You Get What You Pay For: the Quebec student strike and tuition fee policy
Quebec’s student protests have garnered international media attention and it is about time – the student strike began almost four months ago and the related civil disobedience has paralysed Quebec’s higher education institutions. With last week’s failure of the latest round of negotiations between the provincial government and student protest leaders, it is worth reminding ourselves of the issue which ignited the protests: student opposition to a proposed increase in Quebec’s tuition fee cap. International media have failed to contextualize the protests with details of what the Quebec government was proposing. Revisiting the government’s fee proposal may change some minds about the protesters’ cause.
How do tuition fees work in Quebec?
Like all Canadian provinces, the Quebec government exercises the ability to cap the undergraduate and professional program fees universities in the province can charge. However, two important caveats to the government’s authority need to be understood:
1) As legally autonomous institutions, Quebec universities retain the legal right to charge any level of fee they wish. They accept the fee cap set by the provincial government because the government can financially penalise universities that transgress the cap by reducing public grants to the offending institutions.
2) Universities are obviously at liberty to charge a fee lower than the cap set by the government.
It is worth noting that all Canadian provinces behave in the way described above, more or less (for a more detailed explanation of the situation in Ontario please refer to
As part of its new provincial budget announced in February 2012, the Quebec government proposed to increase the provincial cap on the permissible annual tuition fee from C$2,519 (approximately £1,570) to C$3,793 (£2,360) over a five-year period, grandfathering the increases for students ‘in program’ (meaning students would continue to enjoy the fee cap in place when they started their program for the duration of the program).
And students are left to fend for themselves? That’s barbaric!
No, there are lots of government and institutionally administered grants and loans programs. Students are not automatically eligible for grants and loans, however. They must apply for them and the majority of grants and loans are means-tested. This means that (arguably) only those students needing financial assistance receive it. Generally, those in greatest financial need receive more grants than those in less financial need.
In Canada, student financial assistance comes from both the federal and provincial government, coordinated through individual provincial programs. Without going into the intricacies the provincial and federal student financial assistance programs, financial need is determined according to factors such as household/family income, dependents cost of program, where the applicant will be studying, etc. These grants and loans assist students with both “maintenance” (aka living costs) and educational costs, including fees, books, and equipment.
The Canadian and provincial governments act guarantors for all students qualifying for student financial assistance and pay the interest accruing on a borrower’s loan while they are in full time study. Loan repayment is triggered by termination of study (with a small “breathing period” of 6 months). Graduates who received public loans finding themselves unable to make repayments may qualify for programs which will continue to pay the interest of, or even pay down, their loan depending on the borrower’s post-study income.
How do Quebec’s fees compare to the rest of Canada?
The proposed Quebec government policy change would have represented a 75% increase in the fees charged to undergraduates. However, Quebec has the lowest student fees in Canada. Even after the proposed phased increase, Quebec students studying in Quebec would have annual fees at least C$1,500 below the national average (see Figure 1).
But a fee increase would just allow the government to make cuts to university grants, wouldn’t it?
Unlike England’s recent fee changes, the Quebec fee increase was not intended to replace existing public grants to universities. The Quebec budget pledged to increase public grants to universities by C$850 million (£529 million) over the same period as the fee increase. More than 50% of this new public funding was earmarked for teaching and student services. The intention of the new fee policy, coupled with the increased government funding, was to improve the quality of education and student experience for Quebec’s undergraduates.
It is easy to understand why students might be upset if they were asked to contribute more money in exchange for a substandard education. But, as the maxim states, “you get what you pay for”. Quebec’s universities are currently the most underfunded in Canada, in no small part because of low fee revenue. An insightful opinion piece by political commentator Jeffery Simpson in the Canadian national daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail, pointed out that Quebec’s universities fare poorly in international rankings compared to other provinces’ universities despite Quebec representing close to quarter of Canada’s total population (see http://tinyurl.com/quebec-quality). According to Simpson, the Quebec government conservatively estimates the funding gap between Quebec’s universities and the North American average to equal C$600 million (£374 million) annually. Arguably Quebec’s most famous higher education institution, Montreal’s McGill University, forecasts a $7 million and a $3.9 million deficit respectively for the next two years, pending a resolution to the fee standoff.
