Well, the tuition freeze (or soon to be lack thereof) is all over the news these days. The media narrative seems to be that in a magnimonious gesture, Gary Doer gifted students with a wonderful tuition freeze upon getting elected. This tuition freeze promptly deprived those poor university administrators of their hard-earned money and thus turned our once-great universities into decrepit hell-holes where students can’t possibly learn anything. This continued for ten years until the government hired designated smart person and so-called neutral party Ben Levin (at least it’s not Alex Usher) who looked at all the data and released a wonderful report which recommended what business groups and those honourable journalists in the Winnipeg Free Press have been saying for years: the tuition freeze has got to go to make way for better and more efficient systems of bursaries and targeted aid. Our dear leader Gary doer then did the logical thing and followed the advice of the smart guy, and was only opposed by a bunch of ungrateul whiny grumpypantses* in the student unions.
Given what we all know about corporate media, it is not surprising that their constructed narrative is a reflection of elite opinion and has only a superficial basis in reality. In fact, the campaign against the tuition freeze is almost completely media-driven. And when we’re looking at a guy like Gary Doer as premier who seems to avoid doing anything that might be perceived as unpopular by anyone, the media has a disproportionate sway over the government’s decision, more so than the eighty-something percent of Manitobans who support the tuition freeze.
History of the Freeze
One of the first acts of the new government was to implement a tuition freeze, essentially a promise that tuition fees for colleges and universities will not increase. This was coupled with a 10% tuition reduction program which effectively reduces fees by 10%. However, this program does not appear to be a permanent reduction in the base tuition, but rather some sort of transfer which appears in the fine print of all our fee statements. This is so the tuition fee reductions do not appear to be permanent reductions but rather a program which can be scrapped at will. Thus it makes way for another potential loophole in the tuition freeze: the program can be reduced or eliminated at any time and it may not be considered a violation of the freeze even though any reduction or elimination of the program is a tuition increase in all but name.
It is important to note here that a tuition freeze, especially one with as many loopholes as the Manitoba tuition freeze, is not actually a gift to students. Promising to keep tuition levels the same is not the same as actually doing something to lower or eliminate tuition. It’s a preservation of the status quo, and something which should garner no more than lukewarm support in the student movement. While the political right and the uninformed-trying-to-sound-reasonable may whine over inflation, any decrease due to inflation has been balanced out by increases in ancillary fees; ancillary fees that even the NDP government’s own designated smart guy Ben Levin agrees is no different than tuition. And the gut position often taken by the only slightly informed that tuition should increase in proportion to inflation is one which accepts the patently false and ridiculous notion that the actual value of tuition must never be allowed to decrease and should remain at the arbitrary level of whatever Filmon left it it when he was finally shown the door. There is no reason why user fees for something as important as education can’t be reduced.
And no history of the late tuition freeze would be complete without mentioning the “student supported” massive tuition increases targeted at certain faculties. These range from 38% in my home faculty of engineering to 92% in law. As a student who had the unfortunate experience of facing one of these referenda, I can attest to the fact that these are hardly student initiatives and seem to have been part of a divide and conquer strategy to increase tuition and allow university administrators and other pro-increase factions to score a propaganda coup. Upper class students in faculty societies are easily won over and the remainder are threatened with declining quality of education and reduced potential for future employment if the tuition increases are not supported. A threatening atmosphere is cultivated for those who oppose tuition increases. During the engineering tuition referendum of 2007, the “No” side had our banners slashed with knives on an almost daily basis and I was told personally that I shouldn’t be in engineering and that I needed to get my ass kicked. The entire referendum process was clearly orchestrated to give maximum advantage to the pro-increase side, who were then lauded in right-wing media outlets across Canada as model students fighting for a better education. Essentally, we could tell which side was supposed to win and it wasn’t us.
And it is also important to mention the international student differential fees which the Doer government allowed universities to implement. These fees effectively raise tuition fees for international students to up to 230% on top of what Canadian students pay for the exact same classes. The economic justification for these extra fees is simply not there; the only reason these fees have been allowed to be implemented by greedy university administrators is that international students do not have the same political power due to racist and nativist sentiments in society. And for the sake of brevity, let us not even get into the recent plans to privatize education for international students at the University of Manitoba.
In the 2007 election, the NDP promised to extend the tuition freeze for the next four years, while the Liberals promised to increase it by five percent per year, and the Tories promised some sort of “independent” commission to decide on the future of tuition rates. This commission proposal was rightly criticized during the election, as was their constant flip-flopping between the proposed commission and tuition increases.
Skip ahead one year, and it is the NDP flip-flopping all over the map on tuition and proposing a commission to sort it out. Former English professor and Minister of Advanced Education and Literacy Diane McGifford’s linguistic contortions around the meaning of the word “extend” in NDP campaign materials left over from the 2007 election seved to highlight the inconsistency of the NDP’s policies on post-secondary education.
