In the Globe and Mail (which seems to be having web authentication issues lately), Stephen Gordon points out that lowering university tuition costs won’t actually address the problem it’s supposed to:
There is a well-documented correlation between family income and university participation rates: people from the top quarter of the income distribution are roughly twice as likely to go to university as those from the bottom quarter. An implication of this imbalance is that the population of people who are attending university is far from being representative of the population as a whole: university students from the top quartile outnumber those from the bottom by a factor of 2 to 1. This imbalance is both the problem and the reason why the problem is so hard to solve.
Reducing tuition fees will do very little to close the gap between university participation rates in people from the higher and lower ends of the income distribution. The direct costs of university — tuition and books — account for only a quarter of the total costs (source), and financial considerations explain roughly 12 per cent of the gap between PSE participation rates of youths from upper- and lower-income households.
[. . .]
A far cheaper, more equitable and more effective way of increasing access to universities is to concentrate public funds on providing support to students in financial need (this group also includes those who have debt problems). But these measures would benefit only a minority of students who are already going to university, while tuition cuts would benefit all students.
Student lobby groups such as the CFS have a mandate to represent the interests of all current students, and this group does not include those who might have gone to university if more financial support were available. They have little interest in targeted programs — see, for example, the CFS’ reaction to the Ontario government’s tuition rebate for students from families earning less than $160,000/year.
