Tuition fees must rise Editorial

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2010 (5175 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Greg Selinger’s cabinet colleagues are getting their budgets in line, paring back to the necessities. This is pre-emptive work on cutting a deficit, forecast at $592 million this year, in advance of the 2010/11 spending plan. But the call on the provincial treasury extends far beyond the services of core government, which limits the effect of cost-cutting efforts.

To that point, Manitoba’s universities and colleges have been told increases to their provincial operating grants will be lower for the next two years. The schools were disappointed last year when those grants, in total, increased by 5.4 per cent. It was far below what all had said was needed just to keep up with the status quo. The picture improved just a bit when the government lifted a tuition freeze, allowing schools to hike the fees by 4.5 per cent.

Times are tougher. Nothing to date has been said, however, about the tuition cap for 2010/11, but this is the logical source of revenue with some elasticity.

The decade-long freeze was a misguided provincial policy that curried favour with students and parents, but put Manitoba’s universities and colleges on a starvation diet. The U of M has data to prove the point: It is as much as 12 per cent — or $56 million — below the average operating revenues available to other large, doctoral universities in Canada, it claims.

Pulling apart the numbers, government operating grants have kept relatively apace with Canadian counterparts; the U of M’s tuition fees, however, are far lower and that makes up the bulk of the disparity. For example, the University of Saskatchewan’s tuition for a full-time general arts student is almost $2,000 higher. If U of M were charging the same $5,300 in tuition, it would generate $48 million more in revenue, president David Barnard says.

The University of Winnipeg has not done the same number-crunching but it notes its full-time arts tuition is more than $1,000 lower than that at the University of Regina.

The obvious solution is complicated by Mr. Selinger’s promise to rebate tuition to students while they study. An impulsive and risky pledge, it yokes the public treasury to any hike in tuition.

Mr. Selinger will have to revisit his promise. Manitoba students have had it easy for too long, for no real purpose other than political — low tuition has not opened the post-secondary doors to low-income families. While the tuition gap cannot be closed suddenly, fees have got to rise, prudently but surely.