Before even announcing the commission, the provincial government had been hinting at tuition increases for a week. In that week, student unions mobilized a low-key letter writing campaign that undoubtedly forced the provincial government to extend the freeze for a year and retreat behind a commission. Given that the provincial government had already hinted at increasing tuition, one can only conclude that the conclusions to the Levin commission were pre-determined. The commission failed to consult with civil society groups such as labour and anti-poverty organizations, but lent an ear to the business groups which have been campaigning against the freeze in the media for years. The role of the commission was clearly not to impartially evaluate tuition fees, but to provide support to the agenda of the provincial government and redirect the responsibility for the elimination of a popular policy onto a supposedly independent commission.
In light of the background to the commission, the recommendations are no surprise. There are a few good recommendations in the commission report such as increasing the minimum wage and providing student financial assistance, however the thrust of the report is to call for tuition increases of five percent per year. The irony is that the NDP managed to fulfill both the Liberal and Tory promises for education but not their own.
But, lucky for us, the NDP decided to be nice to students and only burden us with a 4.5% tuition increase next year. I guess they figured we would see the 0.5% difference from the recommendations in the report as a gift rather than see the 4.5% increase for what it is: an attack on students. In addition to the report from the commission, the funding for the 10% tuition reduction program mentioned above has been completely eliminated from the 2009 budget. This means that in addition to the 4.5% tuition increase, the elimination of this program will be an effective increase of 11%, for a total of 15.5%. And this is in the first year only; I’m predicting that we will be seeing these 4-5% increases in tuition on an annual basis. So much for Peter Bjornson’s promise after the last Day of Action that “the rate of tuition increase would not be allowed to reach double digits.”
Another Education System Is Possible
So, what are the alternatives? Conventional wisdom dictates that a universal system of post-secondary education is simply too expensive and that while in theory, the elimination of user fees is a noble goal, it is simply unattainable and the Doer government is doing the best they can. We should file the dream of universal post-secondary education under unrealistic utopias we can only dream of along with rapid transit for Winnipeg, socialism, the Cooperative Commonwealth, and free healthcare. Wait, we actually got that last one…
Fortunately, this little piece of “conventional wisdom” has no basis in reality. Many countries are able to afford universal post-secondary education without user fees. And Cuba, a country with less than an eighth of Canada’s GDP per capita, manages to not only have free post-secondary education, but manages to educate enough doctors to build a strong national healthcare system and deliver healthcare to poor people around the world. It is not a question of resources, but rather a question of priorities. Sadly, the priorities of the Doer government lie with giving out corporate tax cuts and tax cuts which benefit primarily the rich. The money eliminated from the budget over the years by Doer’s tax cuts could have paid for universal post-secondary education many times over.
This whole talk about limited resources brings to mind another false argument against reducing or eliminating tuition: the false progressive argument that a system of high tuition and bursaries for the poor is a more efficient and progressive system. This agrument is specifically crafted to trick people on the left into supporting tuition increases by convincing them that low tuition is subsidizing only the rich. However, according to economist Hugh McKenzie at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, subsidized tuition is a net transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor as lower income families as a whole pay less into the system via progressive taxation than they take out through university attendance. Lower income families do benefit from subsidized tuition and will only have more opportunities to benefit if regressive barriers to education such as tuition fees are removed. Contrary to the classist claims of the right, it is not because poor people do not recognize the value of education that they do not attend university at the same rate as the upper class, it is because poor people have more financial difficulties preventing them from attending university.
It is tuition fees themselves which are regressive because they are essentially a flat dollar value which makes up a greater proportion of the incomes of lower income families. Any proposal to increase tuition must be seen for what it really is: a ploy by the forces of capital to foist more of the cost of the reproduction of labour onto the backs of the working class. The class motivations behind the ideology of higher tuition becomes abundantly clear when the Doer government one day cuts $100 million in corporate taxes and the next increases the cost of education for working class students.
So, we can see that increasing user fees for post-secondary education is not the only option and not the best option. And in these tough economic times when people are facing the spectre of unemployment and over 70% of new jobs being created require some form of post-secondary education, does it really make sense to be increasing financial barriers to this education? I believe very strongly that education, like healthcare, is a social right and not an economic privelege. Ergo, the only rational and humane system is a universal system of post-secondary education free of user fees, with provisions for whatever grants or living allowances which would be necessary to allow even the most disadvantaged of society to have the opportunity to experience the benefits of a mentally emancipating education. Perhaps this is an idealist dream which won’t come to fruition anytime soon, but so was healthcare and a lot of other social programs that we take for granted.
Well, I think that’s about enough for today. I’ve given an overview of the history of the tuition freeze and explained why it is an inadequate policy to begin with, how it has been under attack over the past few years and what students will be facing in the future. I plan to revisit this issue in the future to discuss strategies and tactics to build a strong student movement which can resist the attacks by the forces of capital on our educational system and start fighting back against the neoliberal attacks on our education system by governments of all political stripes.
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