That is from the US, Canadian universities are much more affordable.

That doesn't seem to impact debt levels much. Average US student debt is $37K.[1] In Canada it's $26K.[2]

I would have guessed it was much lower in Canada.

[1]https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ [2]http://www.ibtimes.com/student-debt-2016-canada-graduates-wo...

I believe the Canadian number is the average across all students. The American article breaks things up more:

+ 66 percent of graduates from public colleges had loans (average debt of $25,550) + 75 percent of graduates from private nonprofit colleges had loans (average debt of $32,300) + 88 percent of graduates from for-profit colleges had loans (average debt of $39,950) + MBA = $42,000 (11% of graduate degrees) + Master of Education = $50,879 (16%) + Master of Science = $50,400 (18%) + Master of Arts = $58,539 (8%) + Law = $140,616 (4%) + Medicine and health sciences = $161,772 (5%)

This is a highly skewed distribution (would be in Canada too, but all values would be lower). Graduate school in the USA is significantly more expensive than in Canada. The average of the Canadian distribution across all majors + graduate programs is going to make the difference between the two nations seem much smaller than it really is. The Canadian report has no such breakdown unfortunately (though see the average debt levels on page 40 of this http://www.cusc-ccreu.ca/CUSC_2015_Graduating_Master%20Repor...).

26k seems pretty good to me, plus if you convert the 37k USD into CAD, it's more like 50k. If you are in a good program, I think 26k is perfectly fine, it's the students going into debt for programs that don't get them a job who are the issue.

Why would you convert the currency? Canadians pay for things in CAD and Americans in USD.

Yeah, but prices in CAD !== prices in USD. Much of the stuff in stores is imported, and a weak CAD means higher prices (e.g. gas is around 1.15$ / L at the moment, so ~4.36$ / gal, which you might find expensive).