BCFS Advocacy, Postsecondary Funding, and Student Affordability Challenges

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Humanist

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/12

Cole Reinbold is a dedicated student leader and experienced financial steward currently serving as Secretary-Treasurer for the British Columbia Federation of Students in New Westminster. With a robust background in student governance at Vancouver Island University, Cole has contributed as a Governor, Senator, and Chairperson, ensuring strong financial oversight and effective policy development. Their commitment to advocacy and educational excellence is evident in their work on community campaigns and external relations. Cole’s leadership skills, strategic planning expertise, and advocacy for students empower them to advance organizational missions and create impactful change in higher education. Passionate leader inspiring positive change. Reinbold discussed challenges such as changes in policies by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) affecting international students. These changes significantly impact tuition revenue as international students pay substantially more than domestic ones. Additionally, Reinbold addressed the gap in provincial and federal funding for postsecondary education, which has decreased dramatically since the 1970s. To combat these issues, BCFS advocates for Open Educational Resources (OERs) to reduce costs and pushes for better funding for Indigenous students. The federation’s strategy includes working on campaigns like ‘Grants not Loans’ and supporting financial literacy to alleviate student debt pressures.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re here with Cole Reinbold. How are you doing?

Cole Reinbold: I’m doing well. How about you?

Jacobsen: Good. So, what are the most pressing issues for the BCFS?

Reinbold: The timely issues pressing for us are the recent announcements by IRCC—Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada. Changes to the number of international students permitted in the country impact the amount of funding institutions receive from tuition fees. In BC and across Canada, international students, on average, pay five times more in tuition than domestic students.

This is a way to fill in the gaps regarding what provincial and federal funding should be for postsecondary education. It’s decreased from 80% in the seventies to less than or barely 40% today. With that, there isn’t the 2% cap on tuition fees that there is on domestic tuition fees. Domestic tuition fees have a 2% cap on increases every year, but international tuition fees don’t have that cap. So, considering there’s not enough funding and there isn’t a cap on international tuition fees, what are institutions going to do?

They’re going to raise international tuition fees. So, when the federal government reduced the number of international students last year, institutional deficits to tens of millions of dollars were suddenly becoming the norm this year in BC. That is one of the biggest issues that we’re fighting right now. We are created to provide advocacy, representation, and services to our 170,000 members. 

Jacobsen: What other affordability and access issues aren’t as obvious as international students making up the slack of provincial funding?

Reinbold: Yes. Another big campaign we have is OERs. We advocate that all institutions and instructors adopt open educational resources (OERs). These are textbooks, course materials, and entire course packs made by instructors in BC and provided for free to students.

When you do not have to pay $500 for a textbook, it makes education much more inaccessible and affordable because you’re paying, as a domestic student, around, on average, $500 to $2000 a course. But then, adding another $500 that you didn’t know about often makes students drop a course entirely. So that’s something that we’re working on. We’ve recently added to our campaign plan to lobby the federal and provincial governments to add more funding for Indigenous learners because there’s a significant educational attainment gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners. That is another big thing that we’re working on.

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Jacobsen: What changes in governmental policy, provincially and maybe federally, have made you shift any other priorities?

Reinbold: The biggest one is the IRCC. Many international students are our members, so they’re always front and center in our advocacy. But we’ve been full throttle on advocating for international students this year. Yes.

That’s been it. We’ve previously advocated for the 2% cap on domestic tuition fees. When that was deregulated in the early 2000s, that was a big push. So, our advocacy revolves around what the current government in power is doing. If they’re making education less accessible and affordable for students, that is where we will push our advocacy.

But we also do other things, like ‘Let’s Get Consensual.’ So, we help our member locals have that campaign on their campuses in September, which is sometimes referred to as the red zone for sexual assault on campus. ‘Let’s Get Consensual’ is a fun way of teaching students about consent and emphasizing that it’s everybody’s responsibility. 

Jacobsen: In terms of strategic direction, has the core mandate of BCFS evolved in response to the changing postsecondary landscape?

