“Dalton McGuinty doesn’t think you have a right to a university education!” piped a self-righteous student activist with a megaphone at yesterday’s rally against tuition fees.
Despite being a heavily indebted student myself, I still have to say that nobody has a “right” to post-secondary education. It is an opportunity extended to those who are intellectually gifted, willing to work hard, and ready to take risks and assume responsibility for their pursuits.
I can already hear the outrage. “But it costs too much!” First of all, try hocking the Uggs and the Ipod-that should free up some money for textbooks. Tuition is already subsidized up to 75 per cent in some cases by our cash-strapped provincial government, and the fees passed on to students are in fact a gross distortion of the true costs of education.
Post-secondary education is an investment, and should be considered in that light. If it’s the government’s responsibility to cover people’s debts, shouldn’t they then subsidize the acquisition of start-up capital for companies, too? No. Because these firms reap the profits, they should pay for it themselves.
“But what if I can’t earn enough to cover my debt payments?” Well then, you obviously chose the wrong career path. Just a hunch, but I doubt there were many engineering, law, business, or trades students participating in yesterday’s hoopla. It is not the responsibility of society to pay for one’s BA in Marxist theory, a degree that is already significantly cheaper than those mentioned above.
When it comes to the tuition debate, the objective of our post-secondary education system should be to make loans and scholarships available to those who will use these resources to their maximum advantage. We should encourage our financial sector to develop innovative credit products that allow students of all classes to borrow based on their future earnings. Alumni and private citizens should continue to develop foundations that will fund those students working towards careers with lower earning potential, such as social work.
Above all, students and politicians need to stop referring to “the right to education.” Let’s look at this logically. Education is not a spontaneous creation. It requires other individuals to teach and administrate. Does this mean that one has a right to their labour? Should they be forced to provide higher education for students in the name of rights? If one is against slavery, the natural answer is, of course, no.
That brings us to the solution proposed by the activists: “The government can do it with tax revenue!” But this revenue is taken coercively by the state from the personal efforts of individuals, and is essentially a less obvious, indirect form of slavery. So the “right to education” is really a right to someone else’s property. The rhetoric preached by the CFS and their minions not only cheapens the concept of “rights,” it betrays the individual liberties that our society is based on.
In the words of Mark Twain, “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world was here first.”
