Translating tuition

Ryan Montgomery, Contributor | 

To start with something we all painfully know to be true —things have gotten more expensive. Across the board, without fail nor exception, things cost more than they once did. Much to the chagrin of the good people of this university, the same stands for tuition. In 2024, tuition was increased by two per cent across all programs, and that is on top of a 5.5 per cent increase in 2023.

With this increased strain on your wallet, it begs the question, where does this money actually go? What is it spent on? Have costs grown proportionally with the tuition increases? 

Thankfully for me, Mount Royal very neatly publishes their financial reports at the end of each year. The meat and potatoes of MRU funding comes from two sources: Provincial grants and student tuition, making up 80 per cent of the university’s revenue. Provincial government funding is the largest of the two, accounting for 41 per cent of MRU’s funding. This means the government subsidizes a substantial part of your tuition, so don’t say they never did anything for you. In second place comes tuition, making up 39 per cent of the school’s coffers. Despite the aforementioned two per cent across-the-board tuition increase, incomes from tuition were 1.7 million dollars under budget.

This was reportedly due to “lower than planned flight training hours” and “lower than planned business and professional education training.” Surprisingly, sales of services and products, which includes the much-maligned parking, make up only 12 per cent of Mount Royal’s revenue. All that pain and suffering bared by the student body to park their cars, pain and suffering thrust upon them by a mediocre municipal transit system, constitutes a measly 12 per cent of the pie chart. With the university being so overly dependent on just two revenue sources, the administration has made it a stated goal of MRU to diversify income sources.

Among these new-planned sources are increasing venue rentals, a catering service, increasing Cougar Store sales, and a planned increase in parking revenues through a more vigilant automatic parking ticket system. So all you would-be parking thieves beware, for justice is coming and she will arrive, righteous ticket dispenser in hand. 

Now that we’ve established where MRU gets its funds, we can move on to how they spend our hard-earned cash. Far and away the largest expense is Salaries and Benefits which pays for the titular salaries and benefits of professors and other university employees.

This alone amounts to 68 per cent of MRU’s costs, a number which I personally believe should be significantly higher (I’ll take my 4.0 GPA now, please). Academic pandering aside, MRU does offer competitive compensation for its professors so this being the largest expense comes as no surprise. After labour costs, the next largest expense is Materials, Supplies, and Services, coming in at 14 per cent of expenses.

This includes things like licensing agreements for the library so we can all have access to a very large database of very obscure and very niche books. The smallest expense on the chart is interest paid on debt, making up around 1 per cent of the budget. MRU’s total debt amounts to 41.1 million dollars, accumulated for “infrastructure expenses.” Included in this figure is 8.6 million owed to the University by SAMRU, sex toy bingo doesn’t come cheap, folks. 

Attempting to parse out an increase in Mount Royal’s expenses is harder than it immediately seems. This is because in 2022 the school administration changed its fiscal year to end in March rather than in June, making the 2022 fiscal year last only nine months as opposed to the iconic 12 months every other year has.

While I know there’s nothing sexier than discussing the intricacies of academic fiscal years, keep your pants on for now cause this is where it gets good. Because of this change, expenses for 2022 were recorded as significantly lower than they actually were. Thus to get a full year of budget we need to go back to the 2021 fiscal year.

But even this year has its problems as the university was still reeling from the pandemic. Despite this, the budget remained more or less consistent. So comparing the 2023 budget with the 2021 budget shows a 16 per cent increase in costs give or take. I will leave it up to you to decide if this increase in costs justifies tuition increases. 

I would like to thank the government for requiring that all public universities publish their financial information every year, it made my job very easy, Pulitzer-prize-winning muckraking journalism this has been not. However, I hope that now you can all be a little more informed in your quiet indignation when you go to pay your tuition this coming winter. 

Ryan Montgomery is a Contributor for The Reflector 2024-2025.