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18 October 2002
uwRyan.com This website is meant to provide value to UW student by delivering information. It will also supplement the column that I write for Imprint by providing extra information on some of the topics about which I will write in addition to the text of each column. Please provide feedback on what I write as well as give me suggestions of topics to cover. You can send e-mail to me to ryan[at]uwryan[dot]com. |
Deregulation, part one: accessibilityAre the poor turned away by high tuition?
If you give someone money it does not instantly make him smarter or generally more able of a person. It does, though, make him more able to pay for things, such as a university education. If money does not make students more able to benefit from a university education, then why should it factor in their ability to access such an education. This question is the essence of the issue of accessibility of post-secondary education. Because of underfunding of universities, that is less funding per student in real dollars, deregulation generally means higher tuition. Lower revenue from a university's operating grant from the province puts a strain on finances and makes tuition hikes a more attractive option. If programs are deregulated, which means the provincial government's controls on tuition are removed, then the financial pressure can be released by another large revenue source: tuition. Other sources must also be pursued, but would require larger proportional gains to realize the same absolute gain, that is smaller sources would need to grow by a larger percentage for the same number of dollars. The debate around accessibility is whether or not increasing tuition has hurt accessibility. The ways that high tuition affects accessibility is by prospective students not being able to afford it in an absolute way, students thinking they aren't able to afford it and thinking that the cost is not worth the potential benefit. Various organizations have performed studies to gauge whether tuition affects accessibility. At the University of Toronto, the Provost's Task Force on Tuition and Student Financial Support released a report in 1998. As a part of its report it studied the proportion of students from different household incomes and suggested that increasing tuition did not affect accessibility between 1991and 1996 at U of T. It said, "The group then reviewed recent evidence from the University of Toronto which suggested, in aggregate terms, that there had not been a decline in the relative proportion of students from lower-income households between 1991 and 1996 as tuition levels increased." The Federations of Students performed a study in 2000 comparing the houshold income of students at Ontario universities in 1991 to those in 1998. It found that over those seven years the percentage of students from backgrounds of below average income dropped from 71.6 per cent to 61.1 per cent. In this same period engineering tuition, for example, rose from $973 to $1,943, a 99.6 per cent increase. The report indicated the correlation between rising tuition and smaller lower-income attendance. "Overall, this report suggests that recent increases in tuition fees have made a university education harder to afford for lower-income students," it read. Last month the Canadian Association of University Teachers published a report, Access Denied, which compared university tuition to wages for different types of work as far back as 1857 up to this year. It indicates that inflation-adjusted tuition is at its highest level in history and that average undergraduate arts tuition rose most rapidly over the 1990s. In the United States an advisory committee on student financial assistance reported to congress in Empty Promises: The Myth of College Access in America. The report says, "While parents' education -- specifically having a college degree -- along with family income is positively related to student academic preparation, there is no evidence that it has an effect on college enrolment independent of the effect of family income and financial aid for college-qualified high school graduates." Problems with accessibility that stem from the perceived barrier of high tuition, sometimes referred to as "sticker shock," can be addressed with information. Both this and lack of financial means, however, can be addressed with better financial assistance. The problem that expands the debate on deregulation beyond accessibility is that providing education requires money and tuition is a significant part of a university's revenue. The next question then becomes how to ensure quality, making a university education worth while. |