Only something like 35% of Quebec students are on strike*, and in a column in today's La Presse, Yves Boivert notes that those on strike are overwhelmingly from the arts and social sciences faculties; those in natural sciences, engineering, medicine, etc have all stayed in class and their session is ending normally. His argument is that since people in the arts and social sciences cannot expect the sort of salaries that students in other faculties will likely get, the tuition increase hurts them more, so it is to be expected that they will be more likely to object.
My first reaction was: "Okay, that makes sense."
My second reaction was: "Hold it, what about compensating differentials?" Increased salaries are only one form in which the returns to education are realised, and it's one that is a relatively recent addition. For centuries, people had been studying philosophy, history and literature for their own sake. Students would take all forms of returns into account when choosing their fields of study, and those at the margin between electrical engineering and English literature would view the combinations of the two sorts of returns as equally balanced in each discipline. Increasing the cost shouldn't change anything.
A complication is that the high-earning programs usually have limited enrollment, so applying marginal analysis here may be problematic.
What do you think?
*For non-Canadians: The Quebec government decided last year to increase tuition fees in Quebec by 75% over 5 years, to a level just under the Canadian average. A student strike has been in progress for 11 weeks or so.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Stephen, I think you mean compensating differentials not compensating variation (which is a technical term used in welfare economics). Please feel free to delete this comment – I’m currently in marking mode.
Corrected, thanks. This is why we have colleagues.
This is a bad comparison. a literature major can’t convert the additional utility they get from a love of their subject into currency to pay their debts. not being able to meet a certain minimal standard of living can’t be compensated by one’s love of literature. The effects of a tuition increase are still asymmetric in reality, even if one theorizes that the utility benefits of each major are equal.
In other news, I think this explanation of social science and art major behavior is rather specious. i suspect that it is more likely the case that these majors invoke a sense of equity or justice that the tuition increase violates that perhaps an electrical engineer hasn’t gleaned from he or she’s studies.
As long as we’re indulging in stereotypes, maybe the people in arts just have really bad analytical skills.
Not really an answer to your question, but wouldn’t Boisvert’s observation be an argument for scaling tuition rates according to faculty?
@Stephen Gordon: it’s funny how utility analysis always comes out against the non-trained analytical abilities. reminds me of a Keynes quote “But the classical school ignored the problem, as a consequence of introducing into their premises conditions which involved its non-existence; with the result of creating a cleavage between the conclusions of economic theory and those of common sense. The extraordinary achievement of the classical theory was to overcome the beliefs of the “natural man” and, at the same time, to be wrong.”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch23.htm
(remember Keynes, confusingly called neoclassical analysis classical).
Maybe it’s my student bias showing, but i think protesting tuition increases is perfectly reasonable.
Stephen, care to dedicate a post to this piece by Michel Girard in La Presse?
http://lapresseaffaires.cyberpresse.ca/opinions/chroniques/michel-girard/201204/02/01-4511564-combien-ca-rapporte-un-diplome.php
If I understand Boisvert correctly, fees in Quebec are even across the board?
He makes the argument that a liberal arts major pays about 40% of the cost of their degree, while a med student pays under 10%, and therefore, even if the med degree cost doubles, it’s still a bargain, particularly since they can expect higher earnings on top of that.
Did I get that right? And is that something that should be discussed as well?
Yes, and there is the idea that people should pay higher tuition in the fields that cost more to teach.
But this is about the idea of compensating differentials: the arts generate non-financial returns as well.
Engineers engineer, doctors heal, advocates advocate. These students are merely acting in accordance with the worldview that they’ve been taught. Is it really necessary to stroke our beards and ponder why people who have spent years studying in fields such as “Gender Equality and Social Justice” are somewhat invested in the notion that socialism is a good idea?
This applies to the occupy movement as well. If you spend $50K on a degree in Post-Colonial Eco-Feminism and -surprise, surprise- nobody will voluntarily give you money for your skills perhaps you too would be a tad angry? Add to that the fact that the skill you’ve learned is not only not in demand but an explicitly resentful worldview and it should surprise nobody why these people are doing what they do. If the only way you know how to serve your fellow man is to shout slogans at them and tell them why they’re immoral, well that’s what you end up doing. There’s only so many government and academia jobs to go around.
