In a series of two texts, Pier-André Bouchard St-Amant and Laurence Vallée, of the National School of Public Administration, do me the honor of criticizing, without naming them, my work on the financing of universities in Quebec. .
The first text is intended to be a defense of the fairness of allocation of the operating grant, which is an amount allocated, essentially, according to the number of students in each university. The authors engage in various calculations to prove that, with regard to the allocation of these funds, from an accounting point of view, UQAM is not disadvantaged.
They are, however, knocking down an open door, because I agree with them, having come to the conclusion that “if we do the analysis according to the language of instruction, English-speaking universities have $5,040/EETP (definition of a student equivalent to full-time) via the standard grant while French-speaking universities receive $5,002/EETP, amounts that are almost exactly equal”3.
But in the same text, I emphasize that English-language universities “remain favored from the point of view of the institutional completeness they enjoy”. “Institutional completeness” is an important concept, recognized in Canadian law4, which makes it possible to understand how the linguistic vitality, ie the ability to retain and recruit new speakers, of a community is linked to the “completeness”, or the funding of the institutional network it has. In the case of Anglophones in Quebec, I demonstrated in my book Why Law 101 is a failure (Boréal, 2020) that they have, for their universities, global funding equivalent to three times their demographic weight. This “overcompleteness” for Anglophones (which is equivalent to underfunding for Francophones) helps to understand why Anglophone universities (and CEGEPs) have become a major vector of the anglicization of Montreal. The authors carefully avoid going into this field.
But where I disagree is on the cause of the drop in student numbers at UQAM. The authors state that the “labour shortage affects university enrolments” and particularly UQAM. Without a doubt. But is this enough to explain the significant drop in enrollment since 2014 (-9.15% overall and -23.4% at the undergraduate level)?
And above all, why did Concordia’s (a comparable English-language institution) enrollment continue to grow until 2020 when the economy was doing well? Concordia has experienced a slight decline since 2020 (-2.2%), but this is mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the second text, the authors demonstrate that McGill has 148% more money per student than UQAM. But Concordia is omitted from the calculation. Is it because it would have shown that an inequity based on the language of instruction does indeed exist? As for the National Institute of Scientific Research, it is a university which does not offer the first cycle and which skews the calculation. It should also be noted that the authors do not speak specifically of capital funds, which have long favored English-language universities.5. Note also that 60% of the funds of the 2023-2033 Quebec Infrastructure Plan are reserved for McGill and Concordia.6.
Language is a major structuring factor that greatly affects enrollment flows in Montreal universities. Language has been shown to be THE explanatory factor for student enrollment in an English CEGEP7. And that 90% of their graduates choose to continue their university studies at McGill or Concordia. Not to mention the very clear preference of international students (a very lucrative clientele) for programs in English. The decline of UQAM mirrors the decline of French Montreal.
The accounting equity of the funding formula, which is based on the fiction of a “free market” for students, is shattered by the reality of the asymmetry of the balance of power between English and French in Quebec and Canada. . This fictitious equity therefore leads to an effective inequity. The tongue is the elephant in the china store of the funding formula. Isn’t it time to integrate the notion of “institutional completeness”, a concept that explicitly aims for equity between Canada’s two major linguistic communities, into the funding formula for Quebec universities?