Higher education costs need more attention in election campaign
Post-secondary schooling has become an investment few Canadians can afford
Imagine you are Stephen Harper. You are 21 years old. You have already made at least two significant adult decisions in your life — ditching the University of Toronto after scant weeks of study; and heading west, where you end up with a low-level job at Imperial Oil.
Consider the intersection of entry-level — even minimum-wage — work, and earning a post-secondary education. Do you see obstacles ahead? Unlikely. You face no significant economic barriers in returning to school. Tuition fees at the University of Calgary stand at $302.50 per term. The annual cost, then, for a full slate of studies within the Bachelor of Arts program rings in at $605.
With an hourly provincial minimum wage of $3.50, an aspiring student would need to work 173 hours to cover the cost of tuition. Imagine you are in that bucket, even though the real Stephen Harper may have earned a wage above minimum.
You will never be an economist. But you will study enough economics to see the simple implication of this scenario: a summer’s worth of work, even after the taxes that you have neglected to factor into your initial calculation, will put the diligent saver on a reasonable financial footing for a year of academia.
You will see this as a welcoming opportunity for you as an individual.
Fellow students immersed in the sociological study of equality will see this as an opportunity for all.
Any progressive government, understanding that earnings rise with education levels, will see this as fantastic ROI. (You learned the acronyms for “return on investment” and “gross domestic product,” et cetera, quite quickly.)
Decades later, you no longer need to use a calculator as big as your head to figure out how the educational costs to you then compare to educational costs today.
Your tuition of $605 translates into $1,749.77 in today’s dollars. Yet actual tuition for that year of study today vastly outpaces that sum, reaching $5,385.
With a current minimum wage in the province of Alberta set at $10.20 (a buck less if you’re a beer slinger) the aspiring student needs to work 527 hours to accomplish today what you achieved back then. And that’s without factoring in skyrocketing housing costs.
Should you want to send your own son to, say, Queen’s University, you’re looking at a whole other cost stratum, which helps make the point that higher education is less and less about equality of opportunity and more and more about either a) elitism, or b) years of servitude attempting to pay off whopping student debts. Neither reflects well on the country.
Only the very well-to-do can hope to emerge not only smarter and brighter, but unburdened by debt.
You may argue that debt in moderation is not a bad thing. You’re in good company if you do. Thomas Mulcair gave an interview to the Varsity, the U of T student newspaper, in which he said he “didn’t begrudge the fact that I finished with a reasonable debt that I had to repay.” The operative word there is “reasonable.”
Higher education has become less about equality of opportunity and more about either elitism or years of servitude
You will no doubt have noticed that the cost of higher education is a hot topic in the U.S., both among elected Democrats (Barack Obama has proposed that the first two years of community college be free for students “willing to work for it”) and aspirants ( just take a look at Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders). Federal/state partnerships will be key to any progress on that front.
Luckily for you, your “old stock” centre-left opponents aren’t offering up much of a fight on this topic. And you have thrown some dimes into the RESP pot, so you can’t be accused of doing nothing. But that hardly has the ring of future prosperity, does it?