Concordia waives tuition for Indigenous students as part of reconciliation efforts

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Concordia University is waiving tuition fees for First Nations and Inuit students from Quebec, part of school efforts toward reconciliation with Indigenous communities.

“Across Canada, universities and colleges have been rolling out these types of initiatives,” said Manon Tremblay, Concordia’s senior director of Indigenous Directions, an office mandated to “decolonize and Indigenize” the university. “We’ve been in discussion on and off about this and we decided that the time was right.”

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The move went into effect this month and is similar to a tuition waiver at McGill University, although that program is limited to students from communities close to Montreal.

Since the tuition waiver’s announcement, “the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” Tremblay said, especially from Indigenous students who were previously funding their own education.

Many Indigenous students had had their studies paid for by their communities, for those who didn’t, Tremblay said the program will offer significant financial relief. “It is one of the great myths of our time that all Indigenous students get their studies funded. That is not the case.”

The change will also offer relief to the communities that did fund students’ tuition, Tremblay added.

She said the university expects the change to result in higher Indigenous enrolment.

The majority of Indigenous people in Quebec speak English as either their first language or second language after an Indigenous language. “McGill and Concordia take the lion’s share of those students,” Tremblay said.

The tuition waiver came into effect this term for students from the 10 First Nations in Quebec and Quebec Inuit students. It covers both undergraduate and graduate tuition.

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Still, Tremblay said the program won’t be costly, as the number of Indigenous students at Concordia remains small. “We’re talking only about 130 students.” She didn’t offer an exact cost for the program. In-province tuition at Concordia ranges from $4,587 to $4,726 per year for undergraduate degrees.

Tremblay said she doesn’t worry non-Indigenous students will see the program as unfair, arguing that most realize other universities are taking similar approaches. She also pointed to other efforts to provide tuition relief, including scholarships for out-of-province students. Those $4,000 scholarships came after the province raised tuition for McGill and Concordia students with the goal of freeing up funds for francophone universities.

Part of broader reconciliation efforts

Waiving tuition is the latest in a number of steps Concordia has been taking toward reconciliation with Indigenous communities, Tremblay said. She pointed to the creation of a First Peoples Studies major and a bridging program to admit Indigenous students to the university who don’t meet usual admission requirements.

Tremblay said the university is also focused on “decolonization of curriculum.” She said it “might sound ‘woke,’” but the goal is to help “professors look at the subject matter they teach and perhaps look at whether there are other perspectives they should be teaching as well.”

She said the project doesn’t apply to every subject, but “if you’re teaching a history of Canada class and you aren’t including Indigenous people, we’ve got a problem.”

Tremblay said reconciliation work at Concordia will continue. “There’s a lot to do.”

jawilson@postmedia.com

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