Underfunding our universities is short-sighted

Quebec risks seeing a decline in the value of its students’ diplomas, Guy Breton writes.

Our investment per student per year in Quebec is $3,800 less than everywhere else in Canada — a 25 per cent gap.

Education is one of the pillars of our society. Yet we, as a society, have let our schools deteriorate over the years. This decline in quality worries me a great deal. At first, of course, nothing seems wrong. The cracks in the system, like those on highway overpasses, aren’t immediately visible. But after 10 or 15 years, the damage is undeniable.

Earlier this year, the news media reported an instance of just such a crack in the university sector. We learned that McGill University’s undergraduate medical program was on probation.

The joint Canadian and U.S. accreditation committee that evaluates the quality of programs in medical schools across Canada had determined that the faculty of our sister university here in Montreal failed to meet 24 of the 132 required accreditation standards. McGill has been given until 2017 to rectify the situation or lose its accreditation.

The Université de Montréal has been there before. In the early 2000s, our Faculty of Veterinary Medicine — the only such faculty in Quebec — obtained conditional accreditation by the American Veterinary Medical Association Council on Education. It took an emergency injection of funding by the federal and provincial governments to upgrade the facilities at our campus in Saint-Hyacinthe and provide the tools our faculty needed to regain full accreditation. With our partners’ help, we managed to meet the challenge, but we never want to relive that situation in any of our faculties in the future.

And yet a real risk remains, when you realize that our investment per student per year in Quebec is $3,800 less than everywhere else in Canada — a 25 per cent gap.

People often ask me why I compare the budget situation of our universities to universities in Ontario or British Columbia. Yes, it is possible to deliver diplomas for less money. Quebec has been doing so for years. But it is not possible to deliver diplomas of equivalent quality without minimal parity in educational and training resources.

The comparisons are less forgiving for professional degree programs, which are subject to evaluation by independent Canadian or North American bodies. And these evaluations are anything but trivial: Without accreditation of our faculties, our graduates would not be authorized to practice their professions. But the same phenomenon is apparent in the humanities and social science programs: There too, a lack of resources tends to undermine the value of the instruction — and the diploma.

Our students, in every field, are just as bright, promising and demanding as other Canadian students. They value their education. They expect the best environment to develop their talent. And their ambitions are not confined to our borders.

As a point of interest, the Université de Montréal today spends 9 per cent more to educate each student than we spent in 2008. At the University of Toronto, they’re spending 28 per cent more — and 50 per cent more at the University of British Columbia. This doesn’t seem to worry some people. But it sure worries me.

Let’s not forget that our universities must bear comparison not only to their counterparts in Canada, but to institutions of higher learning worldwide. Major international ranking systems show that Montreal’s universities have successfully maintained their global standing these past few years. But those same rankings show strikingly how universities in many other countries are gaining strength, creating ever stronger competition.

With a new school year now underway, the Université de Montréal once again has more students registered than in previous years. With HEC and Polytechnique Montréal, there are now more than 70,000 students attending our institutions.

Today, I can guarantee every one of them an excellent education and the best possible diploma. What I want, more than anything, is to be able to make that same guarantee in the future.