Every year it’s the same old song: universities raise tuition a little more, trim costs where they can, and ask the provincial government for more funding, which they don’t get, necessitating further tuition increases, costs cuts, and begging sessions at Queen’s Park. Not much about this process has changed in the last decade, and the result is that students are footing the bill for ever-higher tuition and the debt that goes along with it.
To try and short-circuit this destructive cycle, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has commissioned former premier Bob Rae to review Ontario’s ailing postsecondary system and propose solutions for the long term. Rae has so far issued only a discussion paper as a preview to his report, which is due in January 2005, but already the paper has come under fire for hinting at a conclusion which seems all too familiar to students: raising tuition fees.
Rae’s diagnosis of Ontario’s higher education system is that it suffers two ailments: The first is lack of government funding.
“The fact of the matter is the provincial government’s share has been going down [and] students’ share has been going up,” said Rae in an interview with The Varsity last week. Despite the fact that the private sector boasts multi-million-dollar donations and the federal government advertises new grants to fund higher education, “the provincial dollars are so significant, that if its share starts to go down, then, overall, the system is under-funded.”
The second ailment, he said, is lack of funding for the lowest income families. Rae stressed that while tuition has gone up in the last 10-15 years, student assistance has not. This creates financial barriers for postsecondary education, especially for lower-income students.
Although no firm solutions have been devised to break these barriers and decrease the cost of students’ share, one answer suggested by the Canadian Federation of Students in their “alternative discussion paper” is to abolish tuition with a progressive tax system.
This answer however, does not sit well with Rae.
“The theory that students shouldn’t pay anything [for tuition] is nuts,” said Rae. “We have to remember that we have roughly 40 to 45 per cent of people in the age group going to college and university, which means that slightly more than 50% of the people are not going. If you follow the logic that [tuition] should all be universal, what this means is that low-income taxpayers who don’t have a college degree, or don’t have a university degree, are not going to be able to get one, [because they’re] effectively subsidizing kids that are going to go on and make $50-, $75-, $100-, $150,000 a year. I happen to think that’s very regressive; that’s not progressive.”
Rae said, however, that he is not a “man of extremes” who will opt for tuition to skyrocket; but, he said, as to whether or not “students should be prepared to pay more a little here or there, I haven’t made up my mind”
Rae said he doesn’t buy the argument that high tuition fees will act as a deterrent to students and create an elitist education system. He said that evidence shows that the number of people going to college and university is increasing.
“In the last census, done in the 1990s, the only group whose participation rose significantly was the lowest-income Canadians. So to argue that what’s happening in universities is that they’re becoming more elitist is just factually wrong.
“The true statement is that the institutions are becoming more accessible, not less accessible. Now my concern is that this trend continues.”
Instead of abolishing tuition, Rae said he is focusing on making our current loan system more accessible. He suggests the present Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) scheme-which states students must start paying back their loan 6 months after graduation-could be amended to include an “income contingent” plan.
Similar to models in Australia and the US, an income contingent plan is based on the premise that you only start re-paying your loan once you’ve reached a certain threshold of income, and if you fall below this threshold you cease to pay. Although critics of this plan insist it only creates a prolonged period of debt, Rae said the idea of taking out a loan is a fair trade.
“If you don’t have the money [to pay for higher education] it is not unreasonable to say we need a combination of grants and loans that will allow you to survive and come out of the experience without too much debt. [This] is a good, accessible system, a better system than we have today, and that’s my objective: to make the system better.”
He also criticized the opposition to his discussion paper by various national student groups as being too laden with questions of tuition and not focused on improving the quality of institutions.
“I must confess that I’ve heard from the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance and the College Student Alliance [about the quality of education], but I haven’t heard much from CFS on these questions of quality” said Rae. Students, according to Rae, need to be as vocal as they are about tuition about quality-of-education issues like faculty ratios, class sizes or the replacement of an entire generation of retiring faculty.
For now, questions about funding for education remain unanswered, but Rae assured that he believes “there has to be a limit to how much people take [and that] the debt has to be realistic and fair [as well as] the method of paying it back.”
