Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100 .5 FM in the lower mainland. Today, Laurentianism speaks with Grace Barakat about tuition fee hikes in Canada and the widening gap between those who can afford post -secondary education and those who can't.
Speaker: Getting a college or university education has been framed as the great equalizer, but now there's a rapid increase in Canadian university tuition fees, which throws up a barrier that threatens to widen the gap between privileged students and disadvantaged students. Grace Barakat is a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology at York University.
Speaker: And she joins us to help us understand how changes in the cost of tuition are having an impact on Canadian students and their futures. Hello, Grace. Hi. It's really good to have you with us today. Thank you for having me. Before we delve into this problem, let me ask you to lay a bit of groundwork for us. What are the forces that are creating a funding gap and driving provinces to allow increases in tuition fees?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, you know, we have seen over time, especially in the 90s, we've encountered a lot of austerity cuts to public services, including education, amongst other things. So we've seen, you know, an increase in cuts to many of these fundamental services that we require.
Speaker: here in Canada, and we've also seen an ideological shift towards neoliberalism and everything that sort of encompasses it as well. So we have seen the government of Canada sort of divest in funding from education over time, and we begin to feel those cuts more and more as provincial governments
Speaker: who ultimately have control of the funding get to dictate how much post -secondary education receives yearly. So it has a lot to do with that ideological shift and those austerity cuts. Now, I want to delve a little bit into the regulation of tuition fees in Ontario specifically. How did that change at the end of the 90s and then become a
Speaker: of a benchmark for current tuition differences several years later. Yeah. So the tuition differentiation, which we refer to it that as now, it was referred to as additional cost recovery, and that was what the policy was when it was created in 1998. So
Speaker: That policy was created in May of 1998 after years of pressure from universities. The provincial government of Ontario decided to deregulate tuition fees for some first and second degree programs. Now, international tuition fees, those were deregulated in 1996. And so domestic tuition fees were deregulated in 1998 for some programs. So not for all, just for programs that were classified as additional cost recovery.
Speaker: Now, they're classified now as professional programs, and that changed in 2006. But under this policy, universities and colleges were given the autonomy to set their own tuition fees for programs that qualified as additional cost recovery.
Speaker: And if you're wondering what those programs are or how they sort of are defined, there are programs that are considered costly to operate, are in high demand, and or are assumed to provide high earning employment post -graduation.
Speaker: What would be an example of some of the programs that might fall into that category of additional cost recovery? And what would a typical different tuition be? Yeah, of course. So programs that folks would recognize, there are commerce and business administration programs,
Speaker: computer and information sciences, architecture, and engineering. You know, those are considered professional programs at the undergraduate level. There's different programs when we're looking at graduate programs that we're not going to be looking at that today. And regulated programs are everything else. So think about humanity programs and, you know, social sciences and education and visual and performing arts programs.
Speaker: And really depending on the program, you'll see that some programs are quite higher than others. But when we're looking at regulated programs here in Ontario, there are somewhere around $6 ,000 annually for tuition. And when you look at professional programs,
Speaker: The average is usually somewhere around ten thousand eleven thousand but some of the commerce programs can cost close to sixteen thousand dollars and that's per year and that's only for tuition so there can be quite a big difference in terms of price. Those are some big differences yeah.
Speaker: What evidence is there that this has created a barrier that perpetuates inequalities? Right. So I do want to be quite clear. The work that I've done and actually other work that's been done on this particular topic, we can't say for sure that this particular phenomenon of the increase of tuition specifically is responsible for
Speaker: enrollment patterns or for disadvantaged students being left out of these costly programs, but we do know that it is one of many barriers. And so the research that I've done, I examine the student body or the student demographics of those that are enrolled in first degree professional programs, and I compared it to those who are enrolled in regulated programs using the National Graduate Survey here in Canada.
Speaker: I looked at both Ontario and nationally at Canadian students. So we do know that affluent students or students with affluent backgrounds are more likely to be enrolled in those programs, but we can't exclusively tie it to high tuition fees.
Speaker: Well, I guess my thought would be that this tuition barrier probably interacts with or exacerbates other structural barriers for people trying to get a post -secondary education, thinking of race, class, whether you're a parent or not. Do you think that's true?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely. In this particular study, you know, I looked at plethora of social markers. So I looked at race and gender and status, you know, whether someone was Canadian born and parental education as well. So all of those things definitely influence
Speaker: the likelihood of someone being enrolled in a professional or a regulated program. And in this particular study, we did find that the odds of enrollment for professional programs were higher for self -funded students, so those that are not relying on student loans, for non -racialized Canadian -born men with high levels of parental education.
Speaker: And parental education has become a very well -known barrier when we talk about access to post -secondary education. Some actually say it's the strongest predictor of whether or not a student will enroll in university or college. So your parents' education really does matter. If your parents went to university, the odds of you enrolling and going to university and college increase significantly.
