[note: this conversation is a response to provincial Conservative policy as published on their website: http://ontariopc.uberflip.com/i/108917 ]
Hi Mr. Leone and Mr. Hudak,
I’m curious about the position on student loans represented by your party’s most recent “white paper”, as well as the comments which you made during today’s press release. While I do not presently wish to address the idiocy of tying provincial education dollars directly to employment statistics, even though this proposal is as unfeasible logistically and it is intellectually abhorrent (how does one judge what a student’s “field” is relative to their later employment; I don’t know of too many professional philosophers or literary critics outside of academia, for example, but I have noticed that many of the corporate executives in the Fortune 500 list have graduate and undergraduate degrees in such fields), the purpose of this present letter is to discuss with you the most obvious problem with your party’s proposal.
Indexing student loans to academic achievement has a superficial logic to it, granted. However, such a system of funding does not allow a student who does poorly in one area to transfer into another more suited to their aptitude. I can give as example in this regard British politician whom I once met who described failing out of the science program in his university. He transferred to history and political science at another university, and proceeded to finish a doctorate several years later before entering into federal politics in Britain. Under the Tory proposal to index student finances to academic performance, this individual would not have graduated from university and would not currently be a sitting MP in the British Parliament.
What about a student who has issues with mental or physical health affecting their grades? What about people with developmental difficulties? Or, to take a personal example, what if a student endures trauma or grief due to the death of a loved one? What if they endure physical and/or emotional abuse at home during the course of their studies? What if they’re just irresponsible for a moment during their youth (kids start post-secondary school at 17 now) and learn the lessons of responsibility as they mature and learn from their more ambitious peers? In short, there is a very long list of reasons why a student’s performance at school may be negatively affected at any given moment. It is my view, shared by many experts in the field of post-secondary education, that a functional educational system is flexible enough to cope with the individualities presented by all students, not simply those who do not struggle with paying for or performing in school during their studies. How dare your party be so callous as to assume that a student’s academic performance be exemplary and if it is not they are lazy and should be cut off from funding. What you are saying, Mr. Leone, is that students from affluent families are able to make mistakes, and students from poor families do not get to enjoy such privileges. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that your proposal will result in “better” students, and neither of you, Mr. Hudak and Mr. Leone, have the expertise or credibility to suggest otherwise. More importantly, since student loans are a for-profit system of student financing greatly beneficial to the profitability of several Canadian banks, the idea that student loans are a great expense on the taxpayers of this province is a hyperbolic inaccuracy. The majority of student loans are paid back to the banks, and the government benefits from increased tax revenue from a more advanced and productive workforce. All empirical data points to education being a good investment for the state.
“Market discipline”, as you call it, is neither practical nor desirable, and should not be expected of our students. Education and knowledge are more important for the advancement of the human condition than is the pursuit of money for the sake of itself. Perhaps now is the time to discuss market discipline in relation to the marketplace, and here we can talk about why the world economy went into the toilet in 2008...
As a student from a relatively poor end of the middle class who has struggled very hard to enjoy the privilege of working on a doctorate in a “good” program at a “good” school, I cannot emphasize this point (and pun) enough: Tory educational policy is an act of class warfare.
Regards,
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Thank you for your e-mail.
Nothing in the white paper precludes this British MP from doing what he did. It's actually encouraged. Put it this way, the major issue that you have raised in this white paper is a paragraph which follows another paragraph that talks about minimizing debt. I think we need to talk about the 1 in 5 students who do not finish university. They may have really struggled in first year, probably failed a couple courses, and came back for year 2 or 3, only then to drop out. This student may then go to college to finish a 2 or 3 year university diploma, meaning he or she spent an extra 1 or 2 or 3 years getting an education than needed. That's 1 or 2 or 3 more years of student debt. That's 1 or 2 or 3 years of government investment in this student's education. So, what we're suggesting is that we encourage the student to do what the MP has done and find a different program sooner. That pretty well falls in line with our thinking. Look at our colleges strategy as providing this kind of direction.
