Higher education needs to be more affordable
Targeted free tuition is one way to help students, writes Alex Usher
This November will mark two years until the provincial election, and access to postsecondary education (PSE) and how it relates to skills and jobs will undoubtedly come up for debate.
The affordability of PSE is a perennial concern across the world, and Saskatchewan is no exception. But over the past couple of years, a remarkable new policy direction — arguably the most important movement in higher education financing right now — has gained traction in a number of countries almost simultaneously. Though the labelling varies from place to place, all effectively consist of targeted free tuition (TFT).
TFT is essentially a policy that bridges one of the great divides in PSE: the question of tuition fees.
Systems that do not charge tuition at all are seen as affordable, but also are justly criticized for oversubsidizing students from wealthier families who do not face substantive financial barriers to education. Systems that charge fees and try to offset their effects with student assistance monies are more efficient, but at the same time often so complicated that some students are deterred from applying. One policy leads to waste and overspending; the other potentially to unfairness to lower-income students.
TFT allows governments to get the best out of both these policies simultaneously: They can charge fees (often substantial ones) to those who can pay, while making a clear promise of no tuition payment to students from families of lesser means. Universities and colleges get the resources they badly need, while students in the greatest need get the assistance they require, packaged in a very simple language: “Free.” It is, literally, win-win.
The policy was first used by the British government between 1998 and 2006, a period that happened to coincide with some of the largest gains in access to PSE that England and Wales have ever seen. In 2016, the Bachelet government in Chile introduced a similar policy, with students from families from the bottom six income deciles exempted from tuition. Later that year, Ontario and New Brunswick announced similar policies providing grants equivalent to tuition to students from (more or less) below-median incomes.
Since then, New York, South Africa, Italy and Japan have all independently adopted variants of the same policy. Though it is too early to make definitive statements about the effects of these policies, the U.K.’S experience at the turn of the millennium suggests that this could be an efficient and progressive way to increase access through affordability.
The obvious critique of TFT is that it might seem costly. However, in Saskatchewan, this would not necessarily be the case: Federal grants through the Canada Student Loans Program already cover roughly half of the cost of tuition for lowincome students. Additionally, Saskatchewan could reprofile monies from expensive programs with dubious efficacy.
The province has two obvious targets: The country’s most generous student loan remission program, and a very costly system of graduate tax rebates which gives millions of dollars to people who finish their studies, but nothing to help those in need whilst they are actually studying.
The repurposing of the funds from these programs, as was done in Ontario and New Brunswick, would be sufficient to implement TFT, with no need for any additional expenditure.
In the information age, finding new ways to ensure universities and colleges are properly funded is critical to all economic policy.
Meanwhile, eliminating financial barriers to universities and colleges — and the opportunities that can only be accessed via the degrees and diplomas they provide — is critical to all social policy. TFT thus sits at a crucial intersection of economic and social policy; the Government of Saskatchewan would be well-advised to give this a long, hard look.
Alex Usher is president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a consultancy based in Toronto. The full report, in which these findings are detailed, Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis, is now available on HESA’S website.