No free university: PQ
The PQ drew a line in the sand this weekend in advance of the conference on higher education coming at the end of February: university won’t be free. ASSÉ is already threatening to boycott the conference (La Presse’s photo illustration for that item is a mite inflammatory).
At the same time, Pauline Marois is hoping to emulate her Scottish analogue and lower the voting age to 16. It seems clear she believes the kids will be more radical than their elders, presumably supporting the PQ in future elections and referenda – but she may be mistaken on that point, especially if her government makes it harder for them to get an education. (She may also be kidding herself in assuming they’ll vote much at all.)
Stefan 10:58 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
also in austria the voting age has been lowered to 16, in 2007. it favors parties which are already popular with young people even more. not sure how the affinity of the quebecois parties is there. also they definitely vote less.
note that for elections occurring every four years this still means average entry of voters at 18, and some would still only vote when being 20.
Tux 12:21 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
“Education will never be free” *sigh* No fucking imagination or ambition. In other words, “If you can’t afford university, enjoy a life of low wages, poor benefits, and decreased social status. We ain’t got NO CANDY for you.”
Matthew 12:27 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
Tux, you’re thinking one-dimensionally. Free education is not the only way to make university accessible to people on low wages. I would argue it’s not so much about the cost, but about how it gets paid back. That I think is where the solution to this whole thing lies.
Josh 12:48 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
And the other point is that a bachelor’s degree is no longer the same ticket to prosperity it once was. I don’t know about all this focus on university as opposed to technical school/trades. I don’t see why it should be one or the other.
Bill Binns 13:14 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
I could really get onboard with free university if slots were given out based entirely on highschool grades and the results of an entrance exam with no loopholes. It works this way in France both to enter university and to progress into each successive year. The result is a population of nice quiet serious students who are too busy to break windows and light fires.
Ephraim 14:17 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
How about university based on grades, with a reduction based on average class grade, so the easier the marking the class, the less it counts. Might get the students to actually WORK hard instead of simply choosing the easiest classes to pass.
Of course free doesn’t usually work. When you don’t value anything you are willing to waste it, abuse it, not care. CEGEP is a good example, what percentage graduate on time?
jeather 14:25 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
It’s a good idea: a straight focus on grades and test results would show a pure meritocracy, as neither of those are at all affected by class. That’s why NCLB has been a rousing success.
No\Deli 14:57 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
Bootstraps, jeather!
qatzelok 15:11 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
I’m strongly in favor of a free education – not because it would increase everyone’s income – but because it would improve the comments I read on this blog. Trade school, on the other hand, doesn’t help in creating better people with more insight into the world around them. It just creates more powerful worker ants.
Tux 15:14 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
Matthew, I’m not saying that not getting a degree is a one-way ticket to mediocrity in Quebec (I’m only high school educated and I still make a decent salary having taught myself programming and network administration) I’m just saying that there’s a certain unnecessary hard-headedness about saying education will never be free. Someone who says ‘never’ is not creative, intelligent, or optimistic. Just the kind of people we love to have running shit here. It’s depressing. Education and accreditation open all kinds of doors, and to say that we could never possibly make it affordable to say, someone working minimum wage, is just all kinds of fucked up. I suppose we’ll never be able to feed, clothe and house everyone either, even though the technological means to do so already exist.
Ant6n 15:43 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
To be fair, even free education costs money, because you need to pay for housing, food, study materials, etc. The trick is to make education cheap enough such that the impact of the cost of tuition is small relative to the other costs, and such that the overall costs can be covered by the student working half time, without going to debt too much. The previously proposed tuition increases would have stepped over that threshold.
Regarding the meritocracy when applying to university – aren’t the R-scores helping to reduce unfairness?
jeather 15:59 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
I tend to support cheap — but not quite free — education that is essentially paid for by taxes. A problem is that this encourages people to leave afterwards, because then they get cheap tuition and lower taxes.
