It was bound to happen.
After almost three months, Margaret Wente finally got wind of this kerfuffle in Quebec about students refusing to buy into the whole “but it’s just the cost of a cappuccino a day!” rationale for why a 75 per cent increase in tuition fees over five (or 82 per cent over seven) years is, like, the way of the future. Or something.
Margaret isn’t feeling much love for those Quebec students who “pay the lowest tuition fees in all of North America”….and still will, she claims, even with the increase legislated by the provincial Liberals.
I’m not sure how that adds up: thanks to a hefty rollback, current fees in Newfoundland-Labrador are only slightly higher than Quebec’s, and the recently legislated increase will put Quebec’s fees above Manitoba’s and slightly below the national average in five or seven years. But hey — why bother with math when you can sit back and just make your point with a cappuccino reference?
There’s no doubt that her journalistic slant plays well with the “enough with all this talk of the growing gap — you’re blocking traffic and now my coffee’s getting cold. Doesn’t your liberal arts education teach you about real world priorities?” crowd.
Yes, Quebec students pay the lowest university fees in Canada, and CEGEPs are publicly funded and therefore very affordable. It’s in part why Quebec has the highest post-secondary education participation rate in the country: because their students can attend university or CEGEP without pocketing a $37,000 debt load along with their diploma upon graduation.
I’m a little surprised that Margaret didn’t delve into the “analysis” that was trotted out by several of her fellow strike critics over the past few days claiming that in spite of lower fees, Quebec students do not attend university in numbers as great as their ROC counterparts (therefore lower fees would actually reduce university participation rates).
Not only did this research neglect to mention the hugely popular publicly funded CEGEPs that allow thousands of Quebecers to graduate with a diploma before choosing (or not) to attend university. (Quebec students have different options after graduating high school, designed to suit a range of educational needs and choices.) It also didn’t differentiate between Quebec’s three-year bachelor degrees and the four-year degrees outside of Quebec which, if not adequately taken into consideration, would artificially reduce Quebec’s participation rate compared to that of other provinces.
But that didn’t seem to occur to the media outlets that used these “findings” as an opportunity to scoff at the three Quebec student unions for troubling the public with discussions of affordability, inequality, access and (gasp!) social justice.
These deeper issues like, you know, democracy and stuff clearly get under Margaret’s skin (I’m curious: where did she manage to find a “sneer” font on her keyboard for words like “social justice”?).
But she feels for these kids — she calls them the baristas of the future — she really does: all those “projectile-hurling,” “sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts, and victim-studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless.” (Victim studies? Has she been fine-tuning her rhetoric in Arizona?) After all, they’ve been sold a bill of goods by their professors who have been deluding them into believing their “cause” (whatever that may be) is just, and “that the education they’re getting will equip them to thrive and prosper in the world.”
Wait… the proof that it’s all about useless areas of study… I know it’s around here somewhere. Oh yes — accounting students aren’t protesting. Neither are engineering students. She says.
I mean, seriously? Did you catch all the creativity at the protests? The originality of the signs? The puppets, the dancing, the songs, the lipdubs, the passionate debate about class and public responsibility? What self-respecting real-world focused student would be caught dead within a 10-block radius of all that touchy-feely analysis and appreciation for rhythm and design? Participation in the strike is sustained (stabilizing at close to 200,000 by some counts) and new students are joining the protest, but maybe it’s simply too time-consuming to look into who’s actually supporting this mass action anyway.
Ironically, those protesting students seem to have picked up some fairly articulate arguments and analysis — even some pretty savvy IT and communications skills (apparently through osmosis or divine intervention, since it’s not likely they could have honed any of this in labs or lecture halls studying subject areas that have nothing to do with the “real world”). It’s unfortunate that some commentators ignore the substance of their arguments, preferring instead to pontificate about why kids today should stop complaining, accept the world that’s being left for them to make do with… and hey! get off my damn lawn.
But then, that’s the warm and fuzzy comfort of cappuccino logic. Did you want extra foam with that, Ms. Wente?
This article was first posted on Behind the Numbers.
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