What a way to start the year. The first sight that greeted many returning students was that of striking MUNACA workers picketing outside the major entrances to campus. The general strike means that many students are facing reduced services across the university. While the strike will hopefully have only temporary effects on McGill students, it can be traced back to the root cause of so many of the issues we’ve faced over the past few years: McGill’s ongoing budget crisis.
The university is always quick to point to its fiscal struggles anytime these issues come up. And it has a point. Despite all the budget tightening, the university faces another large operating deficit this year, projected at $6 million. McGill has to meet its obligations in a tight fiscal straightjacket, and the pain needs to be spread around. MUNACA employees receive a generous benefits package, and given the university’s fiscal situation, modest benefit cuts as part of a final deal seems like a reasonable outcome.
Cuts to MUNACA employees’ benefits alone won’t come anywhere near solving the problem. The biggest factor contributing to the McGill’s fiscal crisis is the underfunding of Quebec universities, and one can’t talk about underfunding without talking about tuition. The Quebec government’s decision to decrease provincial funding for universities while preventing them from raising tuition has been the driving factor behind the problem. The provincial government is in a serious fiscal mess of its own, and shifting the responsibility for funding the province’s universities away from the government is an understandable move. In this context, rising tuition seems an inevitability, and it’s time for students, especially those student associations that have been fighting a losing battle for years, to be realistic.
Tuition in Quebec is not going to be eliminated. Almost everyone accepts that students will have to contribute to making up the funding gap. It would be one thing if students saw no benefits from increased tuition, but we’ve already seen and felt the effects of the alternative: increased enrolment leading to booming class sizes, conferences cut from classes, and much more. In short, students have suffered because of the university’s fiscal troubles, and it’s reasonable to assume that increasing the university’s revenue would significantly improve the student experience at McGill.
Of course increasing tuition could affect accessibility in a worrying way. Yet the solution is not to push for a model in which every student’s education is heavily subsidized, regardless of whether he/she can afford it, while allowing the quality of that education to fall further. Instead, we should push for a model in which part of the revenue from increased tuition is used to subsidize the education of low-income students, thereby protecting both accessibility and quality. The provincial government has already taken steps in this direction: its budget for 2011-12 allows for annual tuition increases of $325 for five years beginning in 2012, while stipulating that around a third of the revenue raised this way go toward bursaries for low-income students. Meanwhile, McGill has committed to spending 30 per cent of new tuition revenue on student support.
In the end, students will have to bear some of the costs of closing the funding gap, and increased tuition has to be part of the solution. Students should accept this and focus lobbying efforts on ensuring that part of the extra revenue is used to support those who actually need subsidized education, instead of focusing on the fantasy of tuition elimination. In the end, we have to remember that a university degree is an investment. A degree from McGill still significantly increases one’s future earning potential, but if we let things continue as they are, that may cease to be the case.
