Every year in Canada, we have a back-to-school ritual: some time during the first week of the postsecondary term (usually on the Wednesday or Thursday), Statistics Canada releases its annual tuition fee survey. Pretty much everybody and their third cousin come together in our local, regional, and national newspapers to talk about how terrible it is that postsecondary education in this country “costs so much”. Like clockwork, articles appear, arguments are recycled, and there is much bewailing.

Except this year.

It’s not that Statistics Canada failed to release the survey results (they are here). Nor are the results unremarkable: tuition actually fell by 5.3% nationwide (actually about 7% adjusted for inflation, which Statscan, in its wisdom, never does).   You would think, given the annual bewailing, that this is news, something to which the usual suspects – the Toronto Stars and CBCs of the world, the CCPAs and the Canadian Federation of Students and whoever else – might want to call attention.

*Crickets.*

Now, part of the problem is that this number is an average, so that reality is not reflected everywhere. In fact, the decline was only in one part of the country: Ontario (thanks to the Ford government’s policy announcement last January). Everywhere else, tuition increased—in one or two cases by quite a lot (7.3% in New Brunswick and 5.3% in Manitoba).  Still, since this is (I am pretty sure) the first time tuition has declined since Statscan started collecting data on this subject nearly fifty years ago, surely the story is at least worth a small headline…

“But Alex,” I can hear you exasperatedly explain, “it’s not real. Everyone knows that Ford didn’t just cut tuition, he also cut student aid. A lot. So much so that people on student aid are now paying more than they used to, in net terms. It would be irresponsible for anyone to talk about tuition decreasing when net prices are going up.”

Obviously, this is true, as anyone who reads this blog knows.  In fact, I can say pretty confidently that no organization in Canada has done more to talk about net prices and why they matter as much (or more) than sticker prices as HESA and this blog. In principle, it is best not to make too much about changes in sticker prices. 

However, many alleged experts (hi, CCPA!), political parties, and interest groups have claimed the opposite: that sticker price was more important than net price because it was more comprehensible. And indeed, journalists seemed to agree with them.  Go over those annual early September stories for the last twenty years, and see how many of them mentioned:

• That institutional scholarships have nearly tripled in real dollars since 2000
• That non-repayable, needs-based aid from provincial and federal governments has nearly tripled in real dollars since 2000
• That together, these two sources have added more than $4.5 billion in student aid since 2000.
• That if you throw in the extra half-billion or so from extra Canada Education Savings Grants money, you come to a total of $5 billion in new grant money, which offset nearly all of the increase in tuition in that period.
• That enrolment rates in post-secondary education have risen consistently for the past twenty years, thus suggesting that affordability was perhaps not quite so significant a problem as the ‘bewailers’ would suggest.

I will give you a nickel for every such story you can find, and if I’m out more than a quarter, I’d be shocked.  The political-media line on tuition for the past twenty years has been, effectively, that this does not matter, and that sticker price is the only thing we should care about.  But if that’s true, why the silence now? 

Well, there are two possibilities.  The first is that the usual suspects – let’s call them CCPA and the Bewailers – have concluded that we at HESA have been correct all these years, that it’s net price and not sticker price that matters.  Seems a little churlish they wouldn’t actually come out and say it, but we’ll forgive them. 

The other possibility is the CCPA and the Bewailers have not changed their mind, but are keeping shtum because the reason for this lower tuition is Doug Ford’s Ontario government, and they would rather consume their own lower intestines than give the tiniest bit of credit to them.

We cannot know, at this point, which of these is true.  But there will be a moment of reckoning a year from now.  In September 2020, Statistics Canada will again publish its fee data and tuition will certainly rise again.  Not by much: given that fees will still be frozen in Ontario next year, it probably won’t be more than 2%, but the trend will likely be positive, not negative.  And then we’ll find out.  If they’ve really changed their minds (and we hope that’s the case), then we will not hear a word about this tuition increase – or at least it will all be contextualized in broader discussions about student aid.

Or, if we find that we are back to the usual hue and cry, we will know for sure that the Bewailers are simply hypocrites.  Time will tell.