De-bunking the EPI: Knowledge Driven Revolution

Canadian Association of University Teachers - Ottawa Citizen VIA theFilter.ca
August 15, 2006

A report released this week by the Canadian branch of the U.S.-based Educational Policy Institute (EPI), called "Student Aid Time Bomb: The Coming Crisis in Canada's Financial Aid System," argues that tuition freezes, higher loan limits, student loan subsidies and tax credits are favouring the middle class at the expense of the poorest students.

At first glance it appears EPI wants to make an unfair student-aid system fairer. A closer look at EPI's core policies, however, reveals their real objective: an American-style system with higher tuition fees and lower government assistance for most students.

EPI has long advocated that Canada should adopt an American-style student financial assistance system -- one where families earning more than $35,000 a year are forced to depend on loans. EPI has also called for an end to the policy of not charging interest on student loans until after graduation.

While EPI's latest report accurately documents many of the problems facing post-secondary education in Canada, the solutions it proposes would be disastrous for the majority of Canadian families that are neither poor nor wealthy.

EPI criticizes the six provinces currently freezing or reducing tuition fees, arguing that tuition fees should be increased, and financial aid to all but the poorest families should be decreased. Given the reality facing today's students, EPI's proposal is truly bizarre.

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Canadian tuition fees for arts and science undergraduate programs have increased by more than 110 per cent in the past decade. Student debt has skyrocketed from an average of $8,000 in 1990 to more than $25,000 in some provinces. Rising tuition fees have caused record student debt and increased borrowing.

EPI's proposal also calls for deregulating tuition fees. This means substantial increases to the already record-breaking cost of going to university or college in Canada. When tuition fees were deregulated in British Columbia, they jumped 98 per cent. In Ontario, deregulating tuition fees meant the cost of some programs rose to a staggering $17,000. Most students and their families would have to borrow privately and heavily to finance those kinds of increases.

EPI proposes helping poor students by gutting the core of a program that offers assistance to nearly 400,000 Canadians a year. A recent report by the Canadian Association of University Teachers shows families in the bottom fifth of income bear the brunt of fee hikes. In some provinces, families would have to spend more than 67 per cent of their after-tax incomes to pay one year of fees for one child. The vast majority of families in our study would be deemed "middle class'' and cut off from most forms of assistance under EPI's plan.

EPI says student financial assistance should stop being a "cheap forum for buying middle-class votes," and that funding should be shifted to the poor who really need assistance. Poor students definitely need more targeted assistance, but it seems EPI is just using poor students as a prop for advocating a much broader and very regressive agenda.

Canada's student financial assistance system does need urgent reform, but EPI's proposal is a blueprint for what not to do if we want an accessible and equitable student financial assistance system.

The flawed Registered Education Savings Plan and the Millennium Scholarship Foundation should be shelved, and the savings should be used to augment our student financial assistance system. Increased federal and provincial government funding should allow the reduction of tuition fees.

When it comes to helping poor students, we need the provinces and the federal government to invest more money in needs-based grants, not scale back assistance for middle-class families. Several provinces have led the way with tuition fee freezes and reductions. The federal government and the provinces need to agree on a lasting framework for increasing core funding for post-secondary education.

James Turk is executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

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