Canadians have cause for worry as the U.K. guts its higher-education funding.
Imagine your premier announcing that, over the next few years, funding for universities will be cut by 80 per cent, undergraduate tuition will triple, and a loan system resulting in lifetime debt for about 30 per cent of students will be imposed. While many are vehemently opposed to this policy, your government pushes ahead anyway. A year later, the changes have been implemented despite massive student, faculty, staff, and institutional resistance.
Thankfully, this nightmare scenario is not the case in Canada. Across the pond, however, it is a harsh reality. Over the past year, the United Kingdom’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government has announced sweeping reforms of public higher education. The government is carrying out these cuts to education in the context of a massive budget-cutting exercise: Politicians argue that the deficit is too high, and that the government needs to cut costs in order to balance its books. This rationale was used to gut the main operating grant for universities over the course of five years, replacing this lost revenue with a 300 per cent hike in the tuition cap; by 2012, universities will be able to charge up to £9,000 ($13,803 CAD), up from the current cap of £3,375 ($5,176 CAD).
Find out what the top 10 problems with Canadian universities are here.
The politicians advancing this agenda claimed that maximum tuition would only be charged in “exceptional circumstances.” They argued that market forces would result in a differentiated system that charged students according to the quality of education received. Unsurprisingly to all observers, the politicians were wrong. Two-thirds of universities in England have announced that they will be charging the maximum allowable tuition for a portion of courses, and half have said they will be charging full tuition for every program they offer. Instead of the £6,000 figure that politicians originally cited, average tuition is now expected to rise to £8,393 by 2012.
Most students, of course, will not be able to afford such exorbitant fees without assistance. In order to maintain current levels of access, the government has introduced an income-contingent loan-repayment scheme. The government will pay all of a student’s tuition up front, making university education free at the point of access. The student will have to pay back the loan at an interest rate of up to prime plus three per cent, depending on that student’s income. The rate at which students pay back their loans will be set to nine per cent of all income after £21,000 ($32,491 CAD). After 30 years, their loans will be forgiven.
But while, on the surface, this might seem to protect students, the plan contains some extremely regressive elements. The first is that the government will likely be implementing some “early payment options” – that is, allowing students (who have the funds) to pay their loans back sooner at a high discount. This system exists in Australia, and results in students from wealthy families paying significantly less than their peers.
Moreover, by the government’s own estimates, approximately 30 per cent of students will never make enough money to pay back their loans in full. This point cannot be stressed enough: One in three graduates from the U.K. system of public higher education would experience a lifetime of debt if the forgiveness option were not implemented. Some would argue that 30 years of debt is comparable to a lifetime, since those 30 years would, in most cases, take place within an individual’s prime working years.
Wondering what we can do to improve Canadian education? Find out here.
The U.K. government’s fundamental mistake was assuming that university education could operate according to free-market economics. In fact, universities possess a number of features that have rendered them notoriously resilient to market forces. An abundant supply of students (“customers”) and an unquantifiable, but highly valuable, product are just two such features. This resilience has resulted in the spectacular failure of the government’s predictions. Now, the government is attempting to force the market onto higher education through a number of hasty measures, including lifting the enrolment cap for institutions that are able to attract top students, or that charge less than £7,500.
There is little evidence to suggest that these measures will do anything to improve the quality, or reduce the cost, of the educational experience. In fact, many faculty and administrative groups protest that the cuts will force them to drastically reduce the depth and breadth of the courses they offer.
While we might think that these so-called reforms are unlikely to come to pass in Canada, it may not be so outlandish a possibility. At the heart of the U.K. reforms is a decline in public support for universities. It has been well-documented that government support in most Canadian provinces has declined while student tuition has increased. Here in Ontario, student contributions to university operating budgets have risen dramatically since 1988: from 19 to 43 per cent. In fact, for many institutions, students now contribute more to the operating budget than the government does.
Justifications for this trend have varied over time: At first, it was argued that a cash-strapped government could not afford further investment in post-secondary education, and was asking students and their families to pitch in so that universities could continue to offer high-quality education. But the language began to shift in the 1990s, reflecting a focus on the individual economic returns for attending post-secondary education. For students, despite the tuition increases, the return on investment for attending university will still be higher than if they opted to forego the time and monetary expense of post-secondary education and simply join the workforce straight out of high school.
One need only apply this same mode of thinking to high-school education to reveal its absurdity. High-school graduates can expect to earn, on average, a third more in annual salary than those who drop out. So, if governments were to reduce investment in high-school education and levy user fees against students – perhaps supplemented with a system of loans to ensure accessibility for low-income students – it would still be worth the investment to attend high school. But, with the exception of some political extremists, no one is advocating for the privatization of secondary school.
Can academic freedom survive intimidation from journalists and politicians? Read about one student’s experience here.
If we who value an accessible, high-quality, and public system of post-secondary education do not act now to denounce the privatization scheme in the U.K., it is conceivable that Canada’s provinces could head in a similar direction. The shifting of the cost from the public to the student is neither necessary nor inevitable. Governments possess the means to increase their revenue base or prioritize spending in order to invest in post-secondary education and reduce up-front costs for students. A number of polls indicate that the majority of Canadians are willing to pay more in taxes to increase spending on post-secondary education.
Considering the overwhelming economic and social returns for society at large, ensuring equitable access to post-secondary education should be a no-brainer for governments of all political stripes. As five Canadian provinces head into elections this fall, we’re about to find out if our politicians agree.
Origin
Source: the Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment