Ongoing tuition debate misses the point

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As fall classed begin at post-secondary institutions across the country this week, the local and national media is rife with stories about the skyrocketing cost of education in Canada. Oft-cited in these alarmist news items is a report released last week by Statistics Canada, which claims that Canadian undergrads will pay an average of $4 347 in tuition fees this year, up from $4 211 in 2005 and almost triple the 1990 average of $1 464. Tuition for a typical undergraduate at the University of Alberta this year runs $4 536, among the highest in the nation. These numbers don’t include the myriad student fees universities also charge their students, not to mention books, school supplies and lab materials (and, you know, food and clothing and shelter, too).

Student advocacy groups, including the U of A’s Students’ Union, are sounding the alarm about the increasing lack of affordability of post-secondary education, arguing for, according to their press release, “a substantial and real tuition rollback” (their advocacy campaign last year sported the cheeky title “Roll it back, Ralph!”). Currently, the Government of Alberta has “frozen” tuition, which means that the province’s university and college students have paid the same tuition rate since 2004. Before that, institutions were only allowed to raise tuition by a maximum of 3 per cent per year; the U of A implemented the maximum increase every time it had the chance, despite vigorous opposition from the SU.

Vigorous, yes, but not exactly popular or widespread. Attendance at SU-organized tuition protests at the U of A tends to run the gamut from mediocre to downright pathetic, and while event organizers usually trot out predictable excuses—bad weather, lack of media attention, students not willing to skip class (yeah, I’m sure that’s it)—it’s becoming pretty apparent that the average university student frankly doesn’t really care that much.

But, how can that be? Aren’t all university students starving, near destitute, barely scraping by, looking for any way to get their costs reduced by even a miniscule amount?

Well, no, not really. The stereotype of the starving student has become, at least on the campus of the U of A, largely outdated. While the SU and other advocacy groups issue dire warnings that post-secondary education will soon become too expensive for the working and lower classes, they’re already too late. Broadly speaking, university education is now almost exclusively the domain of the upper middle class. Despite outgoing Premier Ralph Klein’s 2005 proclamation that his government “will do whatever it takes to make sure money isn’t a barrier to attending Alberta’s post-secondary institutions,” a university education hasn’t been within reach for disadvantaged Albertans for nearly a decade or so.

Defenders of current policies point to the government-administered student loan and bursary program as a way of making post-secondary education accessible, but anyone who’s ever dealt with the system knows that it’s unnecessarily complicated and is heavily biased towards “traditional” families (a prospective student’s parents’ income is taken into account as an “asset,” even if the applicant is an adult living away from home, for example). The bulk of government subsidy to the tuition costs of individuals comes in the form of tax rebates on tuition, but low-income families don’t pay much tax to begin with, so by definition tax rebates only favour the middle class.

The reality is, even if university was completely free, many Albertans would still struggle to afford a university education, thanks to the high costs of living in Alberta and the difficulty of finding a job flexible enough to work around full-time school, even in this hot employment market. Government’s and student advocates’ talk of accessibility and universality rings hollow: it’s time to accept that, more so than intelligence or work ethic or achievement, social class is the real determiner of who has access to post-secondary education in Alberta, and simply reducing tuition a few percentage points won’t even begin to change that. V

Ongoing tuition debate misses the point

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