Dear fellow UBC students,

This year, we face yet another proposed increase to our tuition. On December 5th, the Board of Governors will vote on this increase: 5% for new international students, 3% for continuing international students, and 2% for all domestic students. CUPE 2278 and Climate Justice UBC (CJUBC) student organizers write in solidarity with you all today demanding of UBC not only a Tuition Freeze Now, but to commit ourselves to organizing and building student power so that UBC can no longer continue this path towards an exclusionary higher education system built only for the wealthy.

For decades, UBC has forced its students to pay more and more money every year to receive a higher education. Neoliberalism has decimated the government funding for our public institution, and instead of taking real leadership with the provincial government, the university places the burden on their struggling student body. The results of UBC’s own tuition engagement survey from October 2022 have been released, and as expected, 92% of students say no to these increases. Every year this university tends increasingly towards a corporation whose job it is to serve the interests of its wealthiest. Yet, we know that this university is a public institution, whose job should be to service the public with high-quality accessible education. Alongside the rest of the student body at UBC, CUPE 2278 and CJUBC are ready to organize and fight to make that a reality.

In the spring, CUPE 2278 was a part of the Tuition Freeze Now coalition: a “coalition of students, workers, organizers, and groups across BC who are opposed to ongoing tuition hikes that make our public universities a place for the rich, not the working class.” Tuition Freeze Now continuously asserted that, “students are not cash cows and universally accessible public education is the foundation of a just society”. As a union that represents student workers on UBC campus, CUPE 2278 organizes for improved working and living conditions for our members. Since tuition is a requirement of employment for student workers, and tuition continues to put incredible amount of financial stress on us, we organize against these increases. We also fight for protections against wage increases being outpaced by tuition increases, which also occurs for TA’s on this campus year after year. We continue that work in organizing against the proposed tuition increases for the 2023/24 year, as well as through our ongoing #OrganizeUBC campaign to unionize all UBC student workers and build a powerful student worker union to negotiate with UBC.

After CJUBC’s Fossil Fuel Divestment win in 2019, our organization has focused on building off that campaign in several facets, including how we can create a stronger and healthier community centered on anti-capitalist, anti-racist, decolonial and intersectional values. Our group is committed to confronting and working against systemic inequities with the understanding that “climate change is not an isolated issue, and that we must approach our work from a systems thinking perspective that prioritizes the lives of those who face the greatest barriers to justice”, including BIPOC, women, queer and trans people, unhoused and lower income people, and people with disabilities. Tuition hikes and the corporatization of education are consequences of the same system that marginalizes, excludes, and disenfranchises communities forced to face disproportionate impacts of climate injustice and its symptoms. As students and as youth, we have inherited a world in which these interrelated and interdependent injustices work to maintain the neoliberal capitalist structures that entrench our everyday lives. In building towards an ideal and just world, we must destabilize this system and ensure that we are contributing to a strengthened and empowered generation who are able to access their futures through affording an education without sacrificing their most pressing and basic necessities.

Tuition increases have significant material impacts on the student body as it directly correlates to life becoming less affordable for students on campus. Facing an unprecedented inflation crisis, skyrocketing food insecurity on campus, housing crisis, and wage stagnation, students are being pressed from all sides. The food bank lines get longer, more students struggle to pay rent, and this campus becomes more and more exclusive to a wealthier pool of students. Every year tuition increases, there are less and less working-class students who can afford to go here.

Increases in tuition fees have an impact on all students alike, but the playing field is certainly not flat. This university treats international students as an endless bank to fulfill their financial whims and as a means to enforce Canada’s oppressive, colonial border regime that filters and outright denies entry to thousands of migrants every year. The lack of funding opportunities and financial support pushes international students to unfair working conditions and constant uncertainty of temporary status. International students at UBC face the most disproportionate impacts of differential tuition fees, with potential increases ranging from 2-4% in addition to the already exorbitant cost of tuition that is thousands of dollars more per year than domestic tuition.

UBC makes bold promises about equity, inclusion, diversity, and reconciliation, but conveniently ignores the issue of class permeating all intersections of oppression. Black, Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, low-income, and/or disabled UBC community members systematically accumulate less intergenerational wealth, if any at all. Inclusion at UBC, in its current form, therefore merely equates to more students becoming included within debt traps and capitalist exploitation. Beyond our campus, there is a larger trend of higher education institutions playing by the rules of neoliberalism. From our own shrinking budget at UBC to the consistent cut in education funding from all levels of government to the fact that funding we do receive is used for bloated executive salaries and vanity projects– all of this must end. For this campus to be truly equitable and anti-racist, it must be financially accessible to all.

On December 5th, UBC’s Board of Governors has an important choice to make: to vote to make this school more elite and inaccessible, or a vote to turn the tides of the corporatization of this university. They can choose whether this university is about educating our society’s diverse leaders of tomorrow, or about climbing higher and higher on the international rankings scale at any cost.

No matter what they choose, we will keep organizing and building our collective student power to build a deep movement for public education that goes far beyond one board vote. We will organize this power with structure and teeth, just like a workers union that can negotiate collectively. We will keep pushing our elected student unions to fight UBC with more force in advocacy of real student needs. Our movement has already begun, and it grows everyday. From tuition freeze now mobilizations across the province this past spring, to our ongoing #OrganizeUBC unionization drive, to a 1000 person food insecurity walkout, to now. We will keep educating ourselves, talking to our communities, and joining organizations until everyone here can afford to live and everyone can afford to attend UBC.

So organize alongside us, in the work of a better world for us all to demand a tuition freeze, and to commit to ourselves to organizing for a better future. These demands work both towards a better campus for the students of today and creates a world that supports the students of tomorrow. Join us to call on the University of British Columbia Board of Governors to vote NO on tuition increase for all students on Dec 5th.

Additionally, as a reiteration of the demands of Tuition Freeze Now (TFN), we call on the provincial government to take the following concrete steps towards a provincial level tuition freeze. We demand that:

1. The provincial government implement an immediate tuition freeze for all students, domestic, international, undergraduate and graduate alike;

2. The provincial government provide increases to funding across the post-secondary sector to enable the freeze; and

3. The provincial government commits to commissioning a study on the feasibility of providing free post-secondary education for all.

Signed,

CUPE2278

Climate Justice UBC (CJUBC)