Unlike some students at McGill, I have been largely satisfied with Heather Munroe-Blum as our Principal. Her administration has brought common sense and innovation to a university defined by bureaucracy and hierarchy. The recent creation of the Service Point, for example, is a welcome change.
More than her peers, Munroe-Blum has advocated strongly for tuition reform in Quebec. She lobbied aggresively for this in McGill’s recent report to the Quebec National Assembly, and she has been taking flak for the decision, which however was made correctly, and has been a long time coming.
Quebec has simply never had a sustainable tuition model. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the state eventually runs out of other people’s money. A financial double-edged sword threatens McGill’s potential—a government whose contribution is consistently weak, and also students’ demands that tuition rates be frozen at artificially low levels.
The Quebec model is loved within this province, and despised in the rest of Canada. This is because it is paid for, in part, by the nearly $8 billion in equalization payments that flow to Quebec City from Ottawa every year.
There is no solid evidence that the Quebec model improves education. In fact, Quebec lags behind Canada for proportions of young people holding a university degree. Quebec’s graduation rate lies well below the OECD average. Meanwhile, Quebec has had the lowest rate of increase of those holding degrees in the entirety of Canada since 1992.
At the expense of quality, infrastructure, and competitiveness, Quebec’s universities have suffered from obscenely low tuition rates that don’t even serve their intended purpose of improving access to post-secondary education.
The problem is only compounded by the grant system; at least, what can barely be described as a grant system. While Quebec falls safely in the middle of Canadian provinces in terms of general operating grants per student, it does not compensate for artificially low tuition. The result is that Quebec falls chronically below the funding per student of nearly all other North American jurisdictions.
The Quebec model is dying, and will probably not survive the deficit cutting that will define government legislation for the foreseeable future.
I would never argue for the American tuition model. Munroe-Blum is certainly not making that argument. Her suggestion is reasonable: raise tuition to the Canadian average, where more students are going to school despite the increased cost of education. By increased cost, I do not mean to a level that will suddenly force low-income students out of university. That hasn’t happened in Ontario, Alberta, or British Columbia. It will not happen in Quebec. We must balance the affordability of our education with a simple reality: someone has to pay for it, and if we don’t, the government won’t either.
So I give this message to Munroe-Blum: soldier on. You are rattling sabres that other Quebec universities refuse to. In the end, it will give this university the resources it needs to achieve its potential. These are sabres that need to be rattled.
