Be a dentist and get your revenge.

This should come as no surprise to anyone:

“A Statistics Canada report released yesterday indicated that the tripling in tuition and fees for professional programmes, such as law, dentistry and medicine between 1995 and 2002, has most seriously affected students from a middle-class background.

The enrolment of students in these programmes whose parents have either a college diploma or bachelor’s degree, which typically indicates a middle-class status, has fallen by 50 per cent. The number of professional-programme students from the extreme upper and lower classes of society has increased.

Marc Frennette, the author of the report, said, “The middle group may not have been able to afford the rising tuition but may not have qualified for student aid.”

Provincial officials have begun to meet with representatives of students and institutions in an effort to establish a new tuition policy that will take effect when Ontario’s tuition freeze ends in September 2006.”

I find it interesting that the report notes lower-class students moving into fields typically reserved for upper-class students. This is obviously the result of better funding options for lower-income households with children in post-secondary programs (and good for them). But, we must be aware of the middle-class, who all too often these days gets looked over. If we’re not careful, we’ll simply be substituting one lower-class for another.