University students entering lecture halls this week are paying 45 per cent more in tuition than their counterparts did a decade ago. Statistics Canada reported Wednesday that full-time undergraduate tuitions rose 2.8 per cent in the past year, to $6,373 this school year from $6,201 last year. Compulsory fees, such as those for student union membership, rose 2.9 per cent, from an average of $826 to $873.

Tuitions today are up from an average of $4,400 in the 2006-07 school year, the earliest year in StatsCan’s data set. But a study of tuitions going back to the early 1990s — carried out by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives last year — found that university fees had tripled between 1993-94 and 2015-16. During that period, the CCPA study found, government financial support for post-secondary education declined notably, to 55 per cent of university revenue in 2015-16 from 77 per cent in the early 1990s. In that time, universities grew more dependent on student tuitions for their funding. Thirty-seven per cent of their revenue came from tuitions in 2012, up from 20 per cent in 1992.