Like some other professional programs, the tuition for engineering tends to be more expensive than of many other degrees. It’s useful to compare tuition across some of the Ontario universities, once again using the CUDO data to see if there are any significant differences. We can also look at the trends over a few years to see how much more expensive it’s been getting. For context before we get into the engineering fees, according to CUDO in 2022 a typical “Arts & Science” program fees is around $7,500 for the first year (including ancillary fees). So on to the engineering fees.

These are the total fees for first year for “domestic” tuition, meaning the fees charged to Canadians and Permanent residents of Canada (no matter where they come from). These don’t include residence or any other living costs, books, etc.

The fees for each university run from 2017 to 2022 (the last available data point). You might think that I messed up, because the levels are decreasing! No, that’s correct. I adjusted the fees for each year by the CPI (consumer price index) so that the fees shown are all indexed to the year 2022. So yes, in real terms the fees have been dropping over the last six years.

I assume that the dropping real fees are the result of the Ontario government’s restrictions on fees increases (at least for domestic students). You might also wonder if the dropping value of fees has something to do with many universities running into deficit problems lately? Seems to be a likely factor! The Ontario government just announced that these fees will continue to be frozen for the next 3 years, so the downward trend in real income will continue, depending on the extent of inflation. If we expect inflation to be somewhere in the range of 2.5 to 3.5%, that will amount to an 8 to 11% additional drop in real fees over the three years.

CUDO doesn’t have any data for non-domestic fees (i.e. for visa students), so I can’t easily put together that data. I think I’ll have to search each university’s website for the info, which is kind of a pain. Maybe someday, but in general I would expect that their fees are approximately 2 times the domestic fees, i.e. around $30,000 to $35,000 for one year.