Less funding for tuition may not be all bad

Taylor Swift sent a young Ontario woman named Ayesha Khurram over $6,000. The music star made the donation to Khurram’s university tuition fund after Khurram — a dedicated Taylor Swift fan — posted on Tumblr that she was going to have to drop out of school because she couldn’t afford it. Khurram told CTV that last year, the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) covered her entire tuition and rent for her second semester at the University of Waterloo. But

this coming year, “even my tuition wasn’t covered by OSAP, let alone my rent.” Thanks to Swift’s generosity, Khurram plans to continue in Waterloo’s Accounting and Financial Management program in the fall. Next year, if all goes as planned, Khurram will be earning some money through a co-op placement.

Whether or not Swift’s gift qualifies as a purely goodnews story is a matter of debate. Khurram is understandably delighted and grateful for the unexpected help — “i have no words and i can’t stop crying,” she wrote on Tumblr. But many on social media are insisting that the real story here is the horror of the Ontario government’s changes to OSAP that left Khurram and other students like her with less financial assistance for school; as I’ve noted in the past, changes that make access to university more difficult aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but this is not a popular position.

“Canadians shouldn’ t have to tweet at pop stars to pay for post-secondary,” Ayesha Chughtai (another Ayesha) wrote on Twitter. “These are the faces of #FordCuts.” Other tweets

WE ARE LIVING IN A WORLD OF DEVALUED DEGREES AND OVEREDUCATED PEOPLE.

called on Ford to reverse the cuts.

Beyond being worse than before, exactly how Khurram’s funding situation changed is unclear. How much of the support she lost was pulled altogether and how much was changed from a grant to a loan? Khurram quite reasonably did not get into these specifics on Tumblr. Taylor Swift probably would have zoned out instead of cutting a cheque if she had. But they’re the sort of details that matter if we’re going to use her situation to judge OSAP policy changes.

The Ford government’s line has been that the cuts to OSAP were necessary in order to keep the program sustainable; this may be the case, though that shouldn’t have stopped the government from better preparing students and the public for the changes. More interesting may be the question of whether limiting access to university — in the sense of removing the subsidies that artificially lower the cost of attending — could be a positive step in and of itself. It’s no coincidence that we are living in a world of devalued degrees and overeducated people; we’ve spent decades incentivizing virtually everyone to go university — including plenty of students who would not get the optimal benefit from a university education. That’s a poor financial investment for taxpayers, and a life-wrecking trajectory for too many young people who would have flourished in less expensive trade programs and apprenticeships.

In the U.K., something interesting happened a few years ago when university tuitions spiked suddenly. The predictable part was that applications for spots at British post-secondary institutions dropped (though they’ve been climbing in the years since); the surprise was that applications from disadvantaged groups, including minorities and people with less money, didn’t drop any more dramatically than those of wealthy students. The number of poor students attending university in the U.K. has continued to rise in the years since. What changed was that a greater number of students of all backgrounds self-selected out of the admissions process because they didn’t see a university education as worth the higher price.

If the changes to OSAP had a similar effect here, I would consider that a win — encouraging people to pursue paying jobs or shorter, more practical programs when they value them more than expensive (though still heavily subsidized) university degrees. If I had a Taylor-Swift level of money I could use to help Ontario students, I’d spend it on developing as accurate tools as possible to predict which students are most likely to graduate and benefit from a degree. Then I would encourage the Ontario government to stop acting like a predatory lender and forgo assistance to the students who are least likely to do the same.

It might sound heartless or cruel. It would not be likely to go down nearly as well on Tumblr as Taylor Swift’s gesture has.

But there’s not much kindness or heart in enmeshing young people in debt for programs that are unlikely to be of any use to them.

MARNI SOUPCOFF