Four Reasons Why University Education Should Be Free
Observations and analyses in this essay are those of the
author, and are not to be attributed to the
service provider or to any institution.
Four reasons why tuition should be free
1. Canada has committed itself in a legally-binding
international treaty to abolishing university tuition
fees.
Canada signed and in 1976 ratified (thereby giving it the force
of law in Canada) the United Nations
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights. In this treaty the contracting parties commit
themselves to "the progressive introduction of free education" at
the post-secondary level, in conformity with their promise that
"Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all"
(Article 13.2.c).
This treaty also requires that, with respect to social, economic
and cultural rights, including education, the signatories do not
practise "discrimination of any kind as to... national or social
origin" (Article 2.2).
In the thirty-seven years since Canada has ratified this covenant,
not only has free post-secondary education not been
progressively introduced in Canada as the treaty requires, but
the cost of post-secondary studies has increased dramatically in
relation to the rate of inflation. During the same period, most
Canadian universities introduced discrimination on the basis of
national origin by charging international students higher fees
than Canadian students.
As Canada's refusal to comply with its legal obligations under
the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions has vividly
illustrated, there regrettably exists no legal mechanism to force
"rogue states" to obey international laws that they have
adopted.
2. Young people should not have to bear a debt of tens of
thousands of dollars upon graduation.
The majority of graduating students in Canada (about 60%) have
had to borrow money to pay for their studies and begin their
working lives with onerous debts. Their debts upon graduation are
on average close to $28,000 before interest payments, and
typically $10,000 more including interest. In Newfoundland and
Labrador and in Nova Scotia, the average student debt on
graduation is about $35,000, while in Quebec, with its lower
tuition fees before 2012, it has been about $15,000.* These debts
must be borne by a generation of graduates for whom finding
suitable, long-term employment is not always an easy task (hence
the title of the Globe and Mail article cited at the
bottom of this page: "Debt-ridden and unemployed").
3. Canada is one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and
can afford post-secondary education for its young people as
easily as (or, in many cases, more easily than) other countries
that do not have tuition fees.
In many countries of the world (for example Argentina, Ecuador,
France, Sweden, Finland), some of which are significantly poorer
than Canada, there are no tuition fees or only small registration
fees for citizens attending public universities.
It is reasonable to ask whether it is more helpful to the
population of Canada to spend tax revenues paid by Canadian
citizens on free post-secondary education, or to spend tens of
billions of dollars on a war machine that does little or nothing
for Canadians, such as the $28 billion (according to the Rideau
Institute) on the failed invasion of Afghanistan, and on the
deaths of all the Afghans and Canadians this war has killed. Or,
to cite other examples, does it help Canadians more to spend $35
billion on new warships and as much again on new warplanes, when
Canada has not had to defend itself against an invasion for two
centuries and when no one is threatening to invade the country?
It is also reasonable to ask if universities could not themselves
ensure that their internal spending choices give priority to
academic programme expenses over, for example, promotional and
management expenses. In short, the claim that Canadian
governments and universities "just cannot afford" free tuition is
groundless.
4. With regard to qualifications for employment, one or more
university degrees are today the equivalent of a high school
diploma forty years ago.
There are many careers requiring today one or more university
degrees that previously did not: those of elementary school
teachers, nurses, accountants, information specialists, etc.
Therefore the proportion of the age group graduating from
university today is even higher than the proportion graduating
from high school forty years ago, yet no one suggested forty
years ago that students should have to pay for their high school
studies. According to certain governments in Canada, 70% of new
jobs require post-secondary education, and half of Canada's
university graduates return to university to obtain a second
degree in the hope of finding decent employment.*
In summary, it is clear that today post-secondary studies fall within the range of levels
that citizens are expected to attain as part of their basic education, and that they are a
constituent element of education as a fundamental human right that should be provided to
young people without charge by the community as a whole.
