This text is part of the special Higher Education notebook
Last October, the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, announced a set of measures targeting tuition fees for foreign students and students from outside Quebec. This announcement sparked discussions, particularly on the relevance of the current funding model and the need to rethink it to be in line with the university mission of teaching and research.
In Quebec, university funding is mainly based on public funds through a funding formula linked to the number of students enrolled in an establishment. As explained by Pier-André Bouchard St-Amant, associate professor at the National School of Public Administration (ENAP) and author of the book Demystifying the university funding formula, establishments also benefit from income linked to tuition fees, which also depend on the number of students enrolled. University income can also come from private grants as well as research grants, the author says. He explains that, overall, public subsidy takes up 50 to 80% of the total university budget. Last October, the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, also announced a certain number of measures, including an increase in tuition fees for foreign students and those outside Quebec.
Increase in student funding
Christine Gauthier, vice-president of the National Federation of Teachers of Quebec (FNEEQ), responsible for the university group, is concerned by the significant increase in university funding by students in recent years. “For us, this reveals a problem that we do not want to see in the financing of universities”, namely the increase in “the share of financing coming from students”.
She denounces an outdated funding model and a certain mercantile logic going against the public university mission useful to society. The race for students, and moreover for foreign students, is not without danger and can lead to certain harmful decisions, leading to the consideration that certain programs would be “less profitable”. According to Mme Gauthier, preventing this mercantile logic is therefore essential to preserve university freedom of research and teaching. Accessibility to studies also becomes problematic when fees are increased. She believes that this situation is not without danger, because unstable funding dependent on attendance can also create a risk of staff insecurity.
The increase in tuition fees for students outside Quebec, announced last October, also seems to reinforce this mercantile logic. “In addition to being insufficient, it does not resolve the problem of competition [entre universités] and contributes to seeing international students as a source of funding,” explains the vice-president.
No perfect solution
In order to ensure academic freedom, Christine Gauthier recommends an increase in the overall envelope and “public, equitable and sustainable” funding. For Pier-André Bouchard St-Amant, there would be no perfect solution. Rather, it is a matter of “weighting between the different approaches to ensure that the financing method is the lesser evil”. If we distribute public funds according to the number of students enrolled, this can lead to certain deviations, specifies the author. Depending on the policy in force, we can therefore speak either of “improving accessibility to studies” or of “customer racing”. Changing the way funds are allocated to establishments will also have the effect of changing incentives.
“There will never be a perfect solution,” explains Mr. Bouchard St-Amant. According to him, it is a question of “dosing” several components to “ensure that each of the perverse effects is minimized”. If institutions are fully funded, without any incentives, universities could stop trying to recruit additional students. Furthermore, in the event of a significant increase in enrollment without the subsidy following the number of registrations, the latter could face an increase in costs. Another scenario envisaged by the author would be the financing of establishments based on the number of graduates rather than the number of registrations. However, this could encourage another detrimental consequence, the race to graduate.
On the other hand, the author believes that the introduction of a “modest financing component for graduation” would be a possible solution to explore. This would in fact reduce the incentives that have the effect of encouraging the multiplication of university registrations for financing purposes and would increase concerns related to graduation.
Pier-André Bouchard St-Amant also reports on the “taximeter approach”, inspired by the Danish model and which consists of financing student registration, but giving a bonus depending on the number of courses that students complete up to their term. This approach would have the advantage of encouraging attendance, but could encourage universities to facilitate the graduation of their students or the success of courses, specifies the specialist.
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