Upper Canada College - Tuition, Scholarships, and Assets

Tuition, Scholarships, and Assets

Upper Canada College is Canada's wealthiest independent school, having an endowment of more than $40 million (CAD). As of 2010, tuition fees range from $28,575 to $30,575 CAD (not including books and uniform) for day-boy students and $50,990 to $56,490 for boarding. An additional $500 technology fee is levied on all students in the Upper School, which covers the costs of a 13-inch, 2.53 GHz, MacBook Pro laptop computer, the associated software, and technological support. The institution has strict admissions standards, accepting approximately 25% of all applicants; to those, UCC offers over $1.4 million in needs-based financial aid to students in fifth grade and above. The school plans to increase financial assistance over the next decade and to help a more diverse range of students attend UCC.

Besides its own archives containing records that outline the history of Upper Canada, the province of Ontario, and the city of Toronto dating back to the mid-19th century, the college also has a notable collection of artwork, antiques, and war medals. This includes the Order of Canada insignia presented to Robertson Davies, Foster Hewitt, Charles Band, and Arnold Smith, plus Canada's first Victoria Cross, awarded in 1854 to Old Boy Alexander Roberts Dunn, and a Victoria Cross awarded to Hampden Zane Churchill Cockburn; the valour medals were given to the Canadian War Museum on permanent loan on 17 May 2006. In the college's chapel, itself decorated with works by Canadian artists, is an altar made of marble from parts of St. Paul's Cathedral, in London, England, that were damaged in the Blitz and donated by Dean of St. Paul's Walter Robert Matthews. On this is an altar cloth made from a piece of that which was used for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Further, the school holds works by Thoreau MacDonald and a collection of original paintings from the Group of Seven (though several were auctioned by the college in an effort to pay for the lawsuits it faced in 2004); an original Stephen Leacock essay, titled Why Boys Leave Home— A Talk on Camping, donated in 2005 and published for the first time in The Globe and Mail; and the original manuscript of Robertson Davies' work The Mask of Aesop, which he wrote in 1952 specifically for the Prep's 50th anniversary. Also in UCC's possession is a chair owned by Sir John A. Macdonald and another that once belonged to George Airey Kirkpatrick.