It’s an important question as students take to the streets, yet again, over tuition-fee hikes: Does higher tuition result in lower university participation?
In Quebec, will a hike of $325 a year in tuition over five years really be so onerous that it will scare off thousands of students?
It seems improbable that it would. If tuition fees really made a difference, university-age Quebecers should be lined up at university admission offices and scrambling for their share of the province’s loans and bursaries. But they aren’t. Quebec may have the lowest tuition fees in the country, but it is also the province whose students are among the least likely to attend university.
Whatever cause and effect is at work here, it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with low tuition fees. Maybe students should stop and think about what is going on before taking to the streets.
A major, but generally unremarked-on, reason that fewer Quebecers than other Canadians go to university is the province’s high-school-dropout rate. This creates a smaller pool of candidates with even the minimal requisites for university. In Quebec’s case, the minimum requirement is a CEGEP degree, which is to say one degree beyond a high-school diploma.
The highest dropout rate in Canada is among French-speaking Quebec males, at 19.3 per cent, a full nine percentage points higher than the Canadian average of 10.3 per cent. French-speaking Quebec females also have a higher dropout rate than the national average for young women, at 11.5 per cent, compared to 6.6 per cent.
Quebec researchers say that behind francophone males’ academic failings lie pernicious stereotypes. Université de Montréal academic Roch Chouinard found that boys and girls have different ideas of what leads to success. Boys believe that intelligence means they don’t have to apply themselves, particularly if they don’t like a given subject. Girls, on the other hand, think that although intelligence is indispensable to success, so is effort. Girls also see academic success as their ticket to success in life and work. Boys, especially in poorer neighbourhoods, think they can rely on being male to achieve in life.
While there is still a premium attached to be a man in the workplace, it is nothing like it once was. For decades there has been no guarantee for a high-school dropout of any kind of decently paid, stable employment. An investment in higher education is a young person’s investment in himself or herself.
For the wider Quebec/Canadian society, a well-educated workforce has become the key bulwark in a global economy whose one constant is change.
Universities have tried, they say, to tell upcoming students that the cost of a university education is paid back many times over the course of a lifetime of working. So has the world of business. The Bank of Montreal has produced figures showing that dropping out of school is disastrous for an individual. Its research found that dropouts earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over their lifetime, make up the majority of welfare recipients, and have a shorter life expectancy and a higher incidence of depression.
Another important factor in Quebec’s comparatively low university enrolments is the prevailing attitude toward education. A 2005 report, L’éducation: l’avenir du Quebec, found that only 81 per cent of Quebecers surveyed felt it is “extremely important to ensure students have a good knowledge of reading, writing and mathematics,” compared with 94 per cent of respondents in the rest of the country.
Only 61 per cent of Quebecers said it is extremely important to “develop a disciplined attitude to studying.” In the rest of Canada, that figure was 80 per cent. Only 60 per cent of Quebecers said it is extremely important to “acquire the skills that could lead to a good job,” whereas 82 per cent of those surveyed in other provinces felt the same.
There’s a lot of collateral damage caused by undervaluing education. A minor but important part of that is that students overestimate how long it will take them to pay off the average university debt of $14,000, which is a little over half the debt of students in the rest of the country.
Quebec and its universities have a critical role to play here: make sure young people in the province understand that if they need a loan for higher education, they’ll get it. And make sure they know it’s worth it.