Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this morning.
You've already received a brief from the foundation, so I will attempt briefly to summarize the points in that brief.
The foundation believes that Canada requires a highly educated workforce to be competitive in an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy. It also notes that it will not be easy to do that in the coming years for two principal reasons: first, we will see the retirement of the baby boom generation, and secondly, the number of young people between ages 18 and 25 will decline by roughly 400,000 people in the next decade.
So if we are to keep the same number of educated people as we currently have, we're going to have to maintain the currently very high participation rates of the middle class in higher education, and those are roughly 77% and one of the highest in the OECD. Not only will we have to maintain their participation in higher education, but we're going to have to get people into higher education who traditionally are not there, and these are students from the bottom quartile of income, aboriginal Canadians, and in some cases the children of immigrants--and of course there's an overlap between the groups.
Given the rising cost of obtaining a higher education, middle-class students are going to have to continue to borrow, and they're going to need non-repayable grants to help keep them in school. Research is showing that the presence of grants greatly increases the chances that the student will complete the program for which he borrows.
We will also need new and better forms of student financial assistance that are targeted to low-income Canadians, the Canadians who do not currently participate in higher education.
In its seven years of existence, the Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation has disbursed nearly $ 2 billion in the form of non-refundable financial support to about 650,000 needy students from low income families. The Foundation therefore limited the growth of student debt, helped middle class and low-income students continue with their post-secondary studies, and kept its administration costs as low as possible, namely at about 4.5 per cent, and worked in cooperation with its provincial partners to develop grant programs based on local needs and in accordance with provincial government priorities.
The foundation also rigorously evaluated the impact these programs have while striving continuously to improve them. Lastly, the foundation conducted state-of-the-art research on government best practices to increase the participation rate of students in post-secondary education.
Given the approaching end of the foundation's mandate, scheduled for the end of the academic year 2008-09, these achievements are now at risk.
Decisions must be taken in the near future, preferably in the 2007 budget or at the least in the 2008 budget, to ensure that there is uninterrupted delivery of non-repayable grants to needy middle-class and low-income students, and, secondly, that there is continued administration of these programs that respects provincial jurisdiction and priorities and keeps administrative costs to an absolute minimum.
Thank you very much.