Create two kinds of universities

A TWO-TRACK tuition policy could solve the problems facing students, provincial government and schools

The Marois government intends next month’s summit on higher education to settle the war over tuition, but the main players remain at loggerheads. The student groups want to keep tuition low while universities insist they need tuition increases to shine academically.

Yet a way does exist to reconcile those two seemingly contradictory positions.

That way is terribly unorthodox. It will give conniptions to those believing in dogmatic egalitarianism — the idea that the Quebec government should treat all its universities identically.

Before exploring that proposal, however, let’s deal with two questions.

If tuition remains frozen at $1,625 per year or (as one group wants) it is abolished, is it realistic to expect the Quebec government to compensate universities for that loss in income by greatly increasing its own funding to them?

Answer: No. Boosting public funding would either mean raising Quebec’s taxes, which are already higher than in any other Canadian province or any U.S. state, or it would require borrowing money and adding to a public-sector debt that is already precariously high at $252 billion.

Can universities improve the quality of education if the government keeps tuition the lowest in North America and if its level of funding remains below average among provinces?

Answer: It’s hard to see how. Even if universities were to end their wasteful practices (such as creating new campuses), the savings would fall far short of the $265 million per year that the Charest government’s now-kaput tuition hikes would have generated by 2016. Universities that seek to excel nationally or internationally will need substantially more funding if they are to compete with universities outside Quebec by attracting top profs and by updating their labs and other facilities.

So, how can three things happen at the same time? How can the students who want little if any tuition get their way, the universities that want to excel get their way and the provincial government that seeks frugality gets its way?

You create two kinds of universities.

One kind would get low or zero tuition. It would offer a solid academic program but it would perform relatively little research (which is expensive) and would not aim for stardom. It would meet the student groups’ demand that needy students have full access to higher education. Among Montreal’s four universities, Concordia and Université du Québec à Montréal would seem to fall into this category. (They ranked 13th and 14th respectively in Maclean’s latest ranking of 15 Canadian comprehensive universities.)

The other kind of university would charge considerably for tu- ition while offering substantial financial aid. (Just how much tuition is another debate.) This kind of university would be more research oriented, and it would actively pursue excellence. McGill and Université de Montréal would be among such schools. (Maclean’s rates McGill first among Canada’s 15 universities that offer a broad range of PhD programs and medical schools. It puts U de M 12th.)

I can already hear the indignant complaints that this would create a two-tier education system. The term “two-tier” is toxic in Quebec because of its association with the health system, but the concepts are fundamentally different.

The two-tier health concept is controversial because it gives privileged care to the well off — those who can afford to pay out of pocket. If patients see a doctor at a private clinic who has opted out of the public system, they get no financial aid from government.

No such discrimination against the poor would exist under the twotrack tuition system. Students at a school charging a hefty fee could receive plenty of financial aid. The idea would be that no deserving student shy away from such a university for reasons of money.

Precedents exist elsewhere for two-track tuition among public universities. Example: In Pennsylvania, Edinboro University, which does little research, charges $6,428 in tuition while the research-intensive University of Pittsburgh requires $15,730. (The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, charges $39,088, but that’s another story: It’s a private university.)

It would be easy to denounce this two-track tuition policy on grounds that it favours elitism (as if there’s something wrong for an institution to strive to greatness). But I challenge such critics to come up with another way to satisfy student demands while at the same respecting both the aspirations of the leading universities and the financial constraints of the province.