All Posts Tagged With: "tuition freeze"

Tuition freeze likely

The Parti Quebecois government appears to be challenging the notion that the province’s universities are under-funded, a tactic that could hold significant implications it prepares to hold a highly anticipated summit on education.

The government has promised to host a symposium in February aimed at finding a long-term solution to the challenge of university funding, an event that stems from a key PQ election pledge to cancel previously planned tuition hikes.

But it is now sending signals that universities might not actually require a financial boost.

Members of the government including Premier Pauline Marois have in recent weeks been repeatedly challenging the premise that the province’s universities are under-financed. On Thursday, the government even leaked a report to the media challenging that oft-repeated notion.

Continue reading Quebec universities aren’t underfunded: leaked PQ report

Province increases university funding despite deficit

Photo of Memorial

Newfoundland and Labrador will soon take the crown as the cheapest place to study, despite a deficit budget that includes job cuts and that will cause provincial net debt to rise by $1-billion to $8.5-billion by March 2013.

Tuesday’s budget includes $44 million for Memorial University and College of the North Atlantic to prevent them from raising tuition fees, which averaged $2,649 in the fall of 2011.

The province will soon have the lowest fees in Canada. Nationwide, university fees averaged $5,366 in 2011, according to Statistics Canada.

Continue reading Newfoundland continues tuition freeze

PQ platform will include tuition freeze, restricting access to English-language CEGEPs

The Parti Québécois held their big party congress over the weekend. This conference was particularly important because Quebec’s largest opposition party was deciding on the policies that they will be bringing to the voters in the next provincial election.

The biggest news out of the congress was the overwhelming level of support for leader Pauline Marois. She received over 93 per cent in a confidence vote, well over the 80 per cent required to avoid a leadership contest.

There were also some interesting developments on the education front, with delegates voting to oppose the tuition hikes introduced in last month’s provincial budget and, if elected, to freeze tuition at 2012 levels. That proposal has received support from the province’s largest student lobby group.

Delegates also backed recent calls by PQ members of the National Assembly to extend the province’s language laws, which currently restrict access to English-language primary and secondary schools, to CEGEPs. Students in Quebec, who graduate high school in grade 11, must attend a two-year CEGEP program before going to university. The colleges also provide vocational programs.

Currently in Quebec, children can only attend schools in the English-language system if one of their their parents or siblings was educated in English in Canada, or if the child began their schooling in English elsewhere in the country before moving to the province. Everyone else, essentially all francophones and immigrants, must attend French-language schools. The restrictions apply to all schools that receive any government funding, including most private schools.

The PQ has always been something of a strange animal. It is, essentially, a single issue coalition, centred around Quebec nationalism and promoting the French language. Yet, it has formed the province’s government on several occasions and, according to a poll that appeared in Saturday’s Le Devoir, may be poised to do so again.

Over the past few years some high-profile former PQ members, including former leader, Lucien Bouchard, have publicly denounced hard-line nationalist positions. This movement away from the party seems to be coming mostly from its right wing, leaving the PQ more left wing and more radical, at least when it comes to issues of Quebec nationalism and the French language.

But while Marois may be more radical than some of her predecessors, she is certainly not on the party’s radical fringe. Over the weekend, she convinced the majority of delegates to backtrack on a policy that would have called for all commercial signs in the province to be exclusively in French. Instead, the party will be sticking with the status quo, which allows multilingual signs, as long as French is predominant.

The party’s plans to extend the language laws to CEGEPs are controversial and may not be very popular but it’s probably not going to cost them politically. The number of students who would be affected by this change is small, around 4,000 a year, the far majority of whom are in the Montreal area, which isn’t exactly a PQ stronghold. As well, it’s a much bigger issue for anglophones, who wouldn’t have voted for the PQ anyway, than for francophones.

Quebec’s next election could still be a long way off, Premier Jean Charest doesn’t have to call one until December 2012, so it’s much too early to call this one for the PQ. But, when it does come, many young Quebecers will most likely be feeling that both of the province’s major parties are working against their interests.