On the other hand, I’ve long wanted our medical schools to charge market rates where the government would forgive loans as you worked in the province, and I could see something similar (but not with anywhere near the tuition I think should be charged for medical school, just to make this clear) working for undergraduate, especially if we could include non-tuition related expenses. I’m not sure entirely how that would work out. But there are a lot of ways one could imagine trying to ensure that schooling is accessible to everyone and people pretend none of them exist.
The r-score just set up a different way of trying to game the system. I agree it’s somewhat better, but it’s still nowhere close to straight meritocratic.
Ant6n 16:13 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
@jeather
Medical education and tuition should probably be considered completely separate from the rest of the post-secondary education system. Charging people the full rate, and giving them loans, which would be forgiven as they work in Quebec over a period of, say, 10 years, would probably reduce the flight of trained medical professionals and the associated costs.
Josh 16:34 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
Not classist at all there, qatz.
Ephraim 18:54 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
Somehow, I still think we should do what some countries do. You pay actual costs and over a period of x years you get your tuition rebated via the tax system. You don’t stay, you don’t get the tuition rebated… and we stop paying for those who leave the province.
Robert J 19:18 on 2013/01/28 Permalink
@BillBinns in France you pay your whole life for mistakes you made at 18 years old. If you don’t pass your BAC you have one chance to retake it, and the first fail appears on your transcripts for the rest of your life. After that, you are funnelled into universities with little accreditation or technical schools with very few options to change course later on. I’ve heard of 45-year olds getting turned down for jobs because of this.
Also, the French “grandes écoles” are elitist and only accept graduates from prestigious prep schools, regardless of students’ marks. Many people are born into areas with what are perceived as poor quality schools– they’re screwed regardless how hard they try and how well they do. It is not a meritocracy by any stretch of the imagination.
As a result, there are way more disenfranchised young people who have been punished their whole lives, and believe me they are out breaking windows.
qatzelok 07:11 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
@ Josh: “Not classist at all there, qatz.”
My comment was anti-classist. I don’t believe that the only people to get a real education should be the work-allergic offspring of the upper classes. The poor and working classes need to learn just as much about the workings of the natural and manmade world around us, and this can only be obtained through a liberal-arts general education.
dwgs 09:19 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
@qatzelok Not classist except for your belief that anyone who works in the trades is apparently a mindless drone. Oh, and the implication that the folks who comment here are by and large a bunch of barely literate mouth breathers. Good thing you’re around to illuminate us.
Kate 09:35 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
Robert J, that’s exactly what the CAQ would like to institute in Quebec.
David Tighe 09:36 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
I think it is a self-evident fact that free or almost free university education must be accompanied by admission requirements based on level of excellence at secondary/CEGEP levels. Modulated of course depending on the faculty. Ireland had up to recently a free system (recently abolished I think) but entrance requirements, depending on the faculty, based on secondary leaving results and extremely stringent. You have to have worked quite hard to get into university
jeather 11:20 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
David, I think you could do an “easy to get accepted, hard to stay in, possible to be readmitted” plan that would work for cheap education.
Kevin 13:39 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
@Tux
A creative, intelligent person might realize that bursaries and scholarships exist precisely for the people you describe. ;)
@Kate
I don’t see anything at all in what you linked to what @Robert J was talking about.
qatzelok 14:07 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
@ dwgs: ” Not classist except for your belief that anyone who works in the trades is apparently a mindless drone.”
I never said that. I said that all “training” does is create more efficient and voracious consumers. I have two trade degrees myself, along with a lot of liberal arts education, and I don’t see how trades-alone can do anything to improve our sorry lack of wisdom towards the earth or each other.
Kevin 23:59 on 2013/01/29 Permalink
@qatzelok
I’ve never seen much evidence that *any* education stream can impart wisdom to those unwilling to accept it.
Character, now find me someone with character and it doesn’t matter whether they are a tradesman or a scholar, they will have respect and deep thoughts.
qatzelok 07:08 on 2013/01/30 Permalink
Kevin, “character” is exactly what a good education can help develop. Whereas trades just give people with bad characters more skills so they can buy nicer stuff. I have nothing against skills – we all need them to compete with one another in the marketplace. But without character – we are collectively doomed.