Education: good for your health

University students returning to class this week are facing an average 7.4 per cent increase in their tuition costs. This rise in tuition fees will almost certainly mean a reduction in accessibility to post-secondary schooling — especially for those from poor and working class families — which, in turn, will have significant detrimental health effects. In fact, declining university accessibility may contribute to reductions in Canadians' life expectancy by contributing to economic inequality.

At a time when educational attainment is increasingly vital to people's economic opportunities and income levels, this is a disconcerting trend. Nor does it bode well for Canada's economic advancement and its political process, both of which thrive on a well-educated electorate.

So while commentators explain that tuition increases are understandable since governments with the choice of education or health spending have to choose health, a growing body of evidence shows that countries with lower levels of economic inequality have higher life expectancies.

A study reported by The Financial Times noted that in a comparison between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates. According to the report, rich Americans, for instance, are healthier on average than poor Americans, as measured by life expectancy. “But,” the report goes on, “although the U.S. is a much richer country than, say, Greece, Americans on average have a lower life expectancy than Greeks. More income, it seems, gives you a health advantage with respect to your fellow citizens, but not with respect to people living in other countries.”

The report concludes that it would not be surprising if even the wealthiest Americans paid a personal price for their nation's inequality. “People tend to be healthier when three conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel in control in their work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts. Economically unequal societies tend to do poorly in all three respects; they tend to be characterized by big status differences, by big differences in people's sense of control and by low levels of civic participation.”

Health is intimately connected to people's psychological state. And economic inequality — a large and growing income gap — harms people's psychological state. More equitable access to education should lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is good for everyone's health.

Instead of further widening the gap between the educational opportunities of the poorer and richer, governments should reinvest in post-secondary education.

This would be agreeable to most Canadians. A recent study of public opinion in the four westernmost provinces concluded that 57.1 per cent of respondents said improving the post-secondary education system was important — 40 per cent more than those who said lowering taxes was important.

In Canada, government spending on education dropped precipitously during the 1990s. Coinciding with this drop, undergraduate tuition has climbed by 175 per cent since 1990, with the Consumer Price Index rising by only 30 per cent. And between 1992 and 2002, tuition fees for medicine and dentistry increased by 201 per cent and 248 per cent respectively.

Today, adjusted for inflation, tuition and incidental fees are at their highest recorded level ever, more than six times what they were in 1914.

Loans and bursary programs have not kept pace with rising tuition. The Liberal government's Millennium Scholarship Fund, set up in 1998 to help deal with the rapidly growing problem of student debt, is woefully inadequate. The Canadian Federation of Students estimates that only eight per cent of the 750,000 students in need of financial assistance every year receive it through the program. Provinces such as Ontario and Nova Scotia are simply using the scholarship money to fund their provincial loan forgiveness programs, to which students were already entitled prior to the Millennium Fund.

Throughout the 1980s there was no significant difference in post-secondary participation rates between those from the lowest socio-economic status and middle class Canadians. However, throughout the 1990s a gap began to develop. A recent Statistics Canada report found that by 1998 students from families in the highest income group were 2.5 times more likely to attend university than were those from the lowest family income group.

Other countries have already concluded that education is fundamental to society's economic, social and political development. The U.S. government has been gradually increasing its share of GDP allocated to education to a point where it is now greater than Canadaâe(TM)s. Ireland and Wales recently joined most of the rest of Europe and eliminated tuition fees.

Canada needs to do the same, not only for our economic well-being, but also for our health.

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