Protesters storm Quebec Finance Minister’s office, clash with security and police

One student was injured on Thursday, when several dozen protesters stormed the Montreal offices of Quebec’s Finance Minister.

According to organizers, the protester was injured when a security guard pushed him through a glass door. Police are investigating. Rue Frontenac also reported that a ministry staffer threatened to attack one of their photographers if photos were not deleted, when the photographer refused, the staff member grabbed his cell phone. It was later returned.

Apparently fearing for their safety, the protesters soon left the office. Several protesters were pepper sprayed by police but no arrests were reported.

The protest was organized by the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, one of Quebec’s largest student lobby groups. They’re upset with the tuition increases included in last week’s provincial budget, which they described as a “declaration of war against students.”

Another protest is planed for next Thursday.

As is often the case with posts like this, the majority of the links above are to French-language sources.

Tuition hikes a major issue for protesters

10 people were arrested at a large protest against Quebec’s upcoming provincial budget, on Saturday. The budget, which will be tabled this Thursday is expected to include tuition hikes and a $200 per person health care tax.

Organizers estimated the crowd at over 50,000 people (the Montreal police no longer provide crowd estimates). The protest was endorsed by over 150 labour, student and political groups.

Protesters criticized the government’s plan to return to a balanced budget by 2014, saying the government is moving too fast.

“Their obsession with returning to a balanced budget in 2014 is too dangerous,” said Michel Arsenault, president of the Quebec federation of labour. “We want to maintain and improve our social services.”

According to La Presse, the four women and six men arrested, all in their 20s, will face charges of conspiracy to commit a crime and carrying a weapon. One of those arrested is prohibited from attending protests. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, a large student lobby group, denounced the arrests as “arbitrary.” There were no other major incidents.

You may notice that most of the links above are in French. With the exception of a brief in the Gazette and a mention on talk radio station CJAD, Montreal’s English-language media don’t appear to have covered the protest at all.

Professors, staff and students release a manifesto on the future of universities in the province

With less than two weeks before the big education partners meeting in Quebec City, student groups, along with staff and faculty unions, are trying to get out in front of the debate.

Last week, Quebec’s largest student lobby group, the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, released a major survey on student finances.

Today, it’s a manifesto (in French) signed by pretty much every student and labour umbrella group that is involved with post-secondary education in Quebec.

All three of Quebec’s active student lobby groups have signed the document:  FÉUQ; the smaller, more radical, Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante and the newer and smaller Table de concertation étudiante du Québec.

The group which represents continuing education students’ associations, who usually keep a low profile, are also on board.

On the labour side are umbrella groups representing professors, lecturers, non-academic professionals, as well as university-related branches of two of Quebec’s largest trade federations and the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

So what are they calling for? Universities that are “free, accessible, public and democratic.” (That’s free as in the French word “libre,” not free as in “gratuit.”)

Basically, they want to see the provincial government invest more in universities, freeze tuition and reform the financial aid system so students graduate with less, or no, debt. The manifesto claims that the funding for this could be raised from cracking down on tax evaders and cutting corporate tax breaks.

But it’s also about a vision for universities and rejecting the idea of a “knowledge economy,” or at least the idea that universities should be subject to market forces.

These groups say they want universities to be high-minded places where knowledge is pursued, not just places where the next generation of workers are trained.

The manifesto also contains calls for university autonomy. This is mostly in response to government plans that would require university boards of directors to include a certain percentage of “independent” members, ie. people from the community at large, not the university.

It also takes a lot of shots at the “lucides.”

At their press conference today, the groups behind the manifesto said they had given up on the current consultations, like the education partners meeting next month, and want to see much broader public consultations on the future of universities.

This isn’t surprising. It does seem like the education partners meeting is more for show than actual consultation, so it makes sense for these groups, who don’t like the direction the government is taking, to try and delegitimize the process.

But it seems unlikely that this will have any effect on the government’s plans.

