Note: this is a response to an article in the National Post. It might be worth a read for context; it’s short, I promise.
In a recent article in the National Post, Andrew Coyne frames the perpetual debate about tuition in higher education as a problem of cash-flow, rather than total cost. He argues that students should pay the entirety of their tuition, but rather than requiring an upfront payment, they would be fronted the money in exchange for a stake in their life earnings.
Sounds fair, doesn’t it. Sounds kind of familiar too. That’s because Coyne is essentially advocating increased income tax.
Canada’s problem with socialism
Canada has always been stuck between the European socialist model and the American hyper-capitalist (i.e. privatized) model. There are limitless reasons for such a rock-and-hard-place dilemma, not least of which are simple geography and economic history. What the Canadian system amounts to though, is a general uneasiness with absolute socialism or absolute privatization. Along with this middle-of-the-road system, however, comes some unfortunate inefficiency. We run our higher education system as a private enterprise where universities are completely independent from government; except the government provides half of the university’s funding. This results, as Coyne recognizes, in sub-par teaching, since students are not paying the full amount of their cost:
“When universities depend on students, rather than governments, for the greater part of their revenues, they will devote a lot more energy and resources to their core mission — teaching students — than they do now”.
In the American system, students pay the full cost of their tuition and the system responds to the demands of students much more like a business. In most of western Europe, where education is free, or essentially free, the government pays for everything, but maintains significant control over curriculum and decisions at the university level. In Canada, students are getting the worst of both worlds; they have little control over decisions made by universities, but have to pay significant tuition costs.
This uneasiness with socialism is implicit in Coyne’s article. He can’t even recognize that the system he is advocating is essentially what European countries have done forever. Getting students to pay back the cost of tuition over their lives with payment amounts geared to income is the same as graduated income tax. Unsurprisingly European socialist countries (Scandinavians, France, Austria etc.) have higher tax rates, especially for the wealthy. Coyne feels the need to frame a socialist manifesto for education in individualistic terms (i.e. you’re paying back what you were given). But that’s in essence no different than the tax method (i.e. we’ll pay for your education now, but you have to pay for others’ education later). It’s a silly game of semantics so Coyne can avoid scathing critiques because people hate the word socialism.
In a weird turn of argument, Coyne then uses student dedication to back up his argument for what is commonly called in Canada “free education”:
“Conversely, students who are paying full freight will devote a good deal more time and attention to getting the most out of the experience than, for example, I did.”
Without any evidence, I fail to see the link between knowledge that students will be responsible for paying back the cost of tuition later in life and dedication while in university.
Why a socialist model?
Fairness, equality, individual decisional autonomy, efficiency etc. Though Coyne argues that the decision to attend university is based mostly on other factors such as familial background, removing present economic barriers to education certainly wouldn’t make the system less fair or equal. And, to make a conservative argument amongst all this rampant liberalism, people would be able to choose freely between higher education and the myriad other options that exist.
A socialist education system is a good idea is for quality of education. Right now scholastic standards vary wildly between universities and a focus continues to be on research over teaching. Funding the education system entirely through government would allow greater control over the curriculum and hiring process. A public system could also allow students to really discover what they want to do without having to worry about incurring the debt of one or two more years. This could increase job retention rates and decrease systemically expensive and inefficient job search times.
None of this, however, is a commentary on the underlying value of higher education. The question of whether increasing rates of higher education attendance is actually a good idea. Can an economy really function entirely on knowledge? But those are questions for another day.