Nkmtl: That article explains why it’s a good idea to partially subsidize tuition, because part of the financial gain does come back to the govt in form of increased tax revenues. But most of the financial gain is private.
That analysis has its limits. If striking students behaved in a strictly revenue-maximising behavior, then no students would be protesting in the streets because the impact of one additional protester is virtually nil. I’m of the opinion that students in the social sciences are simply more prone to join social movments.
Given that the grade cutoff for getting into a science program (never mind medicine) is much, much higher than for the arts, I think it’s safe to say that the arts students aren’t all there as a first choice. Maybe the compensating differential is negative, I.e. they wish they were doing something else. Obviously not true in all cases, but certainly true for many. On average, who knows.
It’s easier than that. Engineering and Medicine are professional degrees and therefore have a greater proportion of “right-wing” thinking. It’s not a stereotype, it’s true. Anti-Communists are most frequently found in Engineering while those sympathetic to the Communist Manifesto are found in Arts & Science.
Medicine is different in that it is a graduate degree or a second degree; intake is tightly controlled and the ability to practice easier to predict.
Both lead to the classical, marginalist idea that markets always clear given the ability to find a price. That is the line most often taken in Engineering and Medicine. I am an Electrical Engineering grad.
I wasn’t always a left-winger. In university I was a Business Liberal. I even voted Tory. It wasn’t until I graduated and found out that the market for Electrical Engineers was completely dysfunctional that I became a left-winger. I didn’t purchase an NDP membership until last year.
Though even university I was in favour of tuition caps. The faculty I was in planned a $1,500 tuition increase. Engineering in Ontario is deregulated. But Dalton McGuinty was elected and imposed a tuition freeze that put a halt to that idea. The Dean was incensed. I was joyous. Dalton saved me money which came from my summer jobs and RESP.
If you want to test this take a poll of Canadian university students by faculty and see how they vote. Quebec would be a problem though, politics there cleaves on the Separatist/Federalist axis rather than economic issues.
One thing’s for sure. You’d have to have pathetically low expected future earnings/utility to be willing to blow off a year for the sake of a $1500 tuition hike (gradually over a few years!!!???). Are they planning on working after they graduate? Assuming they get off their asses and get back to school, these kids will be in the top 20% in a few years. What entitles them to disproportionate subsidies? Did we suddenly solve our poverty problems?
First there is collective solidarity, K, and then there is the pathetically low earnings potential of grads in general these days. Trying to get a job is like trying to push spaghetti uphill with your fingers.
Determinant,
If they can’t get jobs when they are done they should, indeed, be livid. They should be livid that universities waste public resources and precious years of their lives while teaching them nothing of productive value. They’ve been scammed. But the $1500 has got nothing to do with it.
The solution is for universities to be paid a fraction of their graduates’ future earnings. Imagine all the great minds suddenly spending their time dreaming up ways of maximizing their students future success. Ah well, never gonna happen.
Striking is a thing students can do?
Not that I’ve ever really had a reason to strike, but the possibility of it had never even occurred to me.
I remember from the news (a while back) high school students in France were protesting over pension entitlement cuts they weren’t going to benefit directly from for many decades. I think applying standard marginal analysis is superficial in these cases.
I don’t know. The differential is different for different people with different interests (LOL! I just reread this and I used “different” 4 times in the same sentence!). For centuries, people have also been studying science and engineering for their own sake. Many inventors were amateur men of leisure. In the case of Leonardo Da Vinci, he was paid to be an artist and did his inventing on the side.
I mean, look at all the stargazers, birdwatchers, airplane enthusiasts and computer programmers out there. If they were actually working in those fields rather than being just amateurs, they would be getting a compensating differential out of it too. As do doctors who save someone’s life, help them walk again, deliver healthy babies, etc.
So I’m not sure that people in Liberal Arts degrees get more of a differential than other subjects. I think it’s a matter of individual preference.
