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February 20th, 2018 – Alex Usher
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So this weekend at the NDP convention, delegates voted in favour of a free tuition policy. Based on a totally unscientific scan of twitter afterwards, here are the ten most common arguments in favour of this move, and why each of them is wrong.
1.The federal government can totally impose free tuition on the provinces
No, it can’t. The best it could do would be to pay the provinces to reduce tuition, which could be difficult given that they all have very different participation rates and tuition structures, which means that finding a formula that would make sense for all of them would be difficult, if not impossible.
2. But we did it with Medicare!
Sort of. The starting imbalance in provincial spending was never really overcome and the program went from a 50-50 program to about a 20-80 program with the provinces picking up the extra tab. This is precisely why provinces have resisted promises of shared-cost programming ever since.
3. But it will make post-secondary education more accessible! Look at Germany and Finland and Sweden!
Not if by that you mean higher rates of access and attainment. Here’s a comparison of the four countries’ attainment rates among 25-34 year olds.
Figure 1: Tertiary Attainment Rates Among 25-34 Year-Olds, Selected OECD Countries
And yeah, these results have something to do with different structures of vocational education, but by pretty much any measure, attainment rates here are higher than they are in most if not all free-tuition countries. One reason for that: those tuition dollars pay for more places!
4.No, no! Not that kind of accessible! The kind of accessible that means students from lower-income backgrounds are more likely to go to higher education
Yeah, still no. Check out this paper from Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and Rasmus Landerso which among other things looks at educational inequalities between big, bad, neoliberal America and cuddly Scandinavia. Or maybe just look at this graph, from page 30.
Figure 2: Proportion of 20-34 year olds in tertiary education, by parents’ educational attainment, Denmark, Norway, the U.S.
Or, you could look at data from Canada on participation by parental background in Canada, the best piece being this one from Marc Frenette. As I pointed out back here, over the past fifteen years the two provinces with the best record at narrowing the participation gap between rich and poor are Ontario and Newfoundland, which have had diametrically opposed policies on tuition. Which suggests that whatever is working, it’s not strictly (or maybe even at all) about fees.
Either way, the evidence for fees substantially changing the composition of the student body is essentially non-existent.
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5. But tuition fees perpetuate intergenerational inequity!
This is a weird one. It seems to rest on the idea that richer parents paying for tuition while poorer kids have to borrow for theirs is how intergenerational inequality gets perpetuated. Simple answer: no. If you relieve everyone of the need to pay for tuition, there is nothing to stop parents handing that extra money on to their kids in a different way. End result: same levels of inequality, just a different mechanism.
6.Reducing Tuition Fees Will Eliminate Student Debt! And Student Debt is Killing a Generation!
Debt depends on a bunch of things, not least of all how generously you lend for living expenses. Sweden, famously, has free tuition but also higher average student debt than the U.S. That’s because they let students borrow huge amounts for living expenses with no needs test (something similar is going to start happening in Canada, btw, as we start taking away the need for students to contribute from labour earnings; the result of these policies will be that students will have better living conditions in school now, but more debt down the road.)
Also, student debt burdens are *much* lighter than they were a decade ago.
Figure 3: Percentage of Average After-tax Earnings of Graduates, 2 Years Out, Required to Service an Average Student Loan Debt
(if you want the calculations behind this you can find them back here).
7. Education is a right. It should therefore be free for all.
Food and shelter are also “rights” in the sense delineated by the UN Charter of Rights. But we don’t make those free. We provide direct assistance to those in need and in the case of housing put some very basic assistance (e.g. mortgage insurance) at the disposal of all. And we do that because if there is no market failure, then what’s the point of government intervention? This is why we target on need/income.
8. Free Education is Progressive Because It Helps The Poorest the Most
As I’ve pointed out numerous times, this is not the case, partly due to the fact that less affluent kids are already getting fairly large subsidies and because more affluent kids are more likely to enter post-secondary education. In fact, our best guess in Canada is that free tuition would probably direct three timesas many dollars to families in the top income quartile than in the bottom. So in fact it actually helps the richest the most. Which is a pretty good reason not to do it, you ask me.
9. If you used these targeting arguments in healthcare, there wouldn’t be medicare!
The simple answer here is: health care is universal (in fact most studies show the poor are on average heavier users of the healthcare system). Post-secondary isn’t. So it’s not clear why there it’s inconsistent to argue for universal free health care and asking for targeted rather than universal subsidies in post-secondary.
The slightly more complicated answer is that medicare is first and foremost an insurance program against random catastrophic loss. Nobody knows how much health care they will need or when they will need it, so we use public funding as a way of pooling risk and sharing it. Unless you are prepared to argue that free tuition is protection against being randomly and catastrophically educated, this is a poor analogy.
10. You’re just a neoliberal shill!
An oldie, but a goodie. Unanswerable, really. You have me in the crushing grip of reason.
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