Last week’s “Day of Action” demonstration for reduced tuition seems to have come off well. Union organizers and left-wing MPPs earned a sliver of desperately-craved press coverage. Ambitious student politicians got to network with their comrades and practice their furious haranguing skills.
Students with a few hours to kill got to spend a pleasant afternoon exercising their legs and vocal cords. There’s nothing quite like the camaraderie and moral righteousness of an angry crowd.
Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. The Varsity interviewed a typically tragic case-a student with a $39,000 debt load, about to borrow more as he embarks on a computer science PhD Interestingly, the report suggested that this debt was somehow imposed against his will, not voluntarily requested by the borrower like most loans. I suspect that this student did the math and concluded that borrowing to pay for his degree was a good investment.
Increased earnings over the course of his lifetime will easily outweigh the cost of his education. If he had considered the debt excessive, surely he would have postponed his PhD, got a job, and paid back some of his undergraduate debt.
As previously noted in these pages, across-the-board tuition reductions of the type proposed by the protestors are a remarkably unfair way to fund education.
Most U of T students come from families with incomes somewhat above the Canadian average. Once they graduate, they earn substantially more than Canadians without degrees. To use government revenues to reduce base tuition or student debt, regardless of the true ability of the student or their family to pay, is to write cheques to a relatively wealthy group of Canadians.
Assistance should be targeted at those students who won’t be able to get their degree without it. That means enriching OSAP, providing new bursaries, and actively recruiting outstanding students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Unfortunately, such policies aren’t simplistic enough to fit on a cardboard placard or to be chanted through a bullhorn. So “Freeze Tuition” and its variants are the most sophisticated education policy proposals you’ll hear on a Day of Action.
This suggests a deeper problem-the inadequacy of demonstrations as a way to discuss public policy. After a year working as a Cabinet aide at Queen’s Park, I got an impression of the impact of demonstrations on government policy. They are taken about as seriously as the latest communiqué from the Pope condemning homosexuality. The fact that protests sometimes involve assaulting Members of Parliament or throwing bricks at cops doesn’t improve their credibility.
Canada is blessed with a free press, a constitutional parliamentary democracy, and an apolitical bureaucracy. These precious institutions form public policy through reasoned debate, compromise, and democratic choice. Demonstrations, on the other hand, work by dumbing-down issues, demonizing opponents, and exploiting crowd psychology. So it’s unfortunate that while many students won’t read newspapers or vote (let alone join a political party), there’s usually a substantial crowd at these demonstrations. Apparently, some of the attendees aren’t even being paid by the unions or by the CFS to show up.
It’s time to think seriously about the why and how of government support for universities. Across-the-board tuition cuts are regressive and unfair. After students voluntarily go into debt to fund their generally-lucrative degrees, presenting them as sympathy cases because of how much they owe is a non-starter. The best arguments for enhanced education funding involve the general public interest. For example, a more educated population means a more vibrant economy, and repays the state’s investment in the long term through increased tax revenues. This is a strong case if it’s presented in an articulate and rational fashion by the university and its administration. Unfortunately, waving placards and shouting slogans at the Day of Action won’t get the job done.