Undoubtedly, the arts & social sciences provide a compensating differential. But those students on strike presumably made their decision assuming little or no change in tuition in the next 3 yrs. Given much higher tuition (though still low in absolute terms), their decision is no longer optimal, and they are frustrated.
However, given that a few hundred $ should not make a big difference in lifetime earnings (net present value, etc.) I suspect the strike might be better explained by David Laibson’s idea of hyperbolic discounting (a relatively small loss of wealth today is blown out of proportion): “Individuals using hyperbolic discounting reveal a strong tendency to make choices that are inconsistent over time—they make choices today that their future self would prefer not to make, despite using the same reasoning. This dynamic inconsistency happens because the value of future rewards is much lower under hyperbolic discounting than under exponential discounting”
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting
But why isn’t that frustration more evenly dispersed? The same increase in costs is being borne by everyone.
Quite aside from stereotypes about student attitudes, the way courses, programs and job markets are structured in engineering, sciences and so on would I think make the consequences of striking more problematic for those students than those in arts and social sciences.
@ Stephen Gordon: The same increase in absolute costs, yes. But not the same increase in costs in terms of the proportion or the cost of teaching the course, and the work time it will take to recoup those costs.
Though in terms of job prospects, if you are in med school, your prospects are much better than if you are in some science courses, so that may not be it either.
I wonder if there is a difference in socio-economic family status that is noticeable between the striking and non-striking disciplines?
Jim: That sounds plausible. The worst-case scenario for students is generally portrayed as losing a session. But if you’re in a program where the job market operates on a fixed 12-month cycle, they’d lose an entire year – and be forced to compete for roughly the same number of positions in a double cohort.
Um, this. Rises in tuition are just another front in a much, much larger conflict, and these students rightly see themselves as being on the front line of this battle. This conflict will affect their lives in many other ways throughout. Every capitulation is a license for the political-economic establishment to apply “standard marginal analysis” to other aspects of life. Consequently, they correctly realize that they need to at least put up some form of resistance to economism, at least to delay the opening of other fronts.
BTW, as a techie who started his post-secondary life in a CS/eng/math type program back in the day, I was never impressed by the apathy-to-right-wingery of techie students. They possessed a certain amount of narrow-mindedness and a pollyanna-ish view of what their future was going to be like compared to those “stupid artsies” who were always demonstrating and striking.
Few, if any, have risen to the commanding heights of capital like they had always believed that they were destined. Most of them (myself included) will spend the rest of their lives as tech peons of some rank or another.
I would have expected economics students to be out there in droves, too. They of all people should understand why student debt is undesirable in itself: it incentivizes students to take conventional jobs with steady income streams in order to pay back their debt. That means less entrepreneurial innovation, and a society that is worse off for it.
Or maybe I’m confusing economics students with b-school students…
DavidN
The french high school students were seemingly even wackier than that. Realistically they will never get those pension (France will go bankrupt long before they can retire) and, in the meantime, they’ll be bled dry paying for the generations ahead of them. At the time I chalked it up to French irrationalism (vive la difference).
I now gather, based on the policies of both socialist and conservative French presidential candidates, that it’s just that conventional economic rules don’t apply to France (or so they believe). Maybe the residue of that belief is what makes Quebec a distinct society.
Determinant, I wait eagerly to hear why you think the market for engineers is dysfunctional?
LOL,
as somebody who has in one of his former lifes (co)organized and financed a student strike (starting and ending in the MINT area :-), I would like to make the follwoing remarks:
– student strikes are nonsense (you are simply not in a position to withhold anything, causing any pain/loss to anybody else)
– student strikes can still be a lot of fun and an organisational experience, largest demonstration in Munich after Hitler :- )
– MINT students have to prove their abilities (like constructing a house, which doesnt break down) in exams, how and when they learned that is their own choice
– nobody ever died from a misconstrued poem, so the more the social studies folks get on each others nerves in strategy discussions, the more fruitful
(as from my “strike” experience : – )
Within that strike, It was also a very worthwhile experience to have a podium discussion with our minister for culture, universities, schools (Wolfgang Wild, our former TU Munich president), organized by the strike commitee / student representation.