We propose that institutions have greater control in managing financial aid. In every one of the cases you outline, such exemptions are already provided by institutions, so you're really grasping at straws. We never gave a minimum grade/mark, and we never said we want to be punitive (i.e. taking loans away from people). You assume, incorrectly, what our intent is on this issue by posing every hypothetical that comes to mind. We are a compassionate party. Inside the framework we have set, we could encourage the use of incentives to encourage student improvement. For example, for those we may want to incent students to achieve higher by forgiving a portion of their loans for student success. These options are on the table, and we don't specify because we want to encourage a discussion.
You are actually making assumptions about my assumptions, and they are incorrect. My focus is to improve student success not to focus on who can make "mistakes". This is entirely your hyperbole. I actually believe I do have "expertise" and "credibility." I have a PhD in Comparative Public Policy. I hope that when you get your PhD, you begin to appreciate the enormity of your achievement. You may not agree with what I have said in this white paper, and you're free to do that. However, to suggest that I have no expertise or credibility is an ad hominem fallacy in argument.
Finally, you conclude with your position on how this is class warfare. I'm offended by this, because my parents were immigrants who came to this country with just the shirts on their backs. My father worked hard to provide for my family in a blue collar job. He and my mom are proud to have a son who ended up with a PhD. I know your parents will take as much pride in your success as mine did for what I was able to accomplish. I wish you the best of luck.
All the best,
Rob
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Mr. Leone,
It is clear that we have different interpretations of Tory policy as published on the Conservative website. My bias against the line of thinking which this white paper presents centres upon the idea of higher education being solely for the benefit of particular fields of education most easily indexed to employability records, while other fields are deemed “wasteful” by government bureaucrats who do not understand the correlation between education and employment. To restate a point from my last email to you, in what manner is Philosophy or Ethics directly quantifiable in terms of monetary gain or employability? Surely, you do not wish to challenge the value of philosophy to the human condition or the experience of humanity, for you would undoubtedly be wrong. When examining student employment post graduation, the Tory white paper cites the 2012 Auditor General’s report which indicates that student employment outcomes are not always tied to their field of study in university or college. My worry is that you interpret such data as being a negative outcome of the educational system. Many contemporary studies on pedagogy and labour indicate that a breadth of experience and education is required for the lateral strategic and logistical thought processes which define successful business strategies in the 21st century. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous email to you, if you examine the education backgrounds of many corporate leaders, it is evident that many of them were trained in university or college programs which are ostensively of little use to their executive careers. And yet there they are: corporate managers with English or geography degrees. I myself was employed in the music industry for several years after having received an MA in English. Surely, my employment would have fallen outside of my field of study, despite my continual utilisation of “English degree” skills at a “Music degree or MBA” job. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 1, 5, and 10 in the Tory white paper explicitly details the need to tailor fields of study to fields of employment.
University professors are expected to perform more duties than simply teach classes in their field, and the typical 40-40-20 split mentioned in the Tory white paper reflects this fact. However, the paper also suggests that universities should employ full-time, teaching only professors. While such a suggestion makes sense in a superficial manner, it ignores the fundamental reality of university education: the continual expansion and refinement of human intellectual activity. The knowledge being taught by a full-time teaching professor would likely be obsolete after a few years, and they would then need to retrain themselves, likely at the expense of the province. Please note this important fact: the process of research is precisely the manner by which university professors update and refine the information they are teaching. In effect, it is research which keeps the education system “up-to-date”. Furthermore, it is a school’s research profile which determines its standing in the global academic community, with the consequence of a higher research profile attracting a greater number and “quality” of students. Like you, I too am concerned that universities are increasingly relying on low-paid, part-time, contract teaching from newly-minted doctoral students. Not only is the education of students compromised by poorly-paid and overstressed part-time faculty, but arguably this situation is poor for the economy as a whole, as good wage, full-time jobs are replaced by temporary and expendable contract labourers. You know what would improve this situation however? Releasing more provincial and federal funds to universities to hire more full-time professors. In terms of their employment practices, universities are acting like fast food chains in terms of hiring low-paid, disposable employees because of the same “market diligence” championed by conservative thinkers for decades. The end result of such thinking is that student education is increasingly compromised by the myopic constraints of free market capitalism, with the outcome of students treated more like consumers with desires than as students with needs. Look at the American University of Phoenix as the logical conclusion of this process: an online university which tailors its programs to the “needs” of students (which, unsurprisingly, are defined as contingent with profitability for the school’s stakeholders) and which produce students with worthless, made-up degrees that are not recognised as being useful by most employers; the unskilled and untrained students of the University of Phoenix are for all intents and purposes the unqualified remnants of education dictated by free market principles. Such is the consequence of a university which employs teachers who do not research anything and whose outcomes are “employability”. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 6, 9, and 10 in the Tory white papers explicitly discuss the need for online, free market, non-research focus for university education.