Reinbold: The mandate of the BCFS lies in our constitution, which is unchanging. It states that we are to provide services, advocacy, and representation to our members. So, while our constitution doesn’t change, how we address that will change depending on the current landscape in the province. 

Jacobsen: What about campaigns like the Grants Not Loans campaign and Open Textbooks Now, which you alluded to before?

Reinbold: The Grants Not Loans campaign is self-explanatory in the title, but grants are upfront money given to students at the same time as their loan they do not have to repay. This is at the core of what we do: making education more accessible and affordable because it makes it much easier for students and first-generation learners when you don’t have to pay it back. Sometimes, the government will say, ‘So what we’re going to do to make education more accessible is we’re going to increase the amount of loan we will give you.’ So they’re increasing the amount of debt that we’re “so lucky” to be able to get. So, we advocate increasing the number of grants, not the number of loans.

We did have that win a couple of years ago when interest on student loans was eliminated provincially in BC, the first province to do it, and then nationally. The government is no longer making money on student loans, so why not go all the way and give us grants? And then, ‘Open Textbooks Now,’ I already spoke about that. Still, we work with BCcampus, which is the organization that administers that. They’re a proxy government organization, so they get funding from the government to do that work. That’s good because the government acknowledges that open textbooks are a way to make education more accessible. So we work with BCcampus. They give us the latest research and help us administer the campaign to our member locals.

And then on the ground, what the member locals do is they try to individually convince professors, departments, deans, all that kind of stuff, to adopt open educational resources, and even let them know that there are grants that instructors and professors can take on, so that they can have time to work on the open educational resources instead of having to work on it on the side of their desk for free. They can get paid to work on an open educational resource. 

Jacobsen: You mentioned Indigenous learners and closing that educational attainment gap. That starts early in postsecondary, but it’s another way to combat and target it. But it is also a way to tackle that at multiple stages, at least within your remit in terms of postsecondary education. What about other diverse and marginalized groups that have a similar, or maybe less severe, educational attainment gap that can be covered through the work of BCFS?

Reinbold: Yes. Our delegation directs the work of the BCFS, so our member locals attend annual general meetings. The groups with the lower educational attainment gap identified by our membership include Indigenous students. If you look at the research, there are lower educational attainments for our first-generation learners and also LGBTQIA2S+ learners, and those marginalized groups, equity-deserving groups. But we have not been directed to work on that. 

We do have a campaign called the Unlearn campaign. We have been directed to do that, and it is similar to ‘Let’s Get Consensual’ in that it’s an educational campaign teaching our members to unlearn homophobia, racism, and transphobia, which has become a pressing issue recently.

We educate our members on that. 

Jacobsen: What about coalition campaigns as part of the BCFS’s overall strategy? How do you select which external campaigns to endorse? Is it timeliness? Are perennial issues at the top of the list?

Reinbold: So, the BCFS, we are experts in postsecondary education but not in everything. So, we have our coalition partners who help us with the research and know-how to discuss these issues.

They’re chosen in multiple ways. A member local can bring them to an annual general meeting. The local member selects it, and then the floor debates it, or the federation itself can have it recommended to the executive committee. Then, the executive committee will bring it to the annual general meeting. Typically, we pick partners who are experts in their field and recognized as big names. So when we want to talk about what a living wage is and what a living wage should be for a student, instead of going to a single professor, we go to Living Wage BC, who have been doing this work for about half a decade, I believe. So, choosing our coalition partners happens in one of two ways.

It’s a two-pronged issue. It can be brought forward by an individual member locally or by the executive committee. Ultimately, all members decide upon it at an annual general meeting. 

Jacobsen: Rising living costs, inflation, and student debt are issues for approximately every student, but that’s a staggeringly small number of students. How do you help support students trying to address those as best they can?

