re: "Drop Fees"

A great piece in this week's Fulcrum (the University of Ottawa's student newspaper) regarding the Canadian Federation of Students "Day of Action for a Poverty-Free Ontario": Check it out.

Last week, my brother and I submitted this letter to the editor on the same subject:

YOU MIGHT HAVE seen them. All around campus and the surrounding area, blue and red posters have been taped to lampposts and mailboxes advertising the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) Day of Action for a Poverty-Free Ontario. On the poster, alongside an image of shouting students shaking their fists, is a wish list of reforms or initiatives the CFS would like to see undertaken by our government. Every item on the list, however, has at some point been adopted by some government across the world and been shown to be useless or, worse, counterproductive in reducing and ultimately eliminating poverty. For the purposes of this letter, I’d like to address the most prominent (and probably most popular) of these items: “reduced tuition fees.”

Thanks to the availability of student loans and bursaries, not to mention the amplitude of scholarships and grants, not a single prospective student in Ontario is too poor to attend college or university. Financial barriers to entry being negligible, significantly reduced tuition fees may very well do little more than expand on the all-too-prevalent notion of university as a four-year break from reality. After all, “what we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly.” In France, where a post-secondary education is “free” (that is, completely publicly funded), first-year dropout rates are among the highest in the world. Also, not a single French university ranks anywhere near the best internationally.

The fact is that an investment (especially through credit) in education at current tuition levels still provides an excellent return. Consider that the average salary for someone with a university degree is $58,767 per year—50 per cent greater than that of the average high-school graduate and 69 per cent greater than that of a high-school dropout. There is simply no reason why Canadians should shoulder an increased tax burden to fund the sweetening of an already great deal. If anything, the CFS might do better to petition philanthropists for additional performance-based scholarships rather than add to students’ inflated sense of entitlement.

An organization truly concerned with the elimination of poverty might have listed on their poster efforts congruent with the true poverty killer: economic growth. A rising tide does lift all boats. My list would include “free trade,” “supply-side tax cuts,” “stable monetary policy,” and other proven economic stimulants, but I guess that doesn’t sound as good yelled through a megaphone.