The provincial government of Nova Scotia recently announced more than $200 million in new education spending initiatives. The two initiatives are a three year tuition freeze and a bursary program worth $66 million dollars. The initiatives are meant to fulfill the promise of Premier MacDonald's government to bring tuition to the national average by 2010.

The MOU states that over the next three years universities are not allowed to raise tuition fees (or any other fees) that would make tuition more expensive for students. To help lighten any inflationary blow, the province is serving up $180 million in direct funding to universities. Also, unlike the last MOU, this new agreement includes international students.

The inclusion of international students is overdue; they have seen drastically increasing fees to attend school in Nova Scotia. If Canadian studying in Nova Scotia thought that they had it bad when they saw their university bill, they should have looked over the shoulder of an international student who was paying close to twice as much.

The new MOU is also the first step towards helping Premier MacDonald's government meet their promise to reduce tuition to the national average by 2010. The second step is a new $66 million bursary program.

The bursary program will make Nova Scotians studying in their home province eligible for $761 in 2008-09, $1,022 in 2009-10 and $1,283 in 2010-11. For those students that come from out of province, 31 per cent, they will be eligible to receive a $261 bursary in 2010-11.

Kaley Kennedy of the Canadian Federation of Students called the bursary program "discriminatory" and Mike Tipping of the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations said that it could compound the problem of declining enrolment.

While I agree the bursary program's exclusion of non-Nova Scotian students is problematic, it is a decision that grows from necessity.

The reality is that Nova Scotia gets money for its education programs from the federal government and the federal government uses a per capita formula to determine how much money the province will get. The problem is, however, that the per capita funding formula does not consider those coming from out-of-province.

My two concerns with the new bursary program are how sustainable it is and if it is the most effective use of $66 million in education funding.

Any student, regardless of income levels, will be eligible to receive a bursary beginning next year. However, some of the students receiving a bursary would be able to foot the bill for their books at tuition without it. My issue is that this is not a needs based grant program, it is a flat out, across the board give away. By providing a bursaries to every Nova Scotian studying in-province, the provincial government is refuse to acknowledge that part of the problem with the post-secondary education system is that it disproportionately affects people from certain income brackets, lower-middle and lower income households. By providing those that are at a greater disadvantage with the same help as everyone else, the government is making sure that, comparatively, they are still at a disadvantage.

Why did the government of Nova Scotia offer an across the board bursary instead of a needs-based bursary? Simply put, their option was politically sexier. It appealed touched more people and they hope that it will get people off their backs about the education issue.

The new programs have not been created in a vacuum and are not perfect (I have yet to see a policy that is). The biggest issue preventing Nova Scotia's post-secondary education system from flourishing is that we are under a federal funding formula that is inherently unfair to Nova Scotia. We have more out-of-province students than anywhere else in Canada and until the formula changes, we are at a natural disadvantage. Until this changes, there will only be small victories for PSE in our province.

Originally published in the Cape Breton Post