NDP introduces to post-secondary tuition-fee setting a measure of fairness for students

When I was a postgrad student from Canada in the UK in 1969, university tuition was free there for their students and they got 6 quid a week to live on. No luxury, but basically free. It certainly is not now – the same thatcherite neoliberal forces that privatised public wealth in the ’80s at giveaway prices got rid of mere fripperies like educating the young for the future of the country and replaced it with student loans repayable for essentially ever. And the rentier class rejoiced – no more shaggy-haired students agitating for labour unions. No, now an income stream instead – what genius! Quite unlike the continent where if you can get accepted, tuition is still free or cheap in many places. Money trumps all in the Anglo world.

In the ’60s, Canada was rich enough that university students who managed to get summer jobs could count on making perhaps half of their annual expenses of tuition and room and board. Student loans came along to assist with the rest and a means test often meant needy students got a bit of a bursary as well. Tuition and room and board ran me about $1500 a year in 1968/69 for engineering with scholarships, summer jobs and a total gift of about $2K from my family over six years and two degrees prior to Blighty, I escaped any loans. I was a lab assistant for three years for second year physics students, which was multiple hours marking assignments three times a week for 50 students and running a lab once a week, for the princely pay of $200 a year. Slave labour of the type whose success was noted for future implementation.

University lecturers or profs were not paid overly well, and I do not suppose department heads were rich either. They certainly did not act that way. But as time went on, various PhD types agitated for industry-equivalent salaries, and the administrators certainly felt they should be paid well in excess of that received by mere profs, while contributing little themselves beyond rules, extorting alumni for donations in a pep rally manner while becoming ever more expensive parasitical overhead. Enter the part-time lecturer cum lab assistant, someone with academic qualifications who could be persuaded to “teach” courses for next-to-nothing, while desperately hoping for consideration to join the full-time faculty as retirements happened. Hah! Administration and tenured professional staff costs kept on rising to feed the natural lifestyle of pampered academics and the Admin that lorded it over them. Provincial governments were lobbied for ever more loot to keep the facade from tottering into oblivion. Then – the jackpot! Foreign students eager to join the neolib gravy-train could be charged over the top tuition fees. I know a gentleman who runs this current day, um, chimera for universities around here. Freeland’s name was mud for stirring up the urbane chap running the newly-liberated enlightened state of Saudi Arabia and recalling its overseas students from Canada. I mean, someone has to pay the over half-million salary of university presidents and the couple of hundred grand a year each tenured prof expects as divine right, plus meaty pensions after retirement for those world tours and snowbird winters. All the dirty work of first and second year over-attended lectures is done by underpaid lecturers, and neither they nor the actual profs ever had teacher training, so the result is mush; people cannot spell or even construct logical sentences. Mediocrity reigns. Put up student tuition beyond inflation decided the Council of Canadian University Administrators (or whatever they call themselves) , let students get loans for future indentured servitude and the pampered classes can enjoy a lifestyle unknown to most ordinary people divvying up meagre income to meet the various monthly rents demanded for everything by the rentiers. The people are all turned into drudges with little prospect for improvement. It’s a familiar story, and all the big boys get in on the action; Trump University in the US for one example.

The aristocrats of academe have it easy and rub shoulders with the captains of industry and omnipresent accounting firm “consultant” leeches, witness Morneau’s dollar a year Advisory Committee on budgeting. Yes, a buck a year and all the parliamentary cafeteria sandwiches you can stuff down on the occasional trips to Ottawa, where our betters decide how to run the country the neoliberal way. All jolly good chaps and ladies, determined to do the very best for the country as they experience it. And the way they see it is not the way your average Canadian sees it. The privileged are so far removed from the everyday trials and tribulations of the common man as to to be laughable spooks. Meanwhile, the mass media such as it is, prints the usual rubbish about being good citizens, advocates for constant unsustainable growth at the behest of corporate interests, wails at livable minimum wages, and administrators masquerading as academics piously agree so that their own bread may be well-buttered in perpetuity. Unable to organize due to zealous oversight, the average prole is badly paid, seeks solace in social media and dope, and for the most part merely exists to pay the tithe for the non-productive rich to lord it over them while advancing ever deeper into debt. Because rich people are better people, exhibit superior intellect due to better genes and higher intelligence, and can be relied upon to promulgate far-seeing policies for societal good at all times – we all know that as we tug our forelocks, and to professed Conservatives, well, it’s just so obvious no explanation required.

Notley’s step is a minor one; I’m sure foreign students everywhere will flood Alberta in the secure knowledge that their huge tuitions will remain stable over their years at university. It’s a form of foreign aid, compassion and downright munificence on her part. We’re so far down the rathole of maintaining privilege that minor steps like Notley’s are regarded as somehow enlightened and even praised.

As with people, there is a provincial pecking order. Canadians give Alberta, at the top of the provincial heap, a free pipeline, petro-subsidies and the ability for its citizens to not pay anything so sordid as provincial tax. Ms Notley, having found that having a major snit now and then, accompanied by blackmail of neighbouring BC in a most childish manner, can get what she wants from the rest of us, and can now relax enough to pretend that she’s a bit of a social democrat, while showing Kenney and other graspers how the system can be manipulated for local and personal gain.

Excuse me for wondering what this country is supposed to be all about. Everything is so gerrymandered in favour of privilege that the freakish times we live in have been made to appear normal by paid apologists. So get back to being a coffee-jockey with your arts and humanities degree and suck it up as you work through life with little hope and no pension, no rights of work, no accolade for having contributed to society. This isn’t a country for its denizens – it’s an organization for the already wealthy to siphon every last penny from the pockets of the masses into theirs, while providing soma to cover the pain of a useless existence. And with resources raped from the Earth at irreplaceable rates, species croaking like flies, forests turned into poor farmland, CO2 going ballistic – well, the world’s not going to continue for very long like this. It cannot. Numbed to the truth, people squabble over scraps, and rush lemming-like to oblivion, their minds filled with fake left-right differences as is their wont to deflect them from the reality of being exploited. And no doubt deserve their fate. Rachel Notley “we must sell more bitumen to make a loonie a barrel royalty to fund and implement future environmental policies” is as illogical and out-of-her-mind as any raving robber baron, I’m afraid. So why not cut foreigners a deal on a university education, eh? Sure, why not. Makes as much sense as all the other BS we endure.

So, while I agree tuition ought not to be a barrier to otherwise-capable post-secondary students getting an education, I don’t agree that free college or university tuition is the answer. I feel strongly that post-secondary students need some skin in the game, so they are motivated to buckle down and work instead of just partying (of course this is a stereotype, but it is also a rhetorical device). There is probably a balance point somewhere between the usurious tuition rates we see today, and free tuition, that requires some investment by the student in their education without saddling them with crippling debt at graduation. I, for one, don’t want my tax dollars to fully support the education of yet another corporate lawyer, for example.

I don’t know where that balance falls, but I’m sure it could be figured out. Maybe a system that links tuition to anticipated earning potential with the degree being earned? On top of that, we need a better system of student financial assistance.