Governments must step up on university funding

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/10/2024 (382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Universities are a public good.

Universities not only provide advantages and benefits to individual students who complete their degrees and move into careers, but they offer boons to society more generally. They are incubators of innovation and research, places of critical thinking and inquiry, social venues for events and community.

At my home institution, the University of Winnipeg, this multifaceted and public role is clear: we are one of the biggest drivers of people at the west end of downtown, with close to 10,000 people coming to campus throughout the fall and winter academic year. The university is open to the public, metaphorically and literally: no other venue in the downtown hosts as many free and public events.

Beyond these social and cultural benefits, universities, through their graduates, contribute financially to the city, province, and country. No other credential is as closely tied to upward socioeconomic mobility as a university degree. Across the decades of Statistics Canada data, university degrees clearly align with increased income, and, therefore, increased tax dollars.

Many readers will have nodded along to this overview, many will have attended Manitoba’s excellent universities, attended events on campus as students or since, used recreation facilities, sent their children to programs like MiniU at the University of Manitoba, and benefited from the technological and other scholarly achievements of Manitoba’s universities. Indeed, universities have broad and deep public support: the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) just published the results of a poll that showed 87 per cent of Canadians remember their college or university experience as “very valuable” or “somewhat valuable.”

The same CAUT poll showed that 65 per cent of Canadians trust university professors, in contrast to a mere 24per cent who trust politicians.

It is incredible, therefore, that governments across Canada, regardless of party and regrettably here in Manitoba, have reduced their investment in post-secondary education.

Taking the University of Winnipeg as