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.
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).
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.
