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Comment by drpgq | Hacker News Reader

Tuition is $12000 now? I graduated from Mac in comp eng in 1996 and I think it was getting to around $3000 then. Definitely worth it, but if you told me at the time I would have thought $12000 was crazy. I graduated with no debt though.

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It's roughly $6000/term (for engineering, cheaper for CS students though) not including paying for food + housing (an additional $1600-3000 depending on where you decide to live on or off-campus). I'm in the boat of Waterloo grads who graduated with no debt. But I would hazard a guess that the majority of engineering students have little to no debt. And the students who do co-op in the US most definitely earn more money than what's required to pay for school.

CS with coop is $6300 a term. I think engineering is a few hundred more.

When I started in 2000, it was around $3000 per term all in (tuition, co-op fee, and all the other misc. fees). When I graduated in 2005, it was $4200 per term. That's an increase of 7% per year on average.

From 2005 to now (@ $6300), it's gone up 8.5% per year on average.

Good to see that the university is keeping tuition affordable by keeping up with inflation. Not.

Ken I won't tell you what we're paying down here for tuition then ;)

I think my first term was $2700/school term + 500/work term as a co-op fee. (in 2001).

I study Software Engineering at Waterloo right now; I paid 7600 this term including tuition, incidental fees, co-op fees, etc. but not including food or residence.

I ignored incidental fees from my figure. Strictly the tuition cost.

Also factoring in the point that tuition for engineering is making a major hike (I think it was 5%?) and a lot of students get the 30% tuition cut from the provincial government (although this doesn't apply to 4B students).

Oh wow it's increasing fast. When I started Soft Eng in 2008 it was like $5000. At graduation it was $6500. This is nuts.

If you go to a good school in Ontario you are looking at $7000 at least

Graduate of Waterloo Software-eng here. I paid back my OSAP all at once right after graduation with money I earned from co-op.

How did you get OSAP while having co-op income? I could take a 30% pay cut and still not qualify for any OSAP.

Same. I never qualified even when I declared myself as an independent.

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