And defending freedom of assembly and freedom of speech against the incoming social studies / socialist hordes tryinng to storm the place and drowning out the discussion. Two solid, interlinked chains of technical freedom fighters against the left mob. The bones were nearly breaking, but we had our open and frank discussion.
He did not make any significant promises, but quite frankly told us, well, as the end of the baby boomer bulge, we are numberically a little disadvantaged, and that this will not change in our whole life.
The Mayor of Munich, Kronawitter, told us that he had a lot of citizens in more need than us, and he was right.
Why do I tell this ?
I would be surprised if the expenses for present day students in Canada would not also be a lot larger than 20 or 30 years ago. But please tell me !
Within that strike, It was also a very worthwhile experience to have a podium discussion with our minister for culture, universities, schools (Wolfgang Wild, our former TU Munich president),
organized by the strike commitee / student representation.
And defending freedom of assembly and freedom of speech against the incoming social studies / socialist hordes tryinng to storm the place and drowning out the discussion.
Two solid, interlinked chains of technical freedom fighters against the left mob. The bones were nearly breaking, but we had our open and frank discussion.
He did not make any significant promises, but quite frankly told us, well, as the end of the baby boomer bulge, we are numberically a little disadvantaged,
and that this will not change in our whole life.
The Mayor of Munich, Kronawitter, told us that he had a lot of citizens in more need than us, and he was right.
Why do I tell this ?
I would be surprised if the expenses for present day students in Canada would not also be a lot larger than 20 or 30 years ago.
But please tell me !
Finally, on tuition fees I did change my mind a few years ago, from pro to against.
The reasons are as follows, in the broadest possible stroke:
Yes, univ educations costs, and usually results in a significantly higher income later.
(LOL, I had pretty expensive toys as a Physics PhD, a million a piece and liquid nitrogen on tap 🙂
So, why not let them pay for at least part of it ?
So I thaught, too, until a few years.
Because it is a uncalculable risk, especially in non-MINT, and especially for people coming from a less than rich background. If they make enough money later, we will tax them on that. If there sits a person more or less in a seminar, whats the difference ? To play with the expensive stuff, like above, or human lifes, you have to survive tough exams first.
And I think it is very beneficial for social peace, if one can say:
“Nobody can say, he didn’t have his chance.”
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2012/03/what-is-a-university-president-worth.html#comments
I think, what you are missing in your “marginal analysis” of “compensating differentials” is exactly the Variation / Risk component and the relative utility of the various outcomes. You should have more fincance classes as part of macro economics, and then understand the needs of the poor better : – )
The “only 30% are on strike:”
Depending on the vagaries of various local conditions, strike results vary widely. In my cegep, the vote ( secret over 2 days, supervised by the Association Générsale des étudiants, the Administration and the Professors’s Union), the result was 228-228 with 6 cancelled ballots, So, no strike. It doesn’t mean there is no sympathy here. Far from…
Students in STEM often live in a bubble. They sometimes see designing nuclear bombs as neat technical challenges. Or maybe they understand what happened to those who had thoughts about what they did, like Oppenheimer. Though , once they grow older, they see how corrupt elites can’t make false numbers add up and turn into Sakharov.
Anyway. Students here have seen the abject disfunction of the university system. Why should they for Îlot Voyageur scandal? Why should they pay for the first-class airplanes tickets for the McGill higher-up junket to Brazil?
Funds are fungible. Anyone with a straight head can clearly see, even if they are arts majors, that
their tuition increases are going to pay for $ 1.25 billion environmental clean-up left by the cronies mines and that they will pay for the sweet-heart deals of the Plan Nord as well as the cost overrun currently targeted by the Operation Marteau.
The rhethoric of “we can’t be governed by a minority” (unless they are lobbyists for the minig or construction industry) is thin.