Here’s a proposal. The corporate and business communities in Canada benefit greatly from having access to a large pool of highly-educated and healthy workers, and yet the corporate and business communities have seen their taxes decline significantly since the mid-1990s. Corporations hire employees who have skills with computers and technology, language, and mathematics, and these skills are deployed by the corporation for profitable gain. However, the business and corporate communities are increasingly paying a lower share of the costs of educating their employees. Presently, corporations, which are granted the rights of “personhood” under Canadian and international jurisprudence, do not pay taxes at anywhere near the same percentage of their income as do individual Canadians. Such corporate taxation policies have been championed by Conservatives as well as the Liberals as encouraging job growth. However, according to recent findings by the Bank of Canada, corporations and large businesses in Canada have not invested the money saved from lower taxation and no jobs have been produced as a result, and this accumulation of “dead money” (in the words of the Financial Post’s Gordon Isfeld) is in fact harming the Canadian economy. Since it is not likely that major corporations will cease operations if their taxation levels are restored to the rates extant in the mid 1990s, when they were also profitable entities, I propose that significant investments be made in higher education be financed by increasing the corporate tax rate back to previous levels. Again, all of this increased revenue from corporate taxation would be earmarked for investment in education, which is of direct benefit to corporate and business employers. The trend of public subsidies for private profits has to end; using the same “free market”, fiscally-conservative logic behind most other Tory policies, it’s time to end the socialisation of expense and the privatisation of profit and “charge” employers for the education received by their employees.
I know full well that your party follows its own ideological vectors regardless of the empirical data which may contradict such positions. As such, it is not likely that Conservative policy will lead the charge, as it were, to a better system of higher education in Ontario. There is one thing on which we can agree, however: like you, I believe that perhaps 15-20 percent of the students enrolled in university programs would be better served by study at a college. Having taught at Mohawk and Sheridan, as well as Columbia International College, I can state that the commonly-held mantra of “go to university, unless you are dumb then try college” is both incorrect and elitist nonsense. Indeed, many students are avoiding the trades because of unfounded class prejudices against such employment. However, I must point out that the reason that universities have lowered their standards and are significantly increasing undergraduate enrollment numbers has to do with cuts to provincial and federal funding which force schools to rely increasingly on tuition dollars from students to pay for their operation. To restate my position above, academic standards would be improved by funding schools directly by increasing the rate for corporate taxation.
PS: Path 11, in which you call for student unions to be made accountable, is a red herring, as student union expenses are less than 1% of a student’s tuition. Even if that 1% truly reflects waste which could be recovered through policies of oversight and accountability, which it does not, the amount of money saved by students (note: not the government; no tax dollars are spent on student union activities) would be negligible.
Regards,
>>>
Dear Quintin,
Thanks for the time you took to respond to my e-mail and the discussion paper. The purpose of doing these discussion papers is to encourage debate. While we don't' agree on many issues, it's nice to know there are a couple things in which we can agree. Thank you for participating!
All the best,
Rob
