Education Minister Michelle Courchesne has neither common sense nor public support on her side in her attack on McGill University. She, or Quebec's next education minister, or her boss Premier Jean Charest, will have to back down from her ill-considered, petty, petulant position.
The facts are simple: Quebec students in the master of business administration (MBA) program at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management have been paying Quebec's bargain-basement tuition. With per-student government funding, that's $12,000 in revenue per student/year. But the program costs $22,000 per student/year to run. You see the problem.
McGill's solution is simple: Forego the government money, raise tuition to $29,500, and use the surplus to beef up the program (and to subsidize needy students).
Running an MBA program is costly, Dean Peter Todd told us, because professors - many of whom could be top managers in the private sector - earn more than other profs; because the new curriculum involves team teaching; and because students are offered a lot of career advice and planning.
These factors add value but they add cost, too. Similar tuition-fee systems are popping up at business schools across Canada. Top Ontario business schools, Todd told The Gazette, spend $30- to $35,000 per student per year.
Remember that an MBA program is unlike any other: Students enter with an average of five years' work experience; three years after completing the program they're earning an average of $104,000, McGill says. Many MBA students have part of their fees paid by their employers. (All this is unique to business schools, so there is no thought of this model being expanded to other faculties or subjects.)
It's all too complicated for Courchesne, apparently. She abruptly notified McGill last week that if it goes ahead, she will claw back $28,000 per MBA student from the university.
Her position, though brain-dead, is at least clear: We won't give you the money you need to run a good modern MBA program, and we won't let you get it from students, either.
Yet the minister has no problem with the $65,000 tuition fee for the mid-career executive MBA program McGill operates jointly with the Université-de-Montréal-affiliated HEC. This raises in some minds the suspicion that Courchesne's real problem is about language.
However, McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum said in an interview this week that she thinks the problem is cultural, not linguistic. She might be onto something. Courchesne's absurd insistence on equality - "our responsibility is to ensure that the quality of teaching is comparable all across Quebec" - sounds ominously like a willingness to level downward, since we can't afford to level upward. Plenty of observers have detected in Quebec a sullen sort of "egalitarianism" which disdains, and even tries to punish, excellence.
Universities forbidden to aspire to excellence certainly will not produce any. But Munroe-Blum noted hopefully that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand, and others, have lately emphasized that Quebec urgently needs excellence, in education and in wealth creation, if we hope to maintain our way of life and afford all our social programs. The governing Liberal Party's slogan, for what it's worth, is "shine among the best."
If a willingness to foster excellence truly is "now emerging as a priority" in Quebec, as Munroe-Blum suggests, then somebody really should tell Courchesne about it.
Excellence isn't cheap, and the world of business schools is intensely competitive. In 1999, McGill's MBA program was ranked 35th in the world in Financial Times ratings, Lucien Bouchard and other prominent supporters of the Desautels proposal wrote in Saturday's Gazette; today it ranks 95th.
In its effort to improve the MBA course, the faculty of management and McGill's top officials have support from the MBA students' association, from an impressive chorus of well-placed McGill grads, from many other "lucids," from many in the media, and more. Its proposal is buttressed with additional student aid. If Courchesne persists in her foolish position, Charest should change her mind for her.