Statistics Canada, for reasons best known to itself, only tracks tuition for university programs.  For college programs, we’re basically in the dark.  We’ve got nothing, nada, zip.

In theory, it’s not all that difficult to work out.  All you need to know is price and enrolment for each program offered: sum the prices, divide by enrolment, and voila!  Average tuition.  And yet nobody does it (my guess for why Statscan doesn’t do it?  Something less than full confidence in the enrolment data that comes in from colleges).

(Actually, Canada’s not alone in this.  In truth, there are very few countries with accurate tuition indexes.  Most countries either have zero tuition, or a set tuition fee, or fees [under Australia’s HECS system, students pay one of three prices depending on what fields of study they are in, with no variation by institutions], or they have a huge multiplicity of prices, often due to having many private institutions.  Almost no one keeps track of what goes on in private sectors, which is why you will search in vain for decent statistics on tuition in places like Brazil, Mexico, Russia, or even China for that matter.  The miracle has more to do with the fact that we have a decent set of tuition statistics for universities – albeit ones with some pretty loopy characteristics, as I noted back here – rather than the fact we don’t have one for colleges.  But I digress.)

The more faithful among you may remember that we here at HESA Towers tried to come up with a college tuition figure a few years ago.  In retrospect, our numbers were probably a little high in at least one province (Saskatchewan).  So this time, we think we’ve fixed the problems, and are giving it another shot.

Here’s how we came up with our numbers.  We looked at posted prices on institutional websites, and then – where tuition varies across programs – came up with an enrolment-weighted average fee for diploma-level programs (both shorter and longer programs are excluded from these calculations). In Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Saskatchewan there is only one institution, so the calculation is relatively straightforward. In Alberta, an estimated enrolment-weighted tuition figure for diploma-level programs was provided to us by the provincial government. In these six provinces, we are pretty confident about our numbers.

In the other four provinces (Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Quebec), we did not do a census of institutions; instead, we obtained fee and enrolment data from a representative sample of college institutions, enrolment-weighted the fee data, and assigned it to the entire province.  I know what you’re thinking: Quebec CEGEPs do not charge tuition.  However, they do charge a variety of fees for things like athletics, student services, etc., and we counted those. In these four provinces, there is a bit more of a margin of error in that we are not fully certain how representative our sample is.

Caveats aside, here’s what we found.

Figure 1: Average Tuition in College Diploma Programs

 
Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island have the highest average fees, at just under $4,700.  This does not of course mean that all students are paying this amount; in fact, most are paying less, but both schools have enough high-tuition programs to pull up the average.  In most provinces, the average is somewhere between $3,100 and $4,100, though Quebec and Newfoundland are substantially below that.  The national average is $2,396.

That’s the picture for 2014-15 anyway.  We’ll try to keep this index up-to-date each year – look for an update on this in September.