Monday, May 21, 2012
February 19, 2012
By Beni Broniscer Fisch
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over my twenty years of existence is that anything that advertises itself as “the truth” should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Less than a week ago on Tuesday (7 February) a number of students from different Québec universities began what could be a prolonged general strike against the Charest government’s planned tuition hikes. According to the plan, announced in last year’s Québec budget, tuition in the province is set to go up by $325 per year over the next five years, resulting in a total increase of $1,625.
Tuition fees in Québec have remained frozen for the greater part of the past 44 years, despite an accumulated inflation rate of around 667.8% during the period (an average of 4.41% per year). By 2016, students in the province are due to pay $3,793 for a year of full-time studies, up from the current $2,168. Not only will this new value still be by far the lowest in Canada, but it will in fact simply bring the real tuition rate (that is, the value adjusted to inflation) back to 1968 levels.
The backlash against the plan has been led by the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE), a temporary coalition of students unions created to fight the hikes. CLASSE claims that around 10,000 students from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM ) and Université Laval already joined the strike last Tuesday, and around 20,000 others could join in the next two weeks. Strike votes are set to be held soon by the students unions of almost every university and CÉGEP in the province.
As the strike goes into full gear, CLASSE legitimates its actions by pointing to information contained in the website Tuition Truth. The page cites the results of a study which suggest that some 30,000 students from lower-income families in the province would be prevented from obtaining a university education should tuition go up as planned. The page further mentions that, while tuition rates in the rest of Canada are higher, other countries such as France and Brazil have free tuition. As a Brazilian national, I can attest to the fact that the system is very flawed and reality much more complicated than that – but that’s the subject for a whole different article. Put it shortly, what tends to happen in both cases is that most government funding will go to a handful of top-tier schools (referred to in France as the Grandes Écoles), while the remainder of schools suffer from severe underfunding and tight budgeting constraints.
What is more concerning about the study, however, is that its results do not seem to correspond to the reality of similar experiences in other provinces. Results of a recent study conducted by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP) – a Winnipeg-based independent think-tank – point to a very different scenario. The study sought to answer two basic questions:
- Are university participation rates higher in the low-tuition provinces than in the higher-tuition provinces?
- Are university participation rates for young people from low-income families higher in the low-tuition provinces than in the higher-tuition provinces?
The answers to both questions are a resounding “no”.
A quick look at the two charts above reveals that Nova Scotia and Ontario, the two provinces with the highest average undergraduate tuition rates, also boast the second and fifth largest university participation rates, respectively. Québec on the other hand – despite an average tuition which stands at a meager 46.5% of the national average of $3,996.40 – is third-last in the country in terms of undergraduate attendance. University participation in the province stands at 40.5%, lagging over three percentage points behind the national average of 43.9%.
One could argue that these numbers are skewed by a greater number of wealthy students who are more willing to attend university in higher-tuition provinces, at the expense of lower-income individuals who may be discouraged to pursue post-secondary studies because of the perceived prohibitive costs. The study, once again, points to a different reality.
This time around, the results are even more surprising. Nova Scotia and Ontario (which, as we have seen, have the two highest average tuition rates in the country) both stand nationally in first and second place, respectively, in terms of university participation rates for lower-income students (defined by the study to be those in the bottom 25 percentile of the population). Québec once again shows an abysmal performance: only 30.6% of its lower-income high school graduates attend university, a full six percentage points behind the national average of 36.6%.
Two other interesting results of the study are found in the following charts:
Not only do we fail to observe an inverse relationship between higher tuition and university participation, but if anything the study finds that there seems to be a positive (albeit imperfect) correlation between the two variables. Put it simply, the line of best fit indicates that university participation rates tend to go up as tuition increases. The second chart in turn points to the fact that the gap between university attendance for higher and lower-income students tends to be smaller in high-tuition provinces than in provinces like Québec, which boast very low tuition.
The authors of the study are careful to point to the fact that these findings do not necessarily indicate a direct causal link between higher tuition and higher participation rates in university. They do, however, indicate that tuition fees are but one of many variables that come into play when one weighs in the pros and cons of pursuing a university degree. Other (probably more important) factors involve opportunity costs related to the time spent studying (and therefore outside of the workforce) and the potential for greater future income; geographical proximity to a university; the existence of high-paying jobs that do not require a university degree (such as in Alberta’s oil industry); amongst many others.
Another consideration is that higher tuition rates may result in greater capacity for universities to distribute financial aid (something most left-wingers should appreciate as essentially a transfer of wealth from higher-income students, who have no problem paying full tuition, to those who are less privileged). A personal anecdote seems to exemplify this well: having been admitted to both McGill and the University of Toronto, the latter immediately granted me a $5,000 bursary. McGill – with the severe budgeting constraints that come with Québec’s lower tuition – gave me nothing beyond a welcome letter. Indeed, experiences from several high school friends who received $3,000, $4,000, and even full rides of up to $21,000 from several Ontario universities seem to indicate that these schools are far more generous in terms of granting financial aid than their counterparts in Québec. (Full disclosure: those numbers come from personal interactions, as I have been unable to find broader statistics on this specific subject.)
Let me be very clear: I am not trying to suggest that Québec should pursue an American-style system of university funding, whereby most schools are entirely self-funded through tuitions that reach the $40,000 – 50,000 range. Indeed, the authors of the FCPP study do point to the fact that, at that high a level, a correlation does seem to exist between higher tuition and lower accessibility. What these findings do suggest, however, is that within the context of Canada’s highly-subsidized and very low-tuition universities, this correlation seems to be a false one. Indeed, higher tuition rates – whether because of resulting better infrastructure, hirings of internationally-renowned faculty, more financial aid, or other factors – seem to be correlated with a higher desire to obtain a university degree.
That is why I am not only in favour of the Charest government’s tuition hikes, but also satisfied with my initial (and seemingly well-justified) scepticism of the phrase “Tuition Truth”.
References:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/02/14/quebec-students-strike.html
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/03/17/quebec-announces-tuition-increase/
http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/canada/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-canada.aspx