Deadline Extended on FEUQ Survey

Survey of the Living Conditions of Quebec University Students Deadline Extended to April 25

NewsJane Gatensby — Published April 17, 2014

According to VP Academic and Advocacy Gene Morrow, “internal problematics” within the CSU caused the delay.

“Every so often you’ll have a project where sometimes somebody thinks that someone else should be on it,” he said.

The CSU sent an email to students on April 11 with the new deadline and a link to the survey.

The FEUQ, of which the CSU is a member, hopes to survey as many of Quebec’s 285, 000 students as possible to establish a statistical portrait of today’s student body.

“The idea is to know, who is the student of 2014?,” said FEUQ president Tierry Morel-Laforce.

The federation says it plans to use the data to campaign on behalf of students.

The last FEUQ survey, conducted in 2009, showed that half of full-time students live below the low-income cut-off for a one-person household, and 40 per cent receive no money from their parents to pursue their studies. It also revealed that nearly two-thirds of students expect to graduate with debt, and 25 per cent estimate that their debt will exceed $20,000.

Morel-Laforce said that in addition to refreshing previous data on topics like student work and financial aid, the voluntary survey will collect information on the realities of student parents, where students live and whether they move to go to school.

The FEUQ’s website states that the 2009 edition of the survey gave the federation the information it needed to advocate on behalf of students during the 2012 student strike.

“It gives us all the tools we need to make better demands to the government [to] make sure that we know who we’re talking about when we’re defending the conditions of students,” Morel-Laforce said.

Morel-Laforce said that the FEUQ plans to study this data before making demands to the newly-elected Liberal government. He was unable to tell The Link what these demands might look like.

“It’s way too soon to say anything […] we’re going to wait to see the analysis,” he said.

Additionally, Morel-Laforce could not say whether he thought campaigning on behalf of students would become more difficult now that the Liberals are back in power.

“The first thing to do is to go and meet the next minister,” he said. “When we’ll meet him, I’ll be able to tell you if he or she has the students [interests] at heart,” he said.