Draft Discussion Document on Quebec Universities

Among adults aged 55 to 64, Canada ranks fourth in the OECD, but by 2010, university attainment rates for the 25 to 34 age cohort put Canada 15th among OECD countries, writes Paul Davidson.
Photograph by: Lyle Stafford , National Post

Canada’s universities have been doing more with less… but can they keep doing so?
(Ottawa Citizen) In the last dozen years, Canadian universities have made space for a 50 percent increase in full-time enrolment, bringing the number of students served each year in credit programs to more than 1.2 million. Why the increase? Because the labour market has demanded it; because, as a country, we need the continued advantage of a well-educated population.
But consider this. While universities have opened their doors wider, ensuring greater opportunities for more people, per student funding has dropped to a historic low. Clearly, universities are doing so much more today with a lot less.
Universities have repurposed space, converting physical infrastructure to meet needs, whether that has meant turning classrooms into labs or offices into teaching spaces
No one will argue the effects of the new economy. The resulting challenges for many sectors have been substantial. Always institutions of ideas, universities have stepped up, perhaps earlier than some, with creative and innovative responses. (23 May 2013)

IS THERE A FINANCIAL FIX FOR QUÉBEC UNIVERSITIES?
A DRAFT DISCUSSION DOCUMENT
John Drysdale & Susan Hoecker-Drysdale

Public universities in Québec today are caught between the Scylla of threatened reductions of government funding and the Charybdis of student demands for free or reduced tuition. On the one hand, with budget deficits running to unsustainably high levels, the government, and behind it, the taxpayers, press universities to control, if not reduce, their spending. From the other side, students press for control, if not reduction or elimination, of the costs of their higher education. While revenues from tuition amount to less than twenty percent of university funding, the level of government funding is itself tied to student enrollments (hence tuition revenue; the more students, the more government funding).

Universities are inherently expensive establishments. In addition to standard classrooms and offices, there are several kinds of library spaces, laboratories, and studios, all of which use costly, cutting-edge technologies. Simply maintaining their facilities and keeping their technologies up to date requires continuously increasing budgetary support. Given that universities, unlike factories or private corporations, do not generate revenues from their mandated operations, they are dependent on external funding and investment. And if the level of funding fails to keep up with advancing operational requirements, then universities suffer declines in their effectiveness as engines of innovation and knowledge-generation. If universities, in turn, fall behind in a competitive national and global environment, then the society, not just the economy, suffers.

Few people doubt the benefits of free public education from kindergarten through the university level. For societies that can afford the investment of resources, fully subsidized education serves to indicate the value a society places on educational achievement. As desirable as free public higher education is, the question for any particular society becomes: are taxpayers able, and if able, willing, to subsidize the entire costs of student tuition and fees? The following proposals are premised on the assumption that the majority of citizens and taxpayers of Québec are not prepared, at least not at this time of high government budget deficits and economic uncertainty, to commit the resources necessary to provide completely tuition-free university education. At the same time, the object in the following is to identify ways of minimizing the financial burden on students while securing the resources needed for strengthening our universities. This is a matter of attempting to navigate the troubled waters between Scylla and Charybdis – no mean feat.

The proposals outlined below are meant to address some of the most pressing needs of Québec universities today:

i. The need to control, possibly reduce, the amount of Québec government expenditure on university education in the near term (in view of the governmental deficit situation);
ii. The need to maintain, possibly increase, the amount of university funding for research and instruction in Québec universities; and
iii. The need to maintain, possibly increase, financial support for students on the basis of both merit and need, in order to maintain both quality and accessibility to university education.
A FIVE-POINT PLAN

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE GOVERNMENT
The primary responsibility of the government now as in the past is to provide adequate financial support for the core operational functions of the university: research, teaching, and learning. What is newly required, at least for the near term, is to shift away from undertaking new capital projects (i.e., construction of new buildings) in order to increase support for these core functions.

TOWARD PROGRESSIVE TUITION STRUCTURES
While tuition revenues need to be increased substantially to contribute to the cost of educating students, the increases also need to be offset as much as possible by greater support for student scholarships and bursaries (see “Challenge to the Private Sector below). The net effects of these changes should be to provide substantial overall increases in revenues from tuition and yet reduce the financial burden on students who qualify on the basis of either merit or financial need (or both) for scholarships and bursaries. Those students who do not qualify for scholarships or bursaries would pay a higher portion of the cost of their own education.
By way of illustration, if the nominal* rate of tuition were to be increased by approximately 20% per year, the current $2,168 per full-time student would increase to $5,395 after five years, resulting in tuition costs still well below the rest of Canada.
*Paid only by students who do not qualify for scholarships or bursaries.

