On October 13, the Legault government announced new rules for financing universities, with a view, says the Prime Minister, to restoring linguistic equity between them.
However, a month earlier, the rector of the University of Montreal, Daniel Jutras, had published in The duty a surprising text. He affirmed that the university funding formula was “not unfair” and did not create “arbitrary discrimination between universities”. It is worth, we believe, returning to these assertions in order to shed light on the current debate on university funding.
The inequity of funding per student
In his text, Mr. Jutras manages to deny the underfinancing of French-speaking universities by a simple method: confusing the part with the whole, he only retains one of the variables of the overall funding portfolio of universities, and ignores their others. sources of income.
For example, if we look at the operating subsidy from Quebec, in 2017-2018 English-speaking universities had $5,040 per EETP (full-time equivalent student), while French-speaking universities obtained $5,002, almost equal amounts. If we consider this source of income exclusively, there would therefore be no discrimination based on language. However, for funds coming from Ottawa, these amounts are $2663 per EETP for Anglophones and $1430 per EETP for Francophones.
As for tuition fees, the same year, English-speaking establishments received $3,500 per EETP; French speakers, around $1,300. The same goes for private donations, sales of products and services, foundation income, and even for capital funds paid by Quebec (English-speaking universities, for example, received sums 56% higher than those which are invested in French-speaking universities in 2019-2020).
Taking into account all sources of funding, English-speaking universities had $16,095 per EETP and French-speaking universities had only $12,507, a difference of $3,588 per student (or 29%). Note that the economist Pierre Fortin arrived at comparable results and demonstrated that the University of Montreal was underfunded (per student, on average, for the year 2018-2019) by 46% relative to McGill and by 20 % relative to Concordia.
Rector Jutras therefore categorically denies underfunding, which nevertheless hits his institution hard.
Why should we consider all sources of financing in order to paint an overall picture of financing equity? Firstly, because it is the overall financial flow which determines the conditions of study. Secondly, because revenues other than the operating fund of Quebec serve as accounting leverage to set up real estate expansion projects, which then leads to an increase in the clientele and therefore in the sums collected by the financing fund or the rights of schooling.
The case of the donation of a large part of the former Royal Victoria Hospital to McGill in order to accelerate the expansion of the university on the most beautiful land in downtown Montreal is enlightening; Quebec chose McGill, because only it apparently had the financial backbone strong enough to operate the site. (This argument was made before we learned that Quebec was going to give $620 million to renovate the site, in addition to the buildings and land…)
Why is this so? Because McGill collects huge sums of money from Ottawa and international students, through which it plans financial packages to then collect additional sums in capital funds, operating funds and tuition fees. “Other sources” of funding therefore add lubricant to the virtuous wheel of increases in clienteles and funding based on enrollment, a wheel that turns faster and faster for universities teaching in English.
Institutional completeness
If net underfunding based on language, per student, is around 29% in Quebec, the story does not end there.
To really influence linguistic dynamics and ensure that English-speaking universities stop acting as centers of anglicization, French must have a weight, at the university level, proportionate to the relative demographic weight of French speakers in Quebec. That is to say, it is necessary to aim for “institutional completeness”, that is to say that French-speaking universities should collect 90% of the total funds in Quebec. As this share of financing is currently around 70%, we are very far from the mark.
In 2017-2018, English-speaking universities received 38.3% of funds from Ottawa, or 4.7 times their demographic weight in Quebec. Regarding tuition fees, the same year, English-speaking establishments received $438.9 million, which represents 5.6 times their demographic weight.
We can estimate that the total missing amount due to French-speaking universities to achieve institutional completeness was, for the reference year 2017-2018, $1,466 million. Which was then equivalent to 20.1% of all university revenues in Quebec.
To the “microscopic” injustice affecting students at the individual level is therefore added the “macroscopic” injustice of institutional incompleteness for French-speaking universities. To achieve real equity, we must act on these two levels. From this point of view, the Quiet Revolution, which was supposed to bring French Quebec to the level of the English-speaking community in education, experienced a failure on these two levels.
The measures announced on October 13 by Quebec on tuition fees constitute only a first, timid step in restoring true fairness. But stopping along the way would only condone the downgrading that threatens Quebec’s French-speaking universities.