Yesterday, the International Herald tribune
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/obama-will-need-young-voters-to-keep-his-job-even-if-they-dont-have-one/
warned Obama how a growing dissatisfaction among the young couls lead to problems for his reelection. They specifically cited the “french canadian students” ( some long-ago names die slowly…)
Determinant, I wait eagerly to hear why you think the market for engineers is dysfunctional?
Lessee, graduated in Electrical Engineering in 2006. Behind the hundreds of resumes sitting on this there are a few stories. Among them are these gems:
1) Attended a “recruiting night” at a well-known consulting firm in 2007 that wanted 30 people to talk to. They got 600. The floor was swamped. I still got an interview, but they never called back. I followed up, I wanted to work in power lines. I was rejected for not having a “civil” background, this from an electrical engineer who got his civil experience as an oil roughneck in another recession.
2) I was rejected by another consulting firm for a position entitled “Electrical Engineer-in-Training” for having no work experience. I had a degree, but no experience. EIT jobs are usually intended for new grads, or so the PEO says….
3) In summer 2008 I was at an avionics manufacturer of long standing and solid repute. I had worked at a sister plant as a summer student. The job I was interviewing for was a contract position. “All of our engineers are on contract, you will not be an employee. It’s so much cheaper.” No benefits, I was encouraged to incorporate and get deductions by the interview. This is borderline illegal, the CRA has gone after these arrangements. I did not want precarious employment for reasons that do no bear discussing here. Market power, what market power? Pension, benefits? Different planet.
4) Attended another interview three hours from my home in October 2008. I thought it went well. The company’s customers were in Ecuador and Finland, it was a real export company, not exporting to the US. I was told at the end “We like you, we’d like to hire you, but our customers have had their bank loans pulled and they have cancelled their orders. Sorry, there is nothing for you.” They could have told me that on the phone that morning. They gave me gas money, the only company who has ever given me gas money. This was during the height of the financial crisis.
This is why I say trying to get a job is like trying to push spaghetti uphill.
More recently, I lost out on a $55,000 position with the Public Service of Canada, full employee status (pension, benefits, the works) due to a test question translated from French to English that had a calque in English, the English translation was very bad and unclear, the question was composed in French.
On the other hand, the market for bilingual engineers in government is better. I recently submitted a resume to a government research lab in Montreal, the engineering job category requires French and I have taken lessons on this, plus I have decent results from previous interviews that let me bypass one of three tests. The job classification had a Terminable Allowance put on it last year, that means an extra $12,000 to keep people because of recruitment or retention problems. I pray my resume will be “screened in”, as they say in Government job circles.
Have I made the dysfunction clear?
@Determinant
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/04/the-cultures-that-is-europe.html
and link therein, and comments
ever thought about Germany ?
We love engineers.
I’m familiar with the culture difference, I’m not sure it means much. One summer I worked at an avionics plant which had a sister plant in France. There was an exchange engineer there from France, we became good friends. He was doing some tax-deductible experience program and was paid in Euros. The lines to get a job as an Engineer in France were as long as the are here, he wouldn’t have taken it but he had no choice because it “got him in the door”.
Loving engineers isn’t the same as hiring them.
Canadian industry says the same thing about “technical innovation” and “knowledge economy” and “educated workers of the future” but won’t actually pay those workers for that education nor attempt to incorporate them into the workforce.
It’s why baby-boomer worries about a demographic labour shortage are just wrong.
Determinant,
the point I wanted to make, is that Germany is HIRING. Youth unemployment in Bavaria is at 3 %.
You will get around easily with English.
In 2009 French workers took foreign managers of closing factories as hostages, several times. Now Hollande threatens 75% income tax. Investors and Managers don’t forget that. You always pay for such behaviour later. No such nonsense in Germany, but high wages, universal health care, etc. Income distribution most equal, after the Nordics. An open country with 10 neighbours, all without border controls, huge exchanges, not only commercially, a little warmer and more temperate than Canada. I ll have 3 Anglo stuff stores /Cafes within 20 minutes walking distance.
No such nonsense in Germany, but high wages, universal health care, etc. Income distribution most equal, after the Nordics.