Reinbold: Yes, so, our students’ unions and our local members will sometimes have courses on financial literacy that can help them with it. It doesn’t take away inflation or anything like that. Still, they do have those courses that first-year, second-year, and third-year students can take, and we do advocate to the provincial government about how students feel the compounding cost of everything. Everything is so expensive for every person in British Columbia. Still, students feel it so much more because, on top of rent, food, gas, and insurance, they also have tuition and textbooks.

And then to further compound that, because students are students, they can’t work full time. We remind the provincial government that to ease this burden on students, we need to freeze and progressively reduce tuition fees. So that’s how we’re working on the cost of living, is through that. Then, through the work of our coalition partners, we will sign on to campaigns, stand in solidarity, and sometimes lobby together about the cost of living. 

Jacobsen: What additional services or resources might be introduced to help students navigate the financial challenges they’re coming to?

Reinbold: Currently, we don’t have any services directly addressing financial literacy or the cost of living. But we do have our health and dental plan.

So we have multiple students’ unions on this big block health and dental plan, which helps keep the rate low. It’s one of the lowest rates in the country for our health and dental plan. So students can get their teeth cleaned twice a year and get everything else they might need for under $200. So it’s a good price because so many people come together. Another thing we do to keep costs low, but not directly—members don’t feel this, but our member locals do—is coordinate bulk purchasing together.

So, economies of scale, if you’ve ever taken economics, the more of something you buy, the better over price you can get. So we do that with the health and dental plan, and we also do that with our pens, highlighters, toques, and swag that we give out to our members. We’re trying to fight the cost of inflation by pooling all of our resources because, as our slogan says, we are stronger together. 

Jacobsen: So when it comes to issues in which you are experts, how ever, it’s an intractable problem. What are those? By “intractable,” you, as an organization, cannot solve those things. It’s the boulder in the river that you must be the water flowing around. 

Reinbold: I will try to answer this question, but let me know if it isn’t exactly what you want. So, a big problem that we are trying to address right now is the chronic lack of underfunding in postsecondary in BC.

While, yes, the BCFS has 14 out of 26 public postsecondary institutions under our umbrella, we alone cannot solve the chronic underfunding crisis that’s going on in BC. Our institutions are crumbling, so we need to work with labour unions, trade unions, and other students’ unions to say to the provincial and federal government that we need funding now more than ever. So, we lobby those groups. We also have coalition partnerships with CUPE, BCGEU, and all the big names, and we also collaborate with larger institutional student unions quite often. So, yes, the big thing that we’re trying to work on that we can’t do by ourselves is address the chronic underfunding crisis and getting that $500,000,000 infused back into the postsecondary system because that is our direct lobby ask that would take us back to before all the massive cuts and the defunding of public education that we saw in the early 2000s.

Jacobsen: This is the North American can-do attitude. ‘There are no intractable problems. It’s difficult but not impossible.’ Last question: Are there direct attacks on postsecondary education in British Columbia? Political squabbles and policy fights can result in delays in funding. Yet something more, political and social language and movements that work to undermine the success and efforts of postsecondary institutions, either individually or through associations and federations like yourself. 

Reinbold: So, a big thing we’ve seen in the past decade is that institutions are no longer seen as places of public knowledge that better society for the greater good; they are now seen as businesses.

This can be seen through the gutting of funding that we’ve seen in the past decade and the international education strategy document that came out under the Christy Clark government; as soon as that document came out, funding plummeted, and then suddenly, there are international students propping up the entire system. So the biggest threat that we are seeing to postsecondary right now is the complete divestment from postsecondary education, and how in the election platform this year, the provincial election, not in a single party’s platform, was postsecondary mentioned. Postsecondary bleeds into every single sector. You can’t run an economy without postsecondary. How will we solve the overdose crisis without paramedics, social workers, and mentors?

How are we going to solve the housing crisis without carpenters? You can’t. So, the biggest attack right now is the government not addressing the dire need for postsecondary education. You will not have a future workforce if you don’t invest in future workers. So, the government is working against itself and the future it wants to create by not investing in postsecondary education.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time today. I appreciate it. Yes, yes, no worries.

Reinbold: We will talk later.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.