In early February, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) released a study document. It determined, to the surprise of no one, that it is within the public’s interest for that federal government to hand students vast amounts of dollars more each year. One demand is really a doubling in funding for that Youth Employment Strategy, which would cost $330 million each year. (If the CFS’s provincial campaigns to increase minimum wages to $15 are successful, private employers will surely hire fewer students. But governments as a rule are happy to overpay, therefore, the request for another $330 million.)
Then comes balance larger demand: The CFS wants an end to undergraduate tuition fees in Canada. The ask comes despite the fact that only about one-quarter of universities’ revenues come from tuition fees, and the federal Liberals already promised up to $750 million of more annual funding throughout the campaign. But the CFS is unsatisfied with $750 million; it wants more.
Marginal enrollment from eliminating tuition fees will probably come from unmotivated, lower-ability students
Within just a couple weeks, the CFS was suddenly a great deal closer to getting what it really wanted, a minimum of in one province – also it didn’t even need to wait for the federal budget. The government of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, Justin Trudeau’s ideological soulmate at Queen’s Park, announced a change from the student grant system. Underneath the Ontario Student Grant, “average college and university tuition is going to be free for students with financial need from families with incomes of $50,000 or less, and tuition will be made less expensive for middle-income families,” according to the Ministry of Finance. The “free” tuition is going to be covered by re-directing funds from current student grant programs and eliminating tuition tax credits.
There will be more grants and more interest-free loans. The Ministry of Finance boasts which more than 1 / 2 of students “from families with incomes of $83,000 or less will get non-repayable grants which will exceed average college or university tuition” and that “all students will be the same or best as underneath the Ontario Tuition Grant.”
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What occurs when costly services like university education are provided for free or at a steep discount? Invariably, there will be overconsumption. In fact, there already is, as seen in the relative unattractiveness of university graduates for employers, who are evidently more hungry for workers with non-university skills: For each year since 1998, Canadian youth were more prone to be employed when they had got a new post-secondary diploma or certificate after high school rather than a university degree.
Making university education cheaper will fuel more overconsumption. It gets even worse considering where the marginal enrollment will require place, using one of what kinds of students. High-ability students who sign up for mathematics, business, or science programs are already in university, simply because they believe the increased future incomes will provide a sufficient return on their own investments in education.
Marginal enrollment from eliminating tuition fees will likely originate from unmotivated, lower-ability students, and in less practical programs like theatre history or equity studies. These are students for whom university education is definitely an unprofitable investment unless taxpayers are footing most or all of the tuition bill. Meanwhile, the dwelling of Ontario’s new funding arrangement actually has the potential to lure would-be students to more affordable programs like arts, in which the province covers nearly all of the tuition using its $6,000 annually average grant, rather than a $11,000-a-year architecture degree or a $13,000-a-year engineering degree, where the province covers only area of the cost.
Eliminating tuition fees will also have the perverse effect of discouraging students from graduating promptly. Students are less motivated to avoid failing courses when they don’t have to purchase additional semesters.
So cheapening or eliminating tuition fees likely won’t mean better computer scientists and much more engineers; it will mean more party students, more 25-year-old social justice warriors within their seventh year of undergraduate human rights studies, and more campus climate activists. But then, Wynne and Trudeau surely wouldn’t mind having a much more of those.
Matthew Lau is a finance and economics student at the University of Toronto.