Speaker: That's so interesting. Do we know what the mechanism is there that might
Speaker: make that true? Yeah. So I think, again, when we look at parental education, we think about whether someone's parents were able or had the privilege to attend a post -secondary education. We often don't think of all the barriers that allow someone to get there, right? So even when we talk about parental education, we also have to talk about someone's upbringing and their family life and their environment and their previous schooling and their language proficiency.
Speaker: and their geographic location and just a number of other factors that influence whether someone ends up going to pursue post -secondary education or not. But if you really think of parental education just as that specific factor, I think
Speaker: People are very much shaped by their environment and your parent figures have placed such a big role, not only in your development and socialization, but in your aspirations. When your parents went to school and you've seen them go through the system and succeed and they've had the resources and they know how to navigate the system, it does make it easier for you to access it as well because your parents will have the information that you require, will be able to push you and guide you in that process.
Speaker: If we look at this problem where these high tuition fees for these programs that then yield probably a better income, why should we care about the fact that this is creating more inequality?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question. You mentioned this earlier when you said post -secondary education is often framed as the great equalizer. I mean, we can have a separate conversation on the function and the role of education in Canada, but we won't get into that today. But a lot of us do believe that education is a space where when you enter,
Speaker: you have the opportunity to experience intergenerational or upward social mobility, right? You have the potential to move up in the world. And that has a potential to mitigate some of these social inequities. But the problem is when students that come from affluent backgrounds, if they're the ones enrolled or more likely to be enrolled in professional programs, right, we're actually in a way
Speaker: reproducing the status quo and maintaining these class structures, because these professional programs not only lead to employment with higher income, but they also tend to lead to more prestigious employment and positions of power. So we're sort of seeing some of these inequities being reproduced.
Speaker: through the education system, which is extremely problematic, especially since it's been crafted as, again, as this space that sort of has the potential to eliminate some of those inequities.
Speaker: How can we start to solve this problem? How can it be fixed? Yeah, that's another great question. So of course, the elimination of tuition fees in general would just remove that financial barrier that stops lots of low income or students with low parental education levels to enter the system and to have an opportunity to get the education they need to form a stronger population.
Speaker: But I think one of the major issues is that when we talk about post -secondary education, when we talk about what programs students enter and why they don't or why they do enroll, we usually start at the post -secondary level. So we're starting the conversation at the level of why are students either not enrolling in universities or colleges or what happens when they do enroll.
Speaker: What we should be doing is starting that conversation much earlier. We have to understand the importance of resources and support systems and environment and previous education and how they can impact someone's post -secondary education journey. You know, some students have access to tutors, to higher quality schools, to safe neighborhoods, to parents with strong language and academic skills, and others don't.
Speaker: And so for so many, you know, for these reasons and so many others, we shouldn't ignore the fact that this journey starts well before the post -secondary level. So we should be having more programs available for struggling students in the elementary and high school levels, more targeted programs. And we should just really be starting these conversations, not at the higher education level, but we should start lower. So primary, elementary and high schools.
Speaker: Previously, there wasn't this differentiation between regular programs and what's now called professional programs. Is there a way through funding mechanisms that this can be leveled?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what we should be doing is we shouldn't have much higher tuition fees for these professional programs. We should be trying and actively trying to level the playing field by setting them at the same rate, by not creating a hierarchy of programs and pricing them as such.
Speaker: I think that by removing tuition differentiation and keeping the cost of professional programs consistent with those of regulated programs, it removes, again, that additional financial barrier that's placed on disadvantaged students. And that can be done in many ways. We can have the provincial government give more funding to institutions. And we do recognize that professional programs can be more costly to operate, just because some programs require more equipment and more labs.
Speaker: But again, I do think that we can redistribute the existing funds to ensure that these programs, these professional programs are priced consistent with those of regulated programs. Finally, I want to circle back to something that you just touched on, but should we be actually questioning our very assumption and make an argument for eliminating tuition altogether?
Speaker: Absolutely. It's interesting because I've had this conversation with so many different people. And it's interesting to hear the argument that if people are making an investment in education, they're making an investment in themselves. And they should have to pay for it, whether it's self -funded through their family's resources or however they're paying for it, or whether it's through loans and grants and financial assistance from the government.
Speaker: But I think what people don't understand is that when we have tuition on education, first of all, we are assuming that everyone that goes through the system and graduates and gets a degree experiences the same return on that degree. We know that regardless of whether you have post -secondary education or not, you are going to face
Speaker: various forms of discrimination and biases based on your gender, your race, your class, your religion, your sexuality, your ability, just a plethora of social markers. So even by having tuition fees, we're actually failing to take into account that not everyone experiences the same return on this, that even the labor market is so precarious and insecure, it's very difficult to find well -paying jobs.
Speaker: And so the price actually varies based on the person that's making that investment. When we remove tuition fees, we're making it easier, especially for those who are part of vulnerable groups, to have an opportunity to really
Speaker: you know, have long term financial and social success. So eliminating that just makes it easier for people. And we know that times are difficult. You know, it's not easy to make it out there. So just having education be affordable and accessible and publicly funded, it's only going to benefit your society. Well, thanks so much for talking with us about this this morning, Grace. I really appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Grace Barakat. She's a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto.
