth in the number of American applications over the last five years.
Other universities, such as Queen’s University in Kingston and the University of Ottawa, have seen the number of American student applications hover at around the same level over the same period.
peter.zimonjic@sunmedia.ca
