CFS: Protectors of the privileged

Reducing tuition fees only helps the rich

ALEX USHER EDUCATIONAL POLICY INSTITUTE/ SPECIAL TO CANADIAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

TORONTO (CUP) — There is today a movement on dozens of Canadian campuses which, through the guise of “helping students” seeks to give billions in public subsidies to the scions of above-average income families. This movement sneeringly derides grass-roots innovative inner-city educational programs such as Toronto’s Regent’s Park Pathways to Education or Winnipeg’s Career Trek that aim to reduce the well-documented educational gaps between rich and poor youth at the high school level. It also opposes increased education cash transfers to low-income infants on the grounds that nothing should stand in the way of a multi-billion transfer to the affluent. The irony is that although this movement’s policies sounds like those of a cartoon plutocrat, it has survived for 25 years by posing as the vanguard of the radical left, not the radical right. The movement’s name is the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and its obscenely regressive policy is called “reduce tuition.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Stop and think for a moment: who really wins from reduced tuition? If you said “high-need” or “low-income” students, you’d be wrong. They are already the beneficiaries of over a billion dollars in need-based grants. If tuition were reduced, their grants would likely be reduced by an equivalent amount and they’d come out more or less even. Some might gain, but none would derive the full benefit of the tuition reduction. Indeed, when the value of lost tax credits are taken into account, a reduction in tuition might actually leave some low-income students worse off.

In fact, the full benefit of a tuition reduction only goes to people who don’t have benefits that can be clawed back: that is, students from wealthier families. For them, every dollar tuition is reduced is pure gain. Yet, students from wealthier families are already over-represented in post-secondary education, so even before taking into account that higher income youth are more likely to get into university than lower-income youth, tuition reduction policies provide more benefit to the rich than they do to the poor.

It gets worse. Take, for instance, CFS’s recent tussles in Ontario. Following the recommendations of the Rae review, the Government of Ontario recently allowed tuition to rise by several hundred dollars. At the same time, it increased loan remission spending substantially, to ensure that anyone with over $7,000 per year in loans effectively would see any extra borrowing due to increased tuition automatically forgiven. In addition, it set aside tens of millions of dollars in new bursaries specifically to give to people from students from families with below-median incomes.

At the end of the day, students from poorer families were either not affected by the new policy or actually better off than they were before. Only students from wealthier families were worse off. The policy’s results speak for themselves: applications to Ontario universities have continued to rise steadily, suggesting that no new barriers to education have arisen as a result of this policy.

A real left-wing movement might see this as progressive social policy. The Canadian Federation of Students, on the other hand, chose to denounce this policy and use it as an excuse for a series of protests. Apparently, the lure of street theatre was more powerful than the desire to support policies that would actually help low-income students.

It’s not as though the CFS leadership doesn’t understand how little effect tuition has on access to education. They know that Nova Scotia, with the country’s highest tuition, has participation rates nearly double those of Quebec, with the country’s lowest tuition. They know that countries with free tuition tend to have smaller and less egalitarian student bodies than does Canada. They have certainly read a recent research piece by Marc Frenette of Statistics Canada (an author frequently quoted by the CFS) that over 80 per cent of the difference in university access rates between rich and poor students can be attributed to social and academic factors rather than financial ones.

In short, they must understand perfectly well that reducing tuition would attract very few new poor students into the system and that the billions of dollars required to eliminate tuition would accrue mainly to wealthier students who are already in the system.

When pressed for evidence that their policies have even a shred of merit, CFS clings to a series of studies from the United States which they claim show that lower tuition is disproportionately beneficial to lower-income students.

Unfortunately for them, none of these studies actually refer to the effects of tuition alone, instead, they look at the effects of “net tuition” (i.e. tuition minus grants). It turns out that while low-income students certainly benefit from having lower net costs, this goal can be achieved as effectively though targeted grants as it can through tuition reductions.

Now, given a choice between helping below-median income students with a well-funded and well-targeted grant program that delivers money precisely to those who need it most, or a blanket tuition reduction program where the majority of funds go to students from better-off families, I’m pretty sure most students would choose the former, more progressive option.

So why does the self-styled “voice of the students” continues to choose the option which so clearly protects the interests of the privileged? And why do their members allow them to promote such policies in their name?

Alex Usher is vice-president of the Educational Policy Institute, a research organization specializing in education policy with offices in the U.S., Canada and Australia.