First Year University Expenses in Canada

Keep in mind those numbers are for 4 month terms, not for an 8-month school year.

>> Median salary in Ontario is $49,088, before taxes, university expenses of 27kCAD are insane for me in that scale!

What's also insane is that the average detached home in Toronto just hit over 1M last week (http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/07/07/toronto-average-h...). I live just north of Toronto near a highly desirable high school, and there are usually bidding wars on homes. A lot of houses sell over asking. Getting 100K over asking is not unheard of.

I bought my house 10 years ago (and thought I was overpaying back then), and I don't know how people can afford to buy a home these days in the GTA. In the decade that I bought my house, property values in my neighborhood have doubled and then some, and I'm pretty sure salaries have not.

A lot of young families live in my area, and I can't imagine how expensive tuition will be when their small children are ready for a post-secondary education. Juggling a gigantic mortgage and saving for your kids' education is incredibly tough these days.

hmmm maybe east coast Canada is different from west coast? Here we have primarily commuter schools where vast majority of students live at home and use subsidized public transport (so no campus culture, isolated student body unless you join a club), apart from the international students who commute in Lambo and Ferraris (I'm sure they have no problem paying 10x what a Canadian pays).

Living on campus first year was expensive but I don't think I ever spent more than a couple thousand bucks per semester with a 4 course as full load that lasts 4 months. Science courses were the cheapest based on my experience of switching majors many many times. Business courses were the most expensive and the easiest and had no substance. We had like one student union fee which wasn't much, food was cheap if you just ate instant food. Oh and I spent like 3.5~4 hours daily just commuting to campus and back for 3 years. I remember I did some math and I spent a few months of my life just on commuting. All that work to get a piece of paper that can't even be used as toilet paper because it's so rough or rolled to smoke herbs due to fact that it emits toxic fumes upon combustion from the ink which says I'm qualified for absolutely nothing.

Why don't Americans go to Europe for their University degree?

In Vancouver median salary is $45~46k (lowest amongst the provinces), average detached home is $2.24 million (highest amongst the provinces), with no real sustainable economy of it's own, aside from old money, bunch of mining companies that go bust or don't really hire, lawyers, accountants, professionals that serve the old money, and real estate industry kept afloat by foreign investors and artificially suppressed supply (won't write new zoning rules since us peasants will ruin the international prestige by crowding the beautiful city that is in demand).

Tech scene here is meh, people would love to tell you Slack is a Vancouver company or it's a thriving hub but so far we only have Hootsuite (with a huge platform risk). Facebook is here to only hire foreigners as well as Microsoft, Amazon is the only one hiring locals (but work/life balance is just as worse as local shops) and a whole range of varying sweathshops/agencies/startups who can't recruit talent themselves (either due to penny pinching reputation or barely getting by with high employee turnover) rely on aggressive and rude recruiters who love to keep hourly wages down so they can make more money on that 3 month contract with false promises it will turn into a full time position (you get fired after they've done exploiting you). Rent is ok if you like sharing with a roommate but otherwise you are stuck with a high rent rate in a tiny space.

It's common to hear stories like some IT support guy pulling $50,000 year makes hefty monthly payment on his mortgage on a million dollar shack (real estate agents love the whole its-gonna-get-expensive-so-buy-now) because his parents told him that he needs to buy a house by using variable interest rate debt. Troubling fact is there's a lot of people doing this, our household debt ratio is much higher than those prior to the subprime mortgage crisis (people in denial saying "but there's no bubble in Vancouver, we are different.")

There's a lot of people that's going to be ruined when the bubble bursts and they suddenly can't make a payment or they are out of a job due to the impact it will have on Vancouver's economy.

The common complaint amongst recruiter is that they can't find senior engineers in Vancouver or they can't recruit any American engineers (I wonder why). Senior engineer, family man pulling $90,000/year (often told to take or leave it) would rather make more just south of the border with far lower living costs and able to actually negotiate a higher raise (instead of a couple thousand bucks if you work 50 hour weeks).

Even if you were doing alright the city has no life because people don't have disposable income like in other cities due to high living cost and strict code for venues shutting down after 1AM. People are isolated, friendly to tourists maybe but people are very cliquey, don't like to include the unfamiliar. People realize Vancouver actually kind of sucks and leaves and ridiculed for it with attitude from people who fake affluency like 'k thx bye we live in the best city in the world'. Hell, even people who grew up here are eager to leave if not already. The brain drain is accelerating and destroying intellectual capital (masters in finance becoming a carpenter because they studied for a job that doesn't exist). Sad because there's always a friend that is leaving Vancouver, and never coming back.

Some of us are determined to live here however and make it work but it also means that you must become an independent freelancer/consultant working for non local clients or starting a business (which actually is made pretty favorable in Vancouver) with a very cheap english speaking labor force in the same time zone as SV. The weak loonie also means American employers save additional 20%.