But all contingent on permanently running massive net exports to the periphery — something that is unsustainable. If germany was forced to run a balanced current account for, say, 10 years running, it’s economy would collapse. There is something very wrong about the pattern of prices and interest rates in a nation that forces it to permanently be a next exporter just in order to maintain full employment.
sigh
I have a niece who I want to see and an ocean would interfere with that.
I’m also a Type I diabetic (inject needles) and diabetes hates long and especially irregular work hours. The reason I want to go for government work was the regular schedule. That and I am extremely able verbally for an engineer, engineering has lots of math geeks who can barely communicate but I’m not one of them.
Ten years ago Nortel was hiring like mad in Canada; it was a bubble and it burst. The US economy had a real estate bubble and it burst. I have no idea what will happen to Germany but for family reasons I’m staying here.
Lastly, Canada does not benefit from EU rules on immigration; I would have to come as a guest worker to Germany and go through the full process of the German immigration system, I do not get a exception or a break on any of it.
It’s not that Canada doesn’t love engineers, it seems that companies cannot find enough market demand and enough capital to find, create and sustain profitable markets for any length of time.
The 30% appreciation of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar and the US recession did not help Canadian manufacturing at all, we have a recession in manufacturing’s biggest customer and Dutch Disease on top of that.
I posted a few experiences in relation to a specific question. If Jon was being a wind-up merchant I am going to be very angry with him.
@rsj,
this “permanently running massive net exports” is a wide spread myth.
As you rightly say, it is the Current Account, which counts. And the Accumulation of this is the
“net international investment position” Line 2 in the EU scorecard
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/02/14/879781/whos-the-most-imbalanced-of-all-eu-members/
Germany is at 38%, not bad, but nothing dramatic. And it just built up in the last 5 years.
Why ? Because we have traditional a trade surplus, but that was all eaten away by tourism, resulting in a 0 % position in the mid eighties. Went a little bit up until 1990, then was slightly negative after reunification, we sucked in a little money, and the cumulative net position was NEGATIVE as late as 2005
(http://www.slideshare.net/genauer/currencies page 2, just focus on the cum CA curve, the slide was originated for a different purpose, how you can understand that from exchange rates, with some delays, and recently some tax stuff, I dont want to explain here)
Why should Germany be hurt by a situation we lived with for the first 60 years after WWII ? Price are set in the market, and not by committee decisions of some closet communists. The interest rate is set by the ECB, which has by treaty a price stability mandate only, and not the Bundesbank, and how would that change, how much Chinese and other Asians love our cars, and investment machines ?
Wages are decided on by employers and employees (their unions) and not some foreign control freaks, Greek union bosses, or economist professors from other places. The whole notion is ridiculous.
Did we do anything unfair in 2003 – 2005 ? No! We just shortened the length of unemployment payments somewhat, and reduced the marginal tax rate to now 48%. And we made a lot of government services more efficient enabling less gov employees, while maintaining a high service quality.
@ Determinant
How is your Diabetes different in Canada vs Germany? People have this here as well.
As the article mentioned, People in Germany love short and regular working hours here as well.
As an entry level engineer, you start here with a union contract, which in most cases are 35 hours a week, 6 weeks vacation. And in many companies, the amount of overtime is strictly limited (unions prohibit payouts), even if you would want to.
I have here colleagues from all over the world, main-land China, Americans, Malaysians, this can not be that difficult for Canada. According to Goldman Sachs http://www.irisheconomy.ie/GSGEP195.pdf
we are now the only large country without a large financial correction, if we assume that the US still has it in front of them. Germans love stability, prefer to correct early, and quite a number of old american colleagues came here for the same reasons. You pay for this with a little higher taxes, but my neighburs even want to increase them. Sigh.
The German immigration system is actually very sensible and straightforward if you have the good sense to find the job first. If you just take the standard statutory insurance (rather than opt out into the private tier), the diabetes treatment is going to be covered.
As for German competence in English, I think some Germans overestimate how good their English is 🙂
Mandos,
LOL, my active English grades were “passing” : – ). But I also got a test, that says my reading and comprehension skills are good enough for Stanford :- ). I worked and lived for 7 years in the US, without any difficulties, and in a group of 9 engineers from different countries (we even had one male US whitey :- ) the joke was: we all speak a common language: broken English.
