The University of Saskatchewan made the Times Higher Education last week when the UK weekly ran a story on the University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and its scheme to admit an extra 25 students per year, provided they pay the full cost of instruction, which is a shade over $60,000. This is about $50,000 more than what students admitted through the current intake process currently pay.  This is not about raising tuition for everyone: it’s about two-tier tuition. There’d be one rate for “top” students who enter through the regular process and another for people who don’t but happen to have a lot of money burning through their (or, more likely, their family’s) pockets.

Interestingly, this story hasn’t caused a lot of waves in Saskatchewan itself – the plan was announced almost ten months ago and as far as I can tell it generated zero subsequent news stories – which is surprising because this is usually the kind of story that sends the Canadian higher education world into a tizzy.  I’m guessing field and location have something to do with it.

What’s behind this move? The main reason is that the CVM is losing a big chunk of its budget next year courtesy of the Government of Alberta.  For decades now, the governments of the four western provinces have jointly funded this program in order to avoid costly duplication, similar to the way the four Atlantic provinces pay for the vet college at UPEI – see my review of a spectacular account of the Vet College’s creation here.  But a decade ago the University of Calgary decided to open up its own vet college (because reasons) and as a result the Alberta government – the NDP one, not the UCP one –decided to stop contributing to the Saskatchewan CVM, thus leaving it in a multi-million dollar financial hole.

Obviously, most Canadians are copasetic with students paying significantly different net prices for the same program.  That’s what merit-based scholarships and need-based grants are meant to achieve, and both have wide support.  We also don’t have a problem with multiple sticker prices provided that international students are paying the extra (or, in the case of Quebec and Nova Scotia, out-of-province students).  But domestic students paying multiple sticker prices?  This tends to make people squirrely.

This isn’t the first time a dual tuition policy has been proposed in Canada.  In the early 1990s – the exact date escapes me, but I am pretty sure it was during the Ontario NDP’s spell between 1990 and 1995 – there was a huge wave of interest in studying education, particularly through post-Bachelor’s programs.  With limited space, some institutions toyed with the idea of this kind of dual pricing system, only for the idea to get knocked back.  Ontario institutions stuck with smaller, low-tuition programs, presumably in the name of access.  Meanwhile, precisely because demand was so high, foreign institutions began offering programs specifically tailored to people wanting to teach in Ontario, which for a while resulted in Buffalo’s D’Youville College having the single largest institutional concentration of Canadian students abroad, enrolling over 900 Canadian students each year and pocketing something in the neighbourhood of $25 million per year in current dollars – money which would have gone quite a long way in Canada had our policy been different.

Abroad, this kind of policy became very common in the 1990s.  In East Africa, countries like Uganda and Kenya had relatively small, free tuition systems in which access to places was restricted by merit (and yes, this led to a hideously regressive system).  In both cases, the number of free places were kept constant and accessed only through exam-based merit assessment, but new spots – which quickly came to outnumber the old ones many-fold – all required fees.  Similarly, the Russian Federation, Romania, Poland and many other post-socialist states chose to meet soaring higher education demand in the 1990s with a mixture of new private universities and dual-tuition schemes at public universities with free spots determined by exam results.

(This still exists in much of the former socialist area, though the demographically-led collapse of enrolment in these countries means that the context has changed: governments keep funding the same number of places, institutions allow the enrolment decline to occur entirely on the tuition-based places and pretty soon you’re back to a free tuition system.  At public universities, anyway).

Even Australia played with this concept at one point.  Under the Howard government in the late 1990s, universities had a restricted number of subsidized students they could accept, but the Commonwealth government did permit institutions to offer full-fee places to students.  These never ended up being a major part of the system (if memory serves, numbers topped out at 2-3% of the student body) and they were eventually banned by the Gillard government about ten years ago.

In any event, it’s an interesting development, and it will be informative to see who exactly feels like forking over $250,000 over four years to become a veterinarian.  Just remember, it’s not actually all that ground-breaking, globally speaking.