Ontario has a new premier, which means the legislature will be back to business soon, there is now only one Liberal leadership election on the horizon instead of two, and the opposition is coming out in full force with policies they feel would benefit the province should they be elected. Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak was vocal in the last week on a variety of topics, specifically education and transit, presumably in a bid to bring attention to his ideas for how Ontario should move forward funding these sectors as MPPs again convene for legislature.
The PC plan for education, titled “Higher Learning for Better Jobs”, is a 28-page report outlining twelve main ideas that they believe will put universities on track to save costs, improve quality, and give students better financial access than our current system. One aspect they do address well is noting that universities can no longer rely on growth and expansion as being one of their primary objectives. The world’s population is decelerating in growth, and there’s only so many people you can keep adding to a system before it becomes unsustainable to depend on growth, so it’s best for any business, including universities, to find ways of maintaining successful operations without depending on everlasting growth.
However, some of the more questionable sections of the policy arise when the paper begins discussing its funding mechanism. In the paper, much criticism is directed at the current Ontario Tuition Grant (the source of your termly $800 rebate, students from Ontario), which the incumbent Liberal Party introduced after the 2011 election. There are certainly problems with the grant as it is now, notably that students in their last year at Waterloo and other schools with effectively five-year co-op programs are ineligible for the grant, even those who have not had any deferrals or repeated terms. It is also advertised as being 30% off tuition, where it is in practice a flat rebate to Ontario students and does not take into account the wide variance in tuition fees between programs and universities.
The PC proposal is to scrap the grant and replace it with school-managed aid and loans tied to various factors. Their argument is that studies have shown that as tuition increases, money allocated to low-income bursaries also increases, and that their goal would be to establish this practice of universities setting aside their own money for low-income students as they see fit when tuition increases. They also state that student loans should be tied to “rewarding good behaviour”, which in their terms means “not only making the smart and efficient choice about where to go to school, but also keeping students accountable for how they choose to spend the money the government is lending them.”
It’s unclear what constitutes a “smart and efficient” choice, but the rest of the paper talks primarily about an increased focus on sending more students to colleges instead of universities. Part of the independence of heading to college or university is having the choice and freedom to choose wherever you feel is appropriate for you, and if you’re an Ontario student studying in Ontario, you are currently guaranteed to receive the same treatment with respect to loans for studying at Waterloo that you would at Conestoga. If this is supposed to suggest that your loan funding would be tied to making the choice to go to Conestoga instead of Waterloo, or an Ottawa-born student having to choose Carleton over Lakehead since they could live at home, that reduces the ability for a student to independently determine their own future, leading to an experience more similar to the transition from elementary to secondary school where students are funnelled into their next school primarily based on location. Of course, having loan funding be tied to which school you attend doesn’t restrict you from applying or attending, but for people who depend on student loans or other forms of aid to get into university, it could effectively remove their desired school from their list of options.
The alternative interpretation of this sentence is that students would have to pick an appropriate program. There are some instances where it is mentioned that students aren’t getting jobs out of university, and trades need to be emphasized more when students are choosing programs. As with the previous scenario, shoehorning a student into picking tool and die over world history won’t make them like it any better. It would be interesting to see what the people who wrote this policy chose, since political figures have a tendency to choose more arts-rooted courses, which you could argue don’t get you a direct job out of university, but could likely help develop the skills to find a job outside of number-crunching and logic. Hudak has multiple degrees in economics, and Rob Leone, a Laurier professor who is the MPP for Cambridge and helped lead the writing of this policy, has multiple degrees in public policy. It could be argued that if they are attempting to funnel students through financial aid or other means into picking different majors that have more direct, applicable skills to the workforce, that they are trying to restrict the ability for students to follow what they had done themselves in past decades.
There is also an issue with a statement they make that follows shortly after, claiming that aid should be tied to students who are able to “demonstrate a minimum level of success”. Again, it is unclear what defines student success, but tying financial aid to academic success will likely punish those who need aid but are not at the very top of their class. Already, most scholarships are heavily biased towards those who are able to demonstrate superior grades, extensive leadership and/or another superlative measurement. Biasing aid towards those same people only makes it easier for those people to get financial assistance while leaving those who are not at the same level not only trying harder to get through classes but distracting them from focusing on their studies by having to focus on finding more sources of income to pay for their schooling. Additionally, students who require more aid are more likely than not those in more expensive programs, such as accounting or engineering, which have much more rigorous and demanding academic workloads. So by tying aid to success, you make students in more challenging programs suffer or unintentionally steer them towards bird courses and other easier electives in an attempt to lighten the load to get better marks, so they can get more funding.
Some of the ideas the Ontario PCs have are good. There should be more students going into colleges when that is more appropriate for them, and colleges should focus more on being colleges and universities on being universities, instead of trying to do each other’s jobs. The method they propose in going around this though is unacceptable and shows they do not truly have a good grasp on what makes students choose their schools. Hopefully, by the time the next election comes around, they will have put a bit more thought into how to get smart students from all income brackets to have an equal chance to attend our schools.
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