A few weeks ago, I noted on Twitter that back when I was in student politics (24 years and counting) we opposed tuition hikes because we feared their negative effect on access. Back then, fees hadn’t increased in real terms in almost two decades, so there wasn’t much evidence either way on the issue. More than two decades on, the evidence has accumulated, and, on the whole, it turns out that what we believed back then was mostly mistaken: despite much higher tuition, more students than ever are attending PSE, and more low-income students than ever are attending PSE.
As a result, it’s increasingly ridiculous to use access arguments against tuition increases: basically you’re reduced to slogans like, “tuition reduces access! And it’s a disgrace more people are paying it every year!” Given this, I asked Twitter peeps what the best grounds were for opposing higher tuition and debt. The most common answer was some variation of “tuition/debt causes inequality”, on the grounds that graduates with debt accumulate assets more slowly than students without debt.
Superficially plausible, maybe, but still wrong. Inequality doesn’t exist “because of” borrowing. Everybody pays equal tuition fees; debt is incurred by those who don’t have the cash up front to pay for it. Blaming student aid for inequality is just blaming student aid for the fact that some students come from poorer families, and others from richer ones. You don’t have to condone inequality to realize that it’s a silly proposition.
So, students who go in rich don’t accumulate debt, and therefore end up richer at the other end; students who go in poor do accumulate debt, and therefore remain poorer at the other end. But that would be true regardless of how fees are set. If you reduce fees for all, everybody is made better by the same amount. Poorer families end up with less debt, richer families get to keep more cash-in-hand. For the abolition of fees to reduce inequality, it would have to create some kind of behavioural change among richer parents that would make them less likely to pass that extra money on to their kids. And how likely is that?
These are all pretty basic observations, yet they rarely make it into the debate about tuition and debt. Partly, it’s because inter-generational transfers complicate the analysis, but I think it’s mostly because debt makes people squirrelly. As Margaret Atwood and David Graeber have pointed out in recent books, the concept of debt is tied-up with an enormous amount of cultural baggage, which makes it difficult to talk about in purely economic terms. For the next couple of days, I’ll be unpacking some of these cultural issues, and how they affect our discourse on debt.
More tomorrow.
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Good observation.
Inasmuch as I do understand debt in a political economy context is part of a broader framework with its own ideological connotations, would not the idea that tuition fees should be abolished really just make the rich even richer? Now, if the whole thing was scaled according to income so that person A with a family income of less than 100k pays x amount as opposed to person B with a family income of more than 100k, then that is in the neighbourhood of fairness – but note that it is in the neighbourhood, not necessarily ACTUAL fairness and equality. The number of logistical problems this would create in introducing some kind of scalable tuition fee model would be nightmarish. It also risks lumping people simply according to income as though all people of a certain income level can be considered homogeneous. Not so. It is difficult for me not to see the Ontario Liberals’ 30% tuition rebate to a certain income as little more than throwing a bone to the middle class in order to secure their votes – but I’m cynical.
Now, I’m not a big fan of raising tuition every time universities find themselves in crisis, either. As someone who is *still* repaying his student loans, and doing so well above the minimum payment as best as possible, I can’t call unfairness when there are programs out there should I find myself in financial difficulties, such as the RAP (although I seemed to have missed the boat on the old forgiveness program). Yeah, student debt repayment, pending how long one has spent in the halls, can be equivalent to a mortgage payment. That, unfortunately, is life, and is part of the many decisions we make when we speculate on our future by assuming some degree of risk. Now, that sounds fairly neoliberal, but I don’t intend it to sound that way: I think there is certainly a navigable course whereby fairness is assured whilst also taking some degree of personal responsibility.
I have difficulty with the access question since it conflates two seemingly separate issues: education and credentialism. No doubt attending university and earning a degree satisfies (hopefully) both, whereas education is something one can elect to do independently without credit or a trail of letters at the end of one’s name. It is not as though the great canonical works are kept away in some medieval cloister, reproduced by hand at an enormous cost affordable only to the ecclesiastical elite; Amazon, a garage sale, or even just entering a university library is accessible to most people. I could buy Aristotle’s Poetics for about five bucks at a used bookstore, go to any university library (or hop online) and read commentaries and criticism, and should I feel so bold, find out what professors are teaching Aristotle and ask a polite email to discuss when they have the time. And, I could assure you that if a member of the public ever approached me as a faculty member and wanted to discuss some finer point in Plato, judging by how barren office hours can be when no assignment is coming due, I personally wouldn’t snub my nose and decline the opportunity. I would wager that the public has more access to education in its non-credentialized sense than they might think.
So, that being said, perhaps we should be very careful what is meant by access in terms of access to WHAT. If it means access to the structured curriculum of module choices in a discipline leading to, if successful in being evaluated as a “pass,” a degree which may or may not be leveraged in a future job or future studies, then that is different than access to education in general.