Maple Spring, ten years later | A legacy taboo

There is a legacy of the student spring that is less talked about: the taboo on university funding.

Basically, the student strikers largely won. Jean Charest lost the election and his tuition hike was replaced by indexation^{⁠ 1}.

But there was a collateral victim: the universities themselves.

The student movement not only denounced the increase. He also challenged the premise that motivated it, university underfunding.

The strikers could have both refused this increase while dreaming of a university better financed by other means. But it was harder to defend, so the underfunding was reduced to a simple management problem. As if it only resulted from advertising expenses or the salaries of rectors.

Universities came out weakened. Even today, governments believe they have more to lose than to gain by playing with this emotional subject. Anyway, who votes according to higher education?

Of course, there is no objective way to assess the “right” level of funding. It depends on the answer to two questions: what should our universities be used for, and who are we comparing ourselves to?

One thing is certain, by comparing ourselves, we do not console ourselves.

Our baccalaureate graduation rate is lower than in the rest of Canada. The same goes for our public funding per student. And these gaps have widened over the past 20 years.

This is demonstrated by a new study by economist Pierre Fortin, carried out for the Bureau de coordination universitaire^⁠2.

Quebec is not backing down. Both of these indicators have improved for us. But this progress has been faster elsewhere in the country. Each year that passes, our delay increases.

The student crisis was followed by the cycle of Liberal cuts. It took until 2016 for the start of reinvestment, and 2018 for the filing of a new university funding policy.

The CAQ government has increased budgets. However, Quebec is still about $1 billion behind the rest of the country.

Other findings from Mr. Fortin’s study qualify this portrait.

When we calculate all of the post-secondary diplomas, including CEGEP, Quebec is ahead of the rest of the country. We are also doing at least as well as the other provinces for university attendance. But fewer of our students earn a bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate.

Is it because we don’t value education enough? Mr. Fortin does not believe it. The proof according to him: the university attendance of Francophones is equivalent to that of Anglophones in Quebec. Rather, he blames the double effect of demography and underfunding.

In response to the limited pool of students and modest resources, our universities have adjusted their approach. They now offer a multitude of short-term training courses that are less expensive to operate. Analyzed individually, there is nothing wrong with these diplomas. But their accumulation results in a lower rate of baccalaureate holders, and it is worse in the French-speaking network.

It is not without consequence. Baccalaureate holders earn 15% more than certificate holders^⁠3.

Since the subject is still delicate today, I will make it clear again, for the benefit of all readers who are already angry at this stage of the column: I am not saying that it is because of the students.

I simply note that since this conflict, the subject has aroused relative general indifference and that no government has felt the political interest to remedy it.

The strikers were fighting for accessible and equitable education. But too little was said about another form of equity: that between establishments.

And in this regard, we have backtracked.

Previously, universities redistributed among themselves the income of foreign students. The Couillard government abolished this equalization in 2018.

McGill and Concordia do not have the same linguistic constraints as their rivals. They can thus attract “customers” from all over the planet. This foreign workforce has almost tripled over the past 20 years^⁠4 and the trend will only grow with distance learning. It has become a real industry^⁠5.

These universities have more money to recruit the best researchers, a competition that puts their French-speaking neighbors at a disadvantage.

The transfer of the land of the Royal-Victoria hospital is thus less a problem than a symptom of a greater injustice. What should cause concern is not so much that Quebec gives it to McGill. It is rather that this university was the only one with the means to present a viable project.

Of course, our universities do not need to be cast in the same mould. The differences can be justified if they are part of a considered vision where the establishments complement each other. However, there was no such debate in 2018.

Why ? Partly because universities have negligible political weight.

This was true long before the strike, but one could have hoped that this popular uprising would at least reverse this indifference a little.

In 2012, the strikers not only denounced the increase in their bill. They were fighting for a certain vision of education and accessibility.

The status quo obtained is disappointing.

An anecdote on this subject, told by a person who attended the convocation of the degrees of a faculty of medicine before the strike. Many students received their diploma from the hands of a doctor: their own relative. An investigation was also made in this establishment, the name of which I was asked to conceal. Half of the youth enrolled had a postal code from the wealthiest neighborhood quintile. They would therefore have had no difficulty in paying more for their education.

Few dare to talk about it. This is another taboo inherited from the strike.

To be fair, the problem is upstream, in the school segregation that begins in high school. And these injustices, the strikers vigorously denounced.

Barely 15% of young people from the “ordinary” public will go to university, compared to 51% of their peers from the “enriched” public and 60% of those who attend the private sector ⁶. The choice of school is strongly determined by the education of the parents and, to a lesser extent, by their income.

However, there is some hope. In 2016, nearly 60% of students enrolled in the Université du Québec network were the first in their family to enter university.^⁠7. It can therefore be assumed that they will transmit this value to their children and that inequalities will decrease.

In his defense, the Legault government is investing a little more in higher education. Last September, he launched a five-year plan that would inject an average of 90 million per year to help student academic success and mental health.^⁠8. Added to this is the new Observatory on Success in Higher Education.

In November, the caquistes also injected targeted sums – a total of 3.9 billion over five years in loans and bursaries for professions in need of manpower (nursing sciences, education, computer science, engineering).

The need there was urgent, indeed. But despite its merit, this approach will not be enough.

In higher education, investments take time to materialize and shortage sectors are difficult to determine in advance.

For example, employers are currently snapping up civil engineering graduates. But who can predict where the market will be in 20 years? With the climate crisis, chemical engineering could become more sought after. And who knows where a supposedly “useless” degree in history might lead? Video game maker Ubisoft is recruiting these experts from the past.

Moreover, according to a CIRANO study, the financial return of a training in pure and applied sciences differs very little from that of a diploma in human, social and administrative sciences (15.2% against 14.7%). ^⁠9.

In 2012, the liberals reduced higher education to an individual investment for which it was justified to go into debt. It was a utilitarian and reductive vision.

As the strikers reminded us, the university is much more than that. It disseminates knowledge and it trains individuals. It has intrinsic value.

It remains that there is nothing wrong with also recalling its economic effect. It was the progressive vision at the heart of a Quiet Revolution slogan, “Who learns, gets richer”.

I come back to the comparison with the rest of Canada and the original question: are our universities funded enough? Maybe so, if we continue to have so little ambition…

Quebec is a small, aging nation whose French-speaking majority has not quite caught up with its historic backwardness.

By canceling the increase in their tuition fees, the strikers won. But the problem of underfunding of French-speaking universities remains. By trivializing it, Quebec has also lost a great deal.

⁠1. However, the gap between the Liberal proposal and the PQ indexation is less great than is claimed. For a quantified demonstration, my colleague Francis Vailles will come back to it tomorrow.

^⁠2. To read Pierre Fortin’s study (from page 17):

^⁠3. According to Statistics Canada’s 2016 census.

^⁠4. The figure comes from the report The university of the futurefiled in February 2021.

⁠5. In 2018-2019, English-speaking universities collected 47% of tuition fees and other fees paid by university students in Quebec, despite having only 28% of students.

^⁠6. To read the study on access to post-secondary education in Quebec

^⁠7. To read a brief summary of this study by Thérèse Bouffard, professor in the psychology department at UQAM

⁠8. To read the map of Quebec

^⁠9. To read the study The private and social return of university education in Quebec (2015) :