Jean Charest’s government is in a bad situation, its policies are pleasing no one and there’s a haze of corruption allegations surrounding it. There will definitely be some policy shifts, but if the government changes course on post-secondary education it’s probably not going to be toward the vision put forward in this manifesto.

This sort of document, with its broad social vision and message that Quebec doesn’t have to be like the U.S. and the rest of Canada, plays well with the Parti Québécois base. In other words, it appeals to people who probably didn’t support the Liberals in the first place and oppose them for a whole host of reasons beyond education.

If Charest tries to win anyone over with his higher education policies it’s far more likely to be the business community, the “lucides,” who are calling for the exact opposite.

A tuition hike for MBA students is opposed by the province; so far neither side has blinked

McGill University and the Quebec government have been locked in a stare-down ever since the school announced last year it would no longer abide by provincial caps on tuition fees for its M.B.A. program. The province promptly kicked up a fuss, and even threatened to fine the school for its insolence. So far, neither side has blinked—even though students are back in class and their tuition bills are in the mail. “We’re still in the same place we were several months ago,” says Peter Todd, the dean of McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “We’ve made it clear we’re going ahead.”

The 56 students entering McGill’s M.B.A. program this fall will shell out $29,500 a year for the privilege. That’s about 15 times what Quebec residents will pay in tuition for any other master’s program at McGill, and more than five times as much as out-of-province Canadians. McGill’s M.B.A. fees are hardly out of whack with those of other top-tier programs across the country—Canadian residents beginning their M.B.A. studies this fall at the University of Toronto will have paid about $75,000 in tuition before the end of the two-year program, while those at the University of Western Ontario will be out $68,500 for its one-year program. (Like the University of Toronto’s, McGill’s is a two year program.) The big difference is McGill didn’t wait for the government’s permission to announce the hike.

This past spring, Quebec’s then-education minister Michelle Courchesne lashed out at the university, reminding it that “tuition fees are set by the government.” Courchesne also threatened to claw back $28,000 in funding to the university—$11,000 of which would have been the province’s share of funding for M.B.A. students—for each student registered in the program if McGill went ahead with the hike. However, Courchesne was never given the opportunity to follow through on the threat; she was shuffled out of the education portfolio last month and replaced with Line Beauchamp.

Beauchamp declined to be interviewed, but a ministry spokesperson acknowledges there hasn’t been any movement on the issue, since “the new minister hasn’t yet had time to work on the file.” That means McGill still isn’t sure what to expect from the government in the coming months, though Todd says the school can absorb the fine should the province choose to impose it. “If we have to deal with some issues with the government in the short term, we’re absolutely committed to doing that,” he says. “We don’t see that we have a lot of choice.”

The spat is the latest in a growing list of ideological battles between supporters of Quebec’s cap on tuition and those who say it starves the province’s universities of much-needed funding. In 2007, the Jean Charest government announced it would hike university fees by $100 a year for the next five years—the first increase since 1994. But three years later, critics say Quebec’s universities are still teetering on a financial precipice.

At a speech to the Canadian Club this past June, McGill principal Heather Munroe-Blum argued, “The biggest obstacles to our universities’ success are the outdated objects of our ambition and underfunding.” Her complaints echoed those of a group of 16 prominent Quebecers, including former premier Lucien Bouchard and former finance minister Monique Jérôme-Forget, who in February called for the deregulation of tuition fees. “Quebec’s universities are hurting,” Bouchard said in a statement signed by the group. “The condition is not incurable, but it is chronic.” However, the call for reforms has yet to find a receptive audience either with the government or the opposition.

While the Charest government has agreed to hold wide-ranging talks this fall on university funding, its stance on McGill’s decision to privatize its M.B.A. program makes clear it’s not yet willing to relinquish its role in setting fees. In that sense, the Liberals are on much the same page as the opposition Parti Québécois, which argues deregulation would undermine Quebec’s increasingly unique egalitarian approach to post-secondary funding. “If we’re going to raise the issue of tuition fees, it’s not with the idea of having the state disengage itself,” says PQ post-secondary education critic Marie Malavoy. “By making such a provocative move, what McGill University is doing is calling into question the model of Quebec universities.”

