I see that one of my favourite student groups, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Association (OUSA), has come out in favour of a tuition freeze.  Fair enough; not many students endorse fee increases, after all.  But the stated rationale for wanting one is a bit disappointing – mixing, as it does, poor historical analysis with poor generational politics.

Here’s their thinking:

In 1980, student contributions to university operating budgets in Ontario, which include tuition and fees, were only 18 per cent. In 2014, accounting for inflation, that number reached 51 per cent. I’m no financial planner, but I do believe that if I invest 33 per cent more into something—I should probably receive a comparable amount in return, or at the very least, expect to.

So let me ask: are there more jobs available for university graduates? More co-op and paid internship opportunities? Are students being taught to articulate their soft skills to employers? Has the ratio of students to faculty in the classroom improved? Most importantly, are university degrees more valuable now than they were in 1980? If the answer to these questions, particularly the last one, is no, then why are students paying more than ever for a university education?

(You can read the complete document here.)

There are a number of errors here.  Are there more jobs for graduates?  Yes, of course there are.  Maybe not relative to the number of graduates, but even so, graduate unemployment rates are a lot lower than they were in the early 80s and early 90s (though of course that has more to do with the state of the economy than anything else).  More co-ops and paid internships?  Incomparably more.  In 1980, Waterloo was still about the only place doing co-op; today, the practice is widely spread (and at Waterloo itself, the number of co-op students per year is at least three times what it was back then). The only piece that’s unambiguously true here is the bit about student-teacher ratios.

If we really want to understand why students are paying more for their education we need look no further than the facts that: a) enrolments tripled, and b) the cost per-student for education got more expensive (not always for good reasons, but true nonetheless).  Governments paid for part of this – admittedly less so in Ontario than elsewhere in the country – and students paid for the rest.

And this is why we have to be careful when making comparisons over time.  Of course, we could bring student contributions back down to 18% of total costs: but remember, part of what that increased contribution bought was vastly increased access.  Anyone want to make that trade and return to a time of cheaper education for a luckier few?  No, thought not.

So that’s the analytical error.  The political error – and it’s a seductive one, I’ll admit – is to claim that every time a new generation doesn’t get something that the old generation got, it’s “unfair” and a basis to lay a claim on state resources.  But this way madness lies.  Where PSE is concerned, it’s tantamount to saying “our parents were oversubsidized and we demand the same treatment”.  Or maybe, “we’re getting a pretty good deal on PSE, but we demand that our deals be ludicrously good like they were in the 70s”.

For a whole bunch of very long-term demographic and economic reasons, today’s students are going to find it harder than the boomers, and even the Gen Xers did (also harder than the generation that passed through university between 2000 and 2005, who did pretty well).  There’s not a whole lot anyone can do about that: some cohorts just have it easier than others, and progress isn’t always linear.  Policy shouldn’t be totally insensitive to these shifts, but neither should our goal be to preserve certain benefits in amber just because “that’s what our parents got”.

None of this is to say there aren’t decent arguments in favour of tuition freezes, or even that the “universities need to show value for money” argument is wrong.  (If it were me arguing the case, I’d push for limiting increases in student fees to whatever the increase in public funding is.)  But arguing on the basis of changes that have occurred over 35 years is a mistake; too much of the money spent over that period did too much good to be criticized.  Inter-generational arguments are trickier than they look, both analytically and politically.