College students deserve better
This isn’t a column about the strike at colleges across Ontario. It’s about the underlying financial issues that can get exposed when a strike happens. Start by considering the students.
Just one-third of the students who start fulltime courses at Conestoga College are straight out of high school.
The other two-thirds are a mixed bag. Laid-off middle-aged workers who haven’t been in a classroom in years, People with university degrees who want marketable skills. People in their mid-twenties who tried a number of different things before switching to college.
There are also plenty of recent immigrants, single parents and people who were down on their luck before they started.
For many of these students, college is another chance. Maybe their last chance.
As a group, they’re not as classroom-ready as the students who start at university. They don’t have as much money or self-confidence. They need more help with everything.
Yet the colleges across Ontario receive far less money to teach these students than universities do. Colleges get lower provincial grants and charge lower tuition fees.
The grants are meant to pay for teachers, classrooms and other basic learning needs.
College president John Tibbits says the average annual grant for a full-time Conestoga student is $4,100 a year.
Compare that with provincial grants for university students that range from $5,000 a year for those in arts (averaged over the four years of their study) to more than $8,200 a year for engineering students.
Those statistics are from the Council of Ontario Universities, which says engineering and science students get more grant money because their highly technical programs require costly equipment and labs.
But colleges deliver plenty of technical programs, too. Some lead to degrees that are just as good as the ones universities give out.
It’s unequal treatment. It reeks of a certain classist bias: More of the resources go to the already advantaged, while the truly needy get the crumbs.
Colleges also are not able to attract the tuition revenue that universities can. Conestoga’s business school charges $3,000 tuition a year. The business school at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo charges $9,000.
“It’s more than a Conestoga College issue,” said Tibbits. “It’s a societal issue.
“We’re dealing with the most vulnerable people.”
He’s chair of the board at Grand River Hospital and says if this was happening in health care, with the wealthy receiving better treatment than the poor, “people would be screaming.”
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was in Waterloo Region earlier this week. She was asked about the funding inequity between colleges and universities.
She declined to answer, saying only that the province encourages union and management negotiators to return to the bargaining table soon.
But there will have to be an answer sooner or later.
The economy is changing dramatically, as we all know. Artificial intelligence and automation are swiftly erasing jobs for people. Only the highly skilled will thrive in the aftermath.
Leaving a large group out of the new economy is not an option for a healthy society. “We need everybody to be a part of it,” Tibbits said.
None of this is the reason that picket lines have gone up across the province. But it makes the colleges less able to respond to the issues raised by unionized faculty. And it has more significance than any of those issues.