Federal transfers leave Nova Scotia universities behind
SPENCER KEYS
HALIFAX — It’s a little known fact of post-secondary education that government transfers for universities are distributed on a per-capita basis (i.e. the number of people that live in a province) rather than on a per-student basis (i.e. the number of people studying in a province). For years this has left provinces like Nova Scotia footing the bill to pay for the cost of educating students from provinces with a net outflow of students — specifically British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and P.E.I..
The costs are not insignificant. Nova Scotia educates approximately 40,000 students in its universities, which is 4,800 more than the number of university-aged residents living in the province. Nova Scotia’s universities pay for the costs of these students through tuition and thinly distributed government grants across spaces. For Nova Scotia this means that the university system has to find an additional $26 million to fund spaces that a) fall outside the natural capacity of the provincial tax base, and b) are not considered in the distribution of federal transfer payments. If the government of Nova Scotia did not have to pay for out-of-province students in 2002-03, tuition could have been reduced by $530 for every student without sacrificing quality. For the province where post-secondary education is the most expensive in the country, this is a real issue.
The argument is sometimes made that these out-of-province students pay for their education when they graduate and begin to contribute to the local economy. While that may be the case for Alberta and Ontario, it isn’t true for Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Quebec has a net outflow of 4.3 per cent of its university graduates and 17.1 per cent of New Brunswick’s university graduates leave upon graduation, which is far greater than the 521 extra students that come to New Brunswick each year. Nova Scotia is the worst off with 29.5 per cent of its university graduating class leaving the province in 2002-03.
What does this mean? Nova Scotia’s universities are in a crisis. Buildings are crumbling, grants for non-traditional students are almost non-existent, and tuition is the highest in the country. Of course, Nova Scotia should not be shutting its doors to out-of-province students or charging differential tuition fees like Quebec. Nova Scotia is not the only province that suffers from this issue and all that would result from that kind of reaction would be a decrease in educational mobility. Diverse student bodies expose students to a variety of different beliefs and perspectives that arguably have greater pedagogical benefits than some university courses. We genuinely like the environment that is created when so many students from across the country come to learn in Nova Scotia. The problem is the way the provincial and federal governments are currently distributing money.
The solution is to carve a Canada Education Transfer out of the Canada Social Transfer and distribute it on a per-student basis. That way funding would go to the place where the student is actually educated instead of simply the province where they’re from.
Education stakeholders across the country have been calling for a dedicated education transfer for years now. It’s one of the few areas where groups like CASA and the CFS are in full agreement. The Liberal Party has said they will create an education transfer on a per-student basis and this was recently rearticulated by Stéphane Dion in Halifax. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said time and time again that the education transfer will be included in the fiscal balance package that will likely comprise a significant part of the upcoming budget. Clearly something is likely to happen on this file in the near future and we are waiting to find out if the education transfer will become reality.
But Nova Scotian students still have cause to be worried. It is unclear how that money will be distributed and we may either see redress of a systemic inequality or we will see the entrenchment of it. Maybe Nova Scotian students will start to be proportionately funded but it is also possible that the Maritimes will once again be thrown under the bus of Canadian realpolitik. On behalf of Nova Scotia’s university students, it’s time that everybody starts getting their fair share.
Spencer Keys is executive director of the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations, which represents 33,000 university students in Nova Scotia.
