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The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) put out its Alternative Federal Budget last month (earlier and much shorter than usual, for reasons I don’t understand).  As has been the case for the last couple of years, the AFB included a “free tuition” program.  Basically, their idea is a conditional transfer to provinces to “eliminate tuition fees in all programs” on condition that provinces “match their share of the cost” and observe some as-of-yet non-existent Canada Post-Secondary Education Act (a perennial CAUT/NDP idea which is a total non-starter in any version of federalism this country has ever seen and which I wrote about back here).  This program, they estimate, will cost the federal government $3.77 billion, meaning that the total cost of getting rid of tuition is $7.54 billion.

But where does this number come from?  We know simply from looking at Statistics Canada data (FIUC and FINCOL surveys of university and college revenues/expenditures, if you want to check for yourselves) that total tuition fees paid in Canada was a little over $12.4 billion in 2015-16. So, a putative federal program which eliminated fees should cost something on the order of $6.2 billion plus a couple of years worth of inflation.  CCPA would seem to be off by an order of about 65%.

Is it that they are eliminating cost-savings from other programs which could be curtailed or cut?  Well, they do account for savings, but those are accounted for separately: the $3.77B is just “cost”.  Are they perhaps excluding fees for international students?  There is no indication of this, and in any case if they were the amount subtracted would be too high.  Did they goof and look only at university tuition?  Doesn’t look like it – FIUC says university tuition was $9.6 billion in 2015-16.

So what is it?

To figure out this mystery I went back in time to look at the last eight alternative federal budgets.  Turns out there is a story here.  There is no detailed costing in the 2019, 2018 or 2017 AFBs, though the amount the project is expected to cost does rise slightly from year to year.  But if you go back to the 2016 budget there are some figures, if not a particularly coherent explanation thereof, on page 115.  I reproduce them below.

Now, if you have even the slightest acquaintance with PSE finances, these figures make no sense whatsoever.  How can it cost *more* to eliminate tuition in Quebec than in British Columbia when the latter collects substantially more in tuition, even with its smaller student population?  How can it only cost $1.6 billion to get rid of half of tuition in Ontario when the fee income of institution in that province 2015-16 was over $6 billion?

To get an answer, you need to go back in time just one more year.  In 2015 – and as far as I can tell through the entirety of Harper’s third term, AFB’s proposal was not free tuition, but a more modest reset of tuition to 1992 levels for all college and undergraduate programs (why 1992?  No idea. Not explained).  Here is the costing they provide on page 121 of that document:

This is…well, whackadoodle.  Follow the logic a second: figure 7 says tuition increased by $3,616 over 23 years which is true if all you are counting is university tuition: college tuition is not tracked and if it were the increase wouldn’t be anywhere near that high.  So, mistake number 1.  Then, to get from an average increase of $3,616 to a total cost of $2.759 billion (figure 8), simple division tells you that the number of students they assume are paying tuition is 763,000.  Which…uh…no.  That number is about right if you only take full-time undergraduates in degree programs at universities.  But even this more limited pre-2016 proposal was supposed to take in everyone in college or university who wasn’t a graduate student.  The real number is more like 1.8 million students, of whom 1.35 million are full-time and 450,000 part-time.

So here’s what I think happened: whenever this idea was hatched, CCPA never looked at the actual tuition figures in FINCOL and FIUC (of which I suspect them to be blissfully unaware).  Rather, they took the average growth in university tuition between 1992 and 2015 and multiplied it by the number of full-time university undergraduates in degree programs (763,000) and came up with a figure of $2.759 billion.  This figure they pretended would cover the cost of reducing tuition for 1.8 million college and university students.

Then, in 2016, they changed the nature of the promise but basically kept the same bizarre process for estimating costs.  At the time, the national average for full-time undergraduate university students was $6,201. If you take their estimated total cost for 2016/17 they believed there were 1.064 million students, which again is almost right if you only count full-time undergraduate students.  But this remains is a huge undercount.  It excludes over 1.4 million graduate students, part-time students, and college students, all of whom are allegedly covered under their program.

Possibly I have this narrative wrong: if the CCPA wishes to provide an alternate explanation for how it came up with a number which appears to be off by 65%, I will publish it here.  But in the meantime, assume that any figure you hear about tuition fees from CCPA is highly unreliable.