The 2012 student movement in Quebec and the tuition debate
The 2012 movement of students and their supporters against
tuition fee increases in Quebec has brought the issue of the cost
of post-secondary studies to the forefront of public debate in
Canada. Often this debate centres on the question of
accessibility. Do high tuition fees make it more difficult for
young people to acquire an education? Detractors of the student
movement argue that this is not the case. They cite the fact, for
example, that although Quebec now has the lowest tuition fees in
the country, it does not have a higher participation rate in
post-secondary studies than certain other provinces where these
studies are more expensive. However such reasoning wrongly
assumes that there are not other factors, of a historical and
social nature, that could account for the slightly lower rate of
participation in Quebec than in some (but not all) other
provinces, and it does not consider the very real possibility
that an increase in tuition fees will lead to an even lower rate
in Quebec. Opponents of the Quebec student movement also claim
that the participation rate of less wealthy students is no
different in high tuition fee jurisidictions than in Quebec.
Since
it is in fact impossible to determine by appealing to statistics
the exact relationship between tuition fee levels and
accessibility, I do not in this article base my arguments for
free post-secondary education on the matter of accessibility,
except to point out the obvious fact that it easier for a young
person from a rich family than a young person from a poor family
to pay for an expensive education,
Why have tuition fees?
The strongest argument in favour of tuition fees is that
university graduates have subststantially higher incomes than
non-university graduates. They should not therefore expect their
studies to be totally subsidized from general tax revenue to
which non-graduates as well as well as graduates must contribute.
This argument could be applied to any level of education, since
high school graduates have on average higher incomes than those
who have completed only elementary school. The argument raises
two questions. The first is: from the perspective of the
well-being of society as a whole, should education be considered
a privately purchased consumer product or a public good provided
to all qualified members of society by the community? The second,
closely related question (closely related because there is
already a social consensus that, with respect to elementary and
secondary education, the answer to the first question is "a
public good" and not "a consumer product") is this: in today's
society, given the educational requirements needed for the
functioning of the society's organizations and institutions, what
is the highest level of study that should reasonably be
considered to fall within the range of levels that citizens are
expected to attain as part of their basic education? These two
questions can in fact be reduced to one: is the post-secondary
education of a significant portion of the citizenry sufficiently
important for the functioning of society today to be considered a
public and not a private good? In these remarks I argue that it
is.
An even less convincing argument for costly university tuition is
that students and graduates do not value their studies unless
they are expensive. Defending the tuition fee increases in
Quebec, the provost at that time of Concordia University
was quoted in the Montreal Gazette (March 8, 2012) as
saying: "I seriously worry that by offering things cheaply you
inadvertently create the idea they have little worth. It is vital
for people to value the education they receive." This line of
reasoning appears to confirm, unintentionally, of course, Karl
Marx's concept of what is now called the "commodification" of
human relations, the idea that capitalism contaminates every
aspect of human life by reducing it to its monetary exchange
value. However most people still believe that many things in
life, indeed the most important and valued things like love,
respect, honesty, and the like, cannot be purchased and that
their value cannot be measured in dollars and cents. This can be
said as well for public services provided by the whole community
for the benefit of all its members.
Concerning the last point, one argument for tuition fees I
have heard from a university administrator is that "in the end,
someone has to foot the bill," and that in Canada today,
provincial governments pay about 80% of this bill and students
only 20%. It is not obvious, this administrator continued, "that
taxpayers should simply pick up the remaining 20%."
(Parenthetically, I might note that the student fee component of
a university's income is sometimes incorrectly formulated with
the claim that students pay only 20% of the cost of their
education. However the 20% figure is calculated as a proportion of the total budget, whereas a not insignificant
portion of a
university's budget is allocated to many activities not involving
the instruction of students, such as faculty research, staff
travel, advertising and "celebration of accomplishments",
expansion of non-teaching administrative positions, high levels
of senior executive remuneration and perquisites, etc.). In fact, in many Canadian universities today
governments contribute to less than half of their costs, and in Ontario, for example, officials speak not of
"public universities" but of "publicly-assisted" universities.
Saying that everything has a cost is of course true of any public
service, whether it is CBC radio, streets and highways, garbage
collection, snow-clearing, food safety protection, medical care,
the police, high school education, etc. I would rephrase the
question so as to ask not who is the someone who should pay, but
what sectors of human activity should be funded by the
collectivity because they serve the collective good or constitute
protection against collective risk?
* "Debt-ridden
and unemployed: We are the class of 2012", The Globe and
Mail, June 1, 2012.
James MacLean
July, 2012; edited September, 2013.
Other essays by James MacLean