Higher fees and larger government grants were meant to address this chronic funding shortfall. The increased fee revenue and government grants, phased in over a five-year period, were meant to address the funding shortfall. Provided the universities could control salary demands made by existing academic staff, most, if not all, of the additional fee revenue could have gone to improvements to Quebec students’ experience at university. As long as the student strike continues and the Quebec government is politically paralysed, this plan to bring Quebec in line with university funding in other provinces is in question.
But Quebec’s universities are more accessible, right?
Despite having had the lowest student fees in the country for some time, Quebec’s educational attainment rate is comparatively mediocre given that fees have been kept low to encourage access. Statistics Canada reports that 48% of Quebec’s 25-65 year old population have completed a higher education credential, including college and university awards. This is compared to a Canadian provincial average of 52% and Ontario’s average of 58% following twelve years of some of the highest fees in the country (please see Figure 2).
A recent study comparing university access by family income confirms that Quebec’s low fees have not contributed to improved access. Finnie, Childs, and Wismer (2011) found that university participation of students with annual family incomes of C$5,000-25,000 was up to twenty percentage points lower in Quebec (with the lowest fees in Canada) compared to Ontario (with the highest fees). The difference dropped, but only slightly, to 14 percentage points for family incomes between C$25,000-75,000. The income groups with the lowest difference in access were the highest, C$75,000-100,000 and C$100,000+ (see http://www.heqco.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/AccessENG.pdf). This information makes two things clear:
1) There are more issues, beyond fee policy, keeping Quebec's disadvantaged out of university; and
2) Quebec’s well-off are disproportionately benefiting from the province’s low fees.
Furthermore, the Quebec Ministry of Education recently reported that 32.4% of Quebec university students “who ended their undergraduate studies did so without having obtained a diploma” (see Henry Aubin’s article, “A startling rate of failure”, available here http://www.canada.com/news/Henry+Aubin+startling+rate+failure/6729620/story.html). Using this measure, Quebec’s dropout rate is over twice the national average while having the lowest fees in the country. Low fees are not even helping students to complete their studies.
Proponents of artificially low tuition fees assert that low fees improve access to higher education. Low fees undoubtedly make higher education slightly less expensive, but the major costs to a student are living costs and the cost of being out of full time work for the duration of studies. Despite their comparatively high fees, Canadian provinces like Ontario, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island have better higher education participation rates than Quebec in spite of having much higher fees. It should not be surprising that these are provinces who also invest in school outreach, needs-based financial assistance, and financial support programs – initiatives that are more closely tied to improving access to higher education than arbitrary fees caps.
So why is the student protest a bad thing?
Most of the students studying at Quebec’s universities are drawn from middle to upper socio-economic groups, and this is unlikely to change no matter how low or high the provincial fee cap is unless Quebec (and its student leadership) takes a hard look at the real reasons why students from less advantaged backgrounds, recent immigrants, and native populations in Quebec are turning away from higher education. Focussing on this fee increase, and the resulting student protests, allows the Quebec government to ignore these larger and more pressing issues.
It is important to understand this “protest” in Quebec for what it really is: a desire to maintain the status quo for those already privileged. Fees for most Canadian undergraduates are, thankfully, nowhere near as expensive as they will be for students studying in England. The public has a limited appetite for groups shutting down roads, increasing security budgets, and generally disrupting the peaceful enjoyment of public life in the name of “injustice”. Unfortunately, Quebec’s student protests will mark students as “crying wolf” the next time they protest a change in fee or access policy – and then it could actually be worth protesting.
