If I could ban one word from higher education discussions, it’s “affordability”. It’s a word without precision, and, particularly when used as a synonym for “accessibility”, it’s downright misleading and harmful.
The worst is when someone uses the raw price of a good – in this case tuition – to indicate “affordability”; as in: “tuition went up 5% last year, and that makes it less affordable”. This is simply asinine. When the price of milk or gas goes up, we don’t wring our hands about the “affordability” of milk or gas. We don’t do this for two reasons. The first is that “affordability”, as a concept, is a ratio and not a point. It’s a function not just of price, but of available resources. If people were serious when talking about affordability, they would be talking about it in terms of fractions, not prices.
(This of course raises a question – what should we use as a denominator? When I talk affordability, I tend to use mean or median family income, because nearly all students entering post-secondary education for the first time are drawing on family resources to do so. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives tends to use much smaller numbers as a denominator, like whatever the minimum wage happens to be. I get where they’re coming from on this – many students, as they get older, pick up more of the burden of their education costs [though they also tend to earn significantly more than minimum wage]. My number will tend make the fraction fairly small. Their number will make it look large. Who’s right? It depends; to some extent, we both are.)
Which brings us to the second issue: there are people for whom a night out at the movies is affordable, and others for whom it is not. For some people a Mercedes S-500 is affordable, for others (most of us) it’s not. Demand curves slope downward, and affordability matters at the margin, not the average. Most people are simply not affected by an increase in price. Even in the largest tuition increase in history – the English tuition hike of 2012, where tuition rose by nearly $9,000 – the net effect on applications was only about 5%. To the extent that affordability affects accessibility, the issue is always about how it affects student at the margin, not how it affects the average student.
That’s why student aid is important. Student aid helps the students at the margin (or at least it does so everywhere outside Ontario, where “needy” has been re-defined by a vote-grubbing government as anyone with income under $160,000). Having grants offsetting higher costs is precisely the way affordability concerns should be dealt with – provided you think that affordability is an access issue.
The problem is, for most people the question of affordability is about almost anything other than accessibility. For most, it’s about making sure that whoever is paying for tuition has more money in their pocket to have a better “quality of life”. Parents – you deserve that second vacation each year rather than paying tuition! Students – you should have smaller loan repayments on your way to being the upper-middle class of tomorrow!
Affordability – as a ratio – is thus an important concept in the way we design student aid to help students at the margin. But the way most people try to explain the concept, and the purposes for which they deploy the concept, are either wrong or disingenuous. We need to talk a lot more about access and a lot less about affordability.
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I agree with the general premise of this piece (as I agree with most of what you write), however, I did bristle at your characterization of “better quality of life.” Where you appropriate link access to the populations at the margins, it seems you (I would suggest not completely appropriately) link “quality of life” to the upper middle class.
Second vacation? Really? I don’t have the data; I’ll leave that piece to you. But without drawing an anecdote to support my perception, I will say that my perception living and working in the higher education industry is not that money saved on reduced tuition would go toward second vacations for many students.
Post secondary expenses are a big ticket item for most families. This gets their attention. So, they are more likely to complain about the costs and look for savings than they would for milk. Tuition, supplies and residence costs about $13,000 /yr at my institution (undergrad). And that’s for 1 kid. Some families have more than one child in post-secondary. Some families are single income families. Even for a dual income family, coming up with an extra grand a month isn’t necessarily easy.
I fully agree with you, however, that we should be clear what we are really talking about (i.e. accessibility or more money in pocket) and that affordability as a ratio (or several ratios) makes more sense for reporting. However, the references to a second vacation and to being the ‘upper middle class of tomorrow’ seem a little insulting — if not inaccurate. Let’s remember too, with post-secondary attainment rates being what they are in Canada today, and the value of education (in economic terms) is largely a comparative advantage for the graduate, not every PS graduate will be the upper-middle class.
Hi Carrie. I mostly agree with you. What I am suggesting is that a lot of the “affordability” is picked up as a cudgel by an upper-middle class audience. They imply “accessibility” to make themselves seem virtuous, but in fact the real object is to pay less for their own kids education, which they can easily afford – if they cut consumption in other areas (like vacations). Does affordability matter to some? Absolutely. So let’s talk about how it affects them specifically, and not how it affects the people who *can* pay but are annoyed at having to sacrifice other consumption in order to do so.
I agree that the conversation needs to shift. But when we talk about affordability only in terms of how cost affects our current students, we completely miss the students who are opting out of PSE, or choosing college over university just because it’s cheaper. Or the adults who would return to school but can’t — being excluded from Ontario’s 30% rebate was a real slap in the face for them. I know that accessibility and affordability are not synonymous, but I deal with prospective students every day who walk away because of high ticket prices and complicated loan/grant systems.