EXTENDING DIFFERENTIAL TUITION STRUCTURES
Universities already charge differential tuition on the basis of residence (in- versus out-of-province versus international) and sometimes on the basis of level of program (graduate or professional versus undergraduate). It is now time to implement differential tuition based on the differential cost of education according to the major fields of study. Fields that require significantly more resources for such things as laboratories, custom technologies, and data usages would justify higher fees than the baseline needs of most humanities disciplines.

MORE INNOVATIVE AND EFFICIENT UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION
One of the most innovative forms of instruction today is online education. Online courses can reduce costs substantially for both the universities that offer them and for the students who take them. So-called MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, sponsored by respected universities, have mushroomed in the past couple of years. While online education is not new to Québec universities, much greater use can be made of such media.

A CHALLENGE TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR
While corporate and individual donors have played a beneficial role in supporting capital projects, the greater need now is for donors to shift their resources from subsidizing new buildings to underwriting more scholarships and bursaries. Instead of named buildings let us have named scholarships. Potential employers can contribute more to bursaries, internships, and work-study programs.

Taken together these measures can strengthen our universities while easing the financial burdens on government, taxpayers, and students.

26 February
Canada must streamline education to turn degrees into jobs
By Denise Deveau, Financial Post
Everyone has heard the argument that education begets fortune and career success. But there are countless graduates who have invested tens of thousands of dollars in a university education, only to find themselves starting on a career path that barely covers their loan payments, or lining up with hundreds of other similarly qualified hopefuls for a job.
While university graduates in jobs in which their skills are barely put to the test might seem common, this is not a universal conundrum by any means. Certain degrees — especially in technology, sciences and engineering — are almost sure-fire entries to a lucrative career. …
The Scandinavian countries, Germany, Switzerland and Australia have produced much better employment outcomes. Ironically, these are also regions where the number of students graduating with university degrees is far lower (typically 20% to 30% depending on the country).
The strength of their education systems lies in the fact that the role of employers is infused in the educational process so career pathways are explicitly apparent, says [Donnalee Bell, senior consultant with the Canadian Career Development Foundation].
To that end, they are very much involved in training and curriculum development. “The focus is on a more direct link to the labour market, so it’s not so heavily weighted on the university system. …
Canada needs to start having discussions around career education and what that means in this economic environment, Ms. Bell contends. “We should be helping students connect the pieces to hone their skills and building networks that will parlay them into where to take the next step.
“Universities and colleges need to think about how what they’re providing translates into the labour market. And business needs to tell us what skills they need, because we don’t know.”

Garneau Proposes Major Overhaul of Student Assistance Program
Under Garneau’s proposed plan, the current six-month “grace period” of non-payment of a student loan would be abolished and instead made into an indefinite time period. No student would be forced to make payments to their student loan until they found a well paying job.
Garneau said an income threshold of about $40,000 would be instituted. Only once the student has found gainful employment and reached that salary level would repayment begin.
He added that since education is a provincial responsibility, provinces would have the option to opt out of this plan and the federal government would continue to support them.

Comments

We should all be grateful to John Drysdale for his work. He assumes that 1. University Education is inherently desirable to the community, 2. The financing of universities should be divided between taxpayers and students, and the non-negligible detail is the division of the burden between, as well as among those groups. 3. The provincial government is seriously interested in seeking a permanent solution to 2.
I have serious doubts, having dealt through the years only with the students who passed the relatively tight admission filter at McGill, that not all who are now at university should be there. If we had serious apprenticeship programmes delivering basic craft skills (carpenter, electrician, plumber etc), not just job-specific skills of value only in the establishment of a particular employer, more people could find, earlier in life, ways to support themselves and their families. If the general educational policy were not designed around promoting the ignorance of the English language, the graduates could fill jobs across Canada, rather than swell the ranks of the unemployed in Quebec. (South Korea, the current pioneer in mass education, promotes the teaching of English as widely as possible. This is not done in the expectation that all young Koreans will emigrate, but in recognition of the fact, denied officially in Quebec, that unavoidably English is the language of science and of business for the foreseeable future.)
Who pays how much, by the way of fees has long been a way of obtaining electoral cannon-fodder in Quebec. A statistical fact is that university graduates, as a group, have higher incomes than the general citizenry. Taxing the latter to subsidize the former, is Robin Hood in reverse.
I can see a very strong case for properly delivered early childhood, primary and secondary education being publicly financed. This implies far more than cheap baby-sitting for middle-class parents. Quantitative skills and languages come very easily to young children. Government spending not strongly committed to these goals is a waste of public money.
It is easy to write down these things, and to submit them to decision makers who are more-or-less aware of these matters. Unfortunately, these decision makers are also aware that their electoral self-interest is tied to promoting linguistic ignorance, the promise of many university diplomas down the road, and pleasing unions committed to the status quo, who finance the electoral campaigns of the very same decision makers.
Tony Deutsch