Todd rejects the notion that McGill is charting a revolutionary course with its expensive new M.B.A. program. “We’re at the end of a chain of this kind of transformation across the country,” he says, “not at the vanguard of it.” And he’d be right, of course, if McGill were anywhere else but Quebec.

Whether tuition is high or low, the price is arbitrary

It finally happened. Quebec will soon be saying good bye and good riddance to its tuition freeze. Finance Minister Raymond Bachand, who announced the change in his budget this week, said “students need to pay a fair share.” Why? Because “We want our universities to be world class.” In response, a McGill Daily editorial called the remarks “offensive” and argued that “These planned hikes, however large they may be, must immediately be met with organized student action.”

Oh boy. Here come the student strikes protests. As much as various Quebec “student leaders” want to frame the issue as one over a just or unjust society, it is nothing more than a conflict between buyers and sellers that is unhelpfully, and arbitrarily, mediated by the government. When students complain about the cost of tuition, it is not much different than if they were complaining about the cost of computers.

But what about poorer students unable to pay for their education? That debate should have ended long ago. There is very little evidence that supports the conclusion that the cost of tuition is a barrier to pursuing a post-secondary education.

At the same time, I am not entirely void of sympathy for students facing tuition hikes. What does the finance minister mean when he says that students should “pay a fair share”? The only criteria given to support the idea that Quebec tuition is too low is that other provinces have allowed tuition to increase, and, of course, Quebec’s universities have been lobbying for tuition to rise for years. So while the government has until now favoured students (or buyers) in keeping tuition low, it will soon favour universities (sellers) in allowing it to rise. There is no objective reason why tuition should rise or decline. Whether it is low or high, the price will be set arbitrarily by the government, and, it will largely reflect the balance of success of the lobbying efforts of various groups.

If there were a free market in education, students and universities would be left to negotiate the cost on their own. Universities would have no choice but to deliver high quality education at a reasonable price, lest they lose students to competitors. Under the current framework, governments give operating grants to universities on a basis that does not always ensure higher quality education. As such, higher tuition fees might simply be used to swell university bureaucracies, which already rival that of the federal government. Or they might be used to keep professional programs inexpensive, while arts and science students see little benefit from a university’s new-found wealth. There is simply little incentive to actually improve services for students.

When the price of anything else is influenced by governments, through subsidies or trade barriers, as well as price controls, there is always at least some resistance, or at least a recognition that the government is buckling to one pressure group or another. Wouldn’t it be nice if the education sector were subject to the same scrutiny?

Report exposed Manitoba’s tuition freeze policy for what it really was

Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett has written an epilogue on the Manitoba government’s recent decision to lift the tuition fee freeze in that province. Lett makes the following point about lower tuition fees and accessibility:

The tuition freeze has been wildly popular with students, of course, but it has been under constant attack from the schools, which claim it starves them of needed revenue. Earlier this month, the province released a report written by Ben Levin, a former deputy education minister, that pretty much exposed the tuition freeze policy for what it really is.

Levin noted there was no connection between lower tuition fees and accessibility, the NDP government’s chief motivation for maintaining the freeze. Levin recommended modest tuition increases for university and college students, the first in a decade.

Levin’s conclusions were hardly shocking

Two years ago, Ontario and Quebec completed exhaustive studies of the relationship between tuition fees and accessibility. The conclusion was that lower tuitions make education more affordable for those who could afford to go; for those who could not afford to go, lower tuitions did nothing.

NB mayor says free tuition would encourage procreation, increase population

A number of arguments have been put forward in favour of the elimination of post-secondary tuition fees over the years, including arguments associated with increasing access for those who cannot afford post-secondary education and mistaken notions about equity and taxation.

The mayor of Saint John, New Brunswick has proposed another reason for eliminating tuition fees: procreation. Saint John Mayor Ivan Court believes that free tuition for post-secondary education might encourage Saint Johners to have more children and thereby increase the city’s population.

Can you imagine the placard slogans?