KPU Retirees Advocacy

Advocating for the Older Student

KPURA has collaborated with KPU Foundation to create the 
Age Friendly KPU Retirees Association Endowed Bursary
That will make a bursary of $1000 available to a student in need of funding with preference given to those who are 50 or older.

If you would like to support this, you can go directly to https://kpu.ca/foundation and make a donation.
Click on the Give Now button on the top right.
This will take you to the Make a Gift page where you can indicate your amount and fill in the rest of the form.
You have to scroll down a bit in Find Your Fund but we are there as:
365298 - Age Friendly KPU Retirees Association Endowed Bursary 
The site is set up to take donations by credit card. If you prefer to do a transfer through your financial institution, give them a call and they will share the process. 
They are not set up to take direct eTransfers.

The KPU Retirees Association has an active Advocacy Committee.

Headed by Geoff Dean, the primary thrust of this committee has been to highlight the discrepancy in funding for KPU in comparison with other post secondary institutions. 

KPU and its predecessors – Douglas College, Kwantlen College and Kwantlen University College – have always been badly underfunded, never receiving much more than half of the operating funding per region resident that the rest of BC’s regional post-secondaries receive.  As a result, KPU and its predecessors have never been able to serve our region nearly as well as the other regional post-secondary institutions in BC serve theirs:

As you can see, relative to the population of the region each of these post-secondary institutions is mandated to serve[1], KPU receives the lowest level of operating grants.  The average 2021 grant per region resident was $145.90, but KPU received less than half that, only $70.74, which is 48.5% of the average.

Given the half-century of this shortchanging, KPURA is very glad that the Government of BC is finally conducting a review of how it funds our public post-secondary institutions.  (See https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022AEST0010-000461 for details about this Review).  We’ve therefore made a submission to the Review team, asking them to ensure that funding for each of B.C.’s regional post-secondaries be strongly related to the size of the population of the post-secondary’s region, with a similar rate of per capita funding for all regional post-secondary institutions.  This would mean at least a doubling of KPU’s annual operating funds, since KPU has always received about half of the funding, per region resident.

Our full five page submission, along with its appendices which include the actual numbers behind the above graph and much more, can be found at: https://www.kpu.ca/sites/default/files/retirees/KPURA_submission_to_BC_…

Feel free to share this, or any parts of it, with any others who you think may be able to help the Review team and the government make this long-necessary change.