Here’s a thing which has puzzled me for pretty much the entirety of my adult life: why is it that the New Democratic Party – in theory the party most likely to defend the marginalized – can’t come up with decent student aid policies?  Why is it that at every turn, they choose to embrace the policies that are the least equitable and effective?

(Major caveat: I exempt the BC New Democrats from this analysis, because they mostly have their act together on this).

To understand the root of the problem, it’s worth going back to first principles on policy. Student aid is based on the following principles:

• Finances can be a barrier to studying at the post-secondary level.
• But not equally so for everyone. Some students will have better access to personal and family resources than others.
• Money is scarce.
• So you when handing out money you prioritize the people who need it most.

On the last point, it is possible for people to disagree in good faith about which students need money, how much they need, and the extent to which the aid should be offered as a loan or a grant. And some of those answers are conditioned by the amount of money available to distribute. But the problem with the NDP is that the party fundamentally doesn’t accept the second point: that need is unequally distributed. Which, you know, is odd for a party that is supposed to have deep thoughts about inequality.
Let’s look at two examples. The most important is in Alberta, where the party was in power between 2015 and 2019 and inherited a mess in student aid. Up until 2010 or so, Alberta had arguably one of the most generous systems of student aid in the country – more generous than Quebec’s on some measures. But then when the first oil bust hit, the Stelmach government cut the vast majority of its grant and remission programs, backfilled them with loans, and then told students they could borrow even more, because he was removing the parental contribution rules on provincial loans (they are still present on federal ones). The result was that instantly, Alberta students were borrowing more than students anywhere else in the country and were receiving fewer grants, as a percentage of total aid, that anyone else was. Figure 1 shows the situation in 2017-18, but the situation was pretty much the same for Alberta from 2011 onwards, so it portrays the situation the NDP faced upon taking power.
 
Figure 1: Average loan and grant per aid recipient, by province, 2017-18

Oh, and during this period, thanks presumably to the oil bust, Alberta had the fastest rate of new borrower growth in the country: up 36% between 2014-15 and 2017-18.  So more borrowers, highest average debt: an obvious policy challenge to take up, yes?

Over four years in power, though, the NDP did not lift a finger to address student aid.  Instead, it spent money – tens of millions each year – to fund a tuition freeze.  By definition, a tuition freeze helps everyone, whether they have financial need or not (and in AB, like most provinces, only around 40% of students borrow in any given year).  In a very real sense, the NDP gave 60% of their “money for students” to students who had no urgent financial need.  Had they put all that money in student aid, they could have put a significant dent in those average debt loads, and ensure that Alberta students did not have the highest average debt loads of any students in the country.

They chose not to do so.

It’s the same thing in Ontario, where the NDP’s higher education critic, Chris Glover, recently unveiled a new proposal in which every student would get a $1,000 rebate on their tuition.  This would be a policy with a price-tag north of half a billion dollars.  As with the Alberta tuition freeze, about half of this money is going to go into the pockets of individuals who are not considered to be sufficiently in need to require a loan or a grant.  If instead one chose to put that money back into the Ontario Student Assistance Plan, it would go a long way to reversing the devastating cuts that the Ford government made to the plan back in early 2019.  But, again, the NDP prefers to pretend that unequally distributed need is not a thing.  In their minds, apparently, it is illegitimate to give money to students from poorer backgrounds unless those from more privileged backgrounds get their taste as well.

I don’t think I can overstate how ridiculous these policies of freezes and rebates are.  They’re actually even a worse policy than free tuition.  At least with free tuition you at least can conceivably address some other policy goals through increased control of university purse strings.  But here there is not even a pretense that this money is being targeted to promote either access or any other policy goals: it’s just “here’s a check for you and here’s a check for you, and….”.

 
Now, the NDP has plenty of bright policy wonks.   They can’t be under any pretense that such policies are either effective or equitable.  So, what is going on here?  Simple.  Most NDP parties do not actually care about solving the access question; what it cares about are youth votes.  And so, it picks policy solutions which are adjacent to the question of access, but don’t actually solve it, because a targeted program won’t pick up as many votes as a “money for all” approach.

  
That’s it.  Effectiveness?  Equity?  Fuhgeddaboudit.  For the NDP (again, BC excepted), its about looking like you are doing something on access, not actually achieving anything or – God forbid – providing money where it is needed most.