Advanced Education Minister Dave Hancock made headlines this week after alluding to some radical changes on the table in the province’s post-secondary review. Bombshells included an idea to make tuition free during the first two years of advanced education and deregulating post-secondary tuition. Two years of free tuition has been derided by some who believe it would be unsustainable.
“Let’s recognize that unless I’m living in a different world than everyone else, nothing is for free,” noted University of Calgary President Dr. Harvey Weingarten. “The fact is, someone’s got to pay for the education of students in the first two years. If you will, the more accurate form of the question is whether students should pay in the first two years from their funds for education or whether it should come from somewhere else. It’s not free. If it’s not provided by the students and their families, it has to be provided in some other way.”
Weingarten stressed that accessibility and quality were of equal importance to tuition costs, saying it would be an error to talk about the three in separate contexts. As well, he noted universities need more funding and such a system wouldn’t likely give universities additional resources.
“It’s not enough to talk about maintaining status quo at any level,” he said. “We need more access here. We’re not meeting the demand now.”
U of C Students’ Union President Bryan West shared Weingarten’s thoughts. Despite being cautiously optimistic about the idea of having two years of fully-funded tuition, West maintained there are other important issues to deal with.
“It’s an interesting concept, but it has to have a lot of qualifiers,” said West. “If that’s where you spend all your money, it doesn’t really help the system because there are infrastructure problems, student finance problems and research and graduate students that you need to think about. Do we like the minister’s idea of fully funding the first two years? Yes. But are the infrastructure dollars going to come, what would tuition be like on the other side of the two years, and will universities be put on starvation diets?”
“As much as tuition is the flag we like to wave a lot of the time, it’s not the only issue and there are many equally important issues,” stressed West.
Alberta Union of Provincial Employees representative Ray Domeij also noted the importance of accessibility and argued the post-secondary system is overburdened already and thus people wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the increased accessibility provided by a fully-funded first two years.
Domeij also expressed fears about the potential deregulation idea, a sentiment shared by others, including SU Vice-President External Jen Smith.
“I think [deregulation] is a horrible idea and I think we would see tuition in Alberta skyrocket,” said Smith. “I don’t think this will get us any lower, why would it? Universities consistently have been doing maximum increases every year when it comes to tuition decisions and if the maximum is a 30 per cent increase instead of the 7.5 per cent it looks like we’re facing next year, it’s definitely not a bonus.”
West, Domeij and Smith, as well as Graduate Students’ Association VP External Jennifer Reid, all mentioned they considered a comb- ination of the two ideas another possibility.
“I think our biggest concern is that what we’re going to see is the coupling up of these two policies, so they’re not mutually exclusive,” said Reid. “What we’re going to see is some wondrous new tuition fee policy that sees undergraduate students having tuition free for their first couple years of university, and then the third and fourth years basically picking up the slack and transferring the tuition fees from first and second year to third and fourth year students. I don’t think we’re going to see one without the other, personally.”
Although Hancock could not be reached for comment, he will be appearing in the MacEwan Student Centre North Courtyard Thu., Oct. 20 at noon in a forum held by the SU.