PC 033 003_17

[Transcript] The Vancouver Sun, Thursday, September 29, 1988 NEWS A17

[Illustration] NATIVE PROTESTERS: demonstrators hold rally on the art gallery steps Wednesday DAN SCOTT

Students protest funding cuts

More than 100 native Indian students and supporters attended a rally at Robson Square Wednesday to protest changes by the federal government in the allocation of funds for post-secondary education.

Speakers complained that a recent policy announcement by the department of Indian and northern affairs will unfairly limit funding for qualified native students.

Student Sharon Shorty of Whitehorse, a spokesman for the Inter Campus Native Student' Ad Hoc Committee on Native Education Concerns, said the government's new policy of "capping" native post-secondary education funds would hit returning students and post-graduate students the hardest.

As a result, she said, fewer adult and mature students would be able to attend post-secondary institutions.

Shorty said the number of native students enrolled in federal-funded post-secondary education programs had risen from 3,500 in 1977 to about 12,000 in 1987.

These students, she said, "have broken many barriers in their upward struggle for education." Even so, she continued, "native people are still under-represented in post-secondary institutions."

A decade ago, she said, only one per cent of native secondary school graduates successfully completed post-secondary courses and today the figure is still less than two per cent.


[Handwritten] For more info. on "Native Student Network":
Sharon Shorty (604) 524-0173
Beverly Scow (604) 224-4005