“Should I stay or should I go?” The age-old question, posed poignantly by The Clash, continues to apply to several situations. In this case, we can apply it to Newfoundland: a province that seems to be having trouble getting young people to stay in the province after graduation.
At the Premier’s Youth Council media advisory, Jenna Reid posed some questions for those attending. One of which revolved around the idea of tuition rates and international students and why students choose Memorial. Premier Andrew Furey replied by explaining that we shouldn’t “attach a price tag to it [the university]” because Memorial University has its own merit as a “world-class institution.”
Therefore, I asked some students why they went to Memorial University.
Some engineering students explained that they liked the program’s prospects and the cheap tuition. Other students said the price. In conversations with humanities students, most said it was also low tuition rates.
If the Premier doesn’t believe we should attach a price tag to the university, it seems that many students disagree.
This is not to say that the education quality at Memorial is bad. On the contrary, there are many great professors at the university. Plenty of who have aided students’ ambition to learn and gather knowledge. But even the good professors do not change why most students come to this university in the first place.
Now to address leaving Newfoundland, there are several reasons why someone might do so.
Firstly, I find that many students don’t want to get “stuck” in Newfoundland––that is, it’s hard to leave once you stay for too long. For others, they want to go somewhere with a better reputation, like Dalhousie or the University of Toronto. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of scholarships or wanting to go somewhere away from home.
Others choose to stay in NL because it’s close to family, cheap, or because they don’t want to leave. So it’s not to say that Newfoundland does not have good qualities, but does it have the best? Probably not.
To summarize, not even the Clash can answer their own question for anyone in NL; they decide why they should stay or go. Many students attending MUN seem to have a good idea of their answer, though…