In recent months, misguided university students across Quebec have taken to the streets to protest proposed tuition hikes. In other provinces, recent tuition increases have also provoked protests from student organizations.
Instead of protesting against modest and necessary increases in tuition, students should be much more upset about the declining quality of undergraduate education in Canada.
The evidence that quality in undergraduate education is deteriorating was laid out in the recent book Academic Reform: Policy Options for Improving The Quality and Cost-Effectiveness of Undergraduate Education in Ontario. Although the book focused on Ontario, many of the trends the authors identify are applicable across Canada.
The numbers show that students receive fewer hours of formal instruction and have reduced access to faculty compared to 20 years ago. The authors of Academic Reform note that, in Ontario, the ratio of students per full-time faculty member has increased by 47 per cent over just two decades.
During the same period, the number of courses each faculty member is expected to teach each year has declined — by approximately a third in many faculties.
Combining these two statistics, the authors calculate that Ontario’s undergraduate education system now delivers approximately 45 per cent as much teaching by full-time faculty per student as it did during the early 1990s.
Some universities have also shortened the academic year. For example, the University of Toronto’s Arts and Science faculty recently cut the number of weeks of instruction in each term from 13 to 12. By comparison, most comparable American institutions have academic terms that are 14 or 15 weeks long.
The best available evidence suggests these trends are, predictably, coinciding with a decline in educational quality. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is an ambitious annual effort to evaluate crucial dimensions of educational quality in universities and colleges across North America.
The 2011 NSSE showed many troubling results for Canadian institutions.
For example, NSSE asked students to evaluate levels of student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning, and educational enrichment. Across all these categories, Canada’s major research universities tended to score considerably lower than the North American average.
In Quebec, the NSSE results are particularly poor in several important categories. Addressing these problems rather than demands for a free ride from rioting students should be the priority of Quebec’s policy makers.
It is noteworthy that modest tuition increases inspire students to take to the streets, while the erosion of quality provokes little outrage, even when it is most obvious.
When the University of Toronto reduced term length from 13 to 12 weeks, this constituted an eight per cent decrease in the amount of instruction students received. The decision inspired barely a peep from student organizations. It is unlikely that an immediate eight per cent increase in tuition fees would have been greeted with similar equanimity.
The apparent indifference of student groups to reductions in quality and educational rigour, coupled with their fury in the face of minor tuition increases lends credence to the argument that, for many students, higher education is essentially a signaling exercise.
The objective for many appears to be obtaining a credential at the lowest cost in money and effort, with the content of the instruction or quality of a degree being secondary concerns.
Fortunately, there are many other students who are concerned primarily with the quality of their education. They will generally be willing to pay a reasonable share of the costs, understanding that they themselves will receive considerable economic benefits — if the quality of their instruction is good enough.
Policy makers have a responsibility to these students to address troubling trends surrounding quality. This may mean increasing resources available for institutions by increasing operating grants and allowing tuition rates to rise.
It will certainly mean developing strategies to get more out of the money we’re already spending. There are a variety of reform options available and all should be examined, but maintaining the policy status quo would be unwise given the evidence of declining quality.
Maintaining a university system is expensive and will get more expensive as costs rise. Students will have to pay more over time, and the tuition protests in Montreal are therefore misguided.
However, students in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada would have a legitimate grievance protesting against declining educational rigour, hours of instruction and student-faculty interaction. In that case, given the amount of money provincial governments spend on higher education, taxpayers might even want to consider joining in.
Ben Eisen and Jonathan Wensveen are public policy analysts at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-authors of Tuition Fees and University Participation for Youth from Low-Income Families: An Interprovincial Analysis (http://www.fcpp.org/).