Free university tuition a bad idea: MEI

MEI report says policy doesn’t address issue of province’s graduation rates

Free tuition for higher education would be unsound public policy in Quebec, a Montreal think tank says in a new publication.

MEI said they hope the two-page report released Thursday will influence public debates on higher education before October’s provincial election.

The group aimed to put a dollar figure to the idea of free tuition in the province: “An extra $1.1 billion a year if applied solely to Quebec students, and $1.3 billion if extended to Canadian and foreign students,” the report says.

“Nothing is free. When we talk about free tuition, what we really say is that taxpayers will finance higher education, rather than students — who, by the way, are the ones who mostly benefit from this diploma,” said Alexandre Moreau, a public policy analyst with MEI who co-authored the report, in an interview with the Montreal Gazette.

“That group has been advocating against free tuition and against every kind of measure for more accessible education in Quebec for years now,” Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesperson for Québec solidaire who represented a student association during the 2012 Maple Spring protests.

Québec solidaire’s calculations for the cost of free tuition approximate MEI’s figures. But the price tag elicits a different reaction for Nadeau-Dubois.

“We think that any spending in education is, in fact, an investment in Quebec’s future,” Nadeau-Dubois said.

“Quebec has another problem: We have many students, but not so many graduates,” the MEI says. Free tuition does not address the problem of Quebec’s graduation rates, it says.

The researchers cite 2016 Statistics Canada data showing that in Ontario, a higher percentage of the population (68 per cent) had obtained a post-secondary degree than in Quebec, where the percentage was 57 per cent. In Ontario, “tuition and related costs are more than twice as high,” the report reads.

MEI does not seek to explain the different graduation rates.

“That’s really the question that politicians should try to answer,” Moreau said.

A comparison of graduation rates between Quebec and other provinces must consider Quebec’s unique CEGEP system, said Benjamin Gingras, a CEGEP teacher and former spokesperson for the student association ASSÉ.

“We have 48 CEGEPs across Quebec where you can get technical training which could equate to a university degree, in terms of technical training, elsewhere in Canada,” Gingras said.

Unpaid internships required by university programs are one of the reasons that students end up dropping out of school, NadeauDubois said.

“They don’t get their diplomas because they have to stop studying because they have to pay the bills,” he said.

The issue will come up during the provincial election campaign, Nadeau-Dubois said.

“I think a lot of parties were a little bit afraid to talk about that issue after 2012. The movement was very big, the mobilization was very intense. People were trying to forget that issue, but now it’s coming back,” he said.

For Gingras, higher education is “not free because every policy costs money, but we assume the costs collectively because we recognize it as a public good that benefits society at large.”