Why do engineers use Powerpoint ? Because they can not write a complete sentence :- )
Searching for yourself and sticking with the standard health insurance is definitely good advice.
“Assuming they get off their asses and get back to school, these kids will be in the top 20% in a few years. What entitles them to disproportionate subsidies? Did we suddenly solve our poverty problems?”
That’s where the argument for heavily subsidized tuition has always lost me. Here we have a government program that disproportionately benefits the offspring of today’s well-to-do (there’s no shortage of empirical evidence indicating that, regardless of tuition fees, universities draw disproportionally from the ranks of the top-third of the income distribution), to say nothing of tommorow’s well-to-do (there’s also no shortage of research to the effect that unversity graduates experience signifantly better job market performance than college or high-school graduates). Hard to justify that on any “social justice” grounds that I’ve ever heard of, unless “greed” and “self-interest” are social justice principals. To that extent, the “social justice” merit of universal subsidies for post-secondary education is about the same as the “social justice” merit of accross-the-board tax cuts (i.e., not much).
Mandos may be right (who ever thought that I’d say those words) in that this is about students thinking their part of a broader conflict. Too bad they’re fighting to protect the privileges of the well-to-do…
Of course I’m right. I just have an unfortunate habit of being right prematurely. I need to work on this.
The concept of “well-to-do” is changing. The race-to-the-bottom in wages is starting to affect parts of the top 19%. Just watch. The students know that they won’t be getting the same deal that their parents did, even with their degrees, and they’re right.
OK, this really gets on my nerves. In the past, only a very small percentage of the population was “well-to-do.” Through social reforms and difficult labour strife, and throw in a couple of world wars, we finally got to the point where, at least in Western industrialized countries, we could reasonably call a significant chunk of the population “well-to-do”—in the sense of “has a comfortable life until they lose their jobs, which hopefully they won’t because we gave them job security”.
If we’re not going to subsidize the continued existence of that “well-to-do”, if we aren’t going to support the stability of that emergent class, then what are we planning on doing? Return to the old situation of a very rich 1% and a huge class of (techno)peons?
Well, guess what. That’s exactly what we’re going to be doing. That’s exactly what we are doing. We’ve made that (illusory/ephemeral) “well-to-do” compete with cheap labour in Asia and Mexico, and we’re wondering why the kids are protesting…
And for this some of us are going to begrudge subsidized tuition. Fighting each other while the whole ship sinks.
“The race-to-the-bottom in wages is starting to affect parts of the top 19%.”
Interesting theory, tommorow’s wealthy won’t be as wealthy as todays’s wealthy, so we need to give them more public money – maybe some tax cuts too. Even if true (highly debatable), it still doesn’t make a particularly compelling public policy argument.
Interesting, Mandos arguing in favour of subsidizing the “well-to-do”, well this is a historic morning. Maybe, along the same lines, we should cut the marginal taxes rates for the highest income earners to zero. Won’t that do wonders to promote the “well-to-do” in Canada? Hey, think of all the corporations who would move their head offices to Canada if their CEOs could double their after-tax income.
You know, instead of making silly argument about the need to subsidize the rich, you (and the Quebec student protestors) might make much better arguments about the need to subsidize (and, in fact, to provide greater subsidies for) students from poor backgrounds (through targetted need based subsidies, rather than universal subsidies that accrue predominantly to the children of today’s wealthy) or the need to provide subsidies for graduates who engage in socially valuable, but financially unrewording work (i.e., doctors, teachers or nurses who work in Northern Quebec, etc.) or who otherwise can’t repay their student loans due to illness, misfortune, etc. (i.e., not to tommorow’s rich).
The problem isn’t the Quebec students’ objectives (or, at least, not all of them), it’s that the policy instruments they’re pushing to achieve those objectives are the most inegalitarian and inefficient possible policy instruments. Just because they’re lefties doesn’t neccesarily mean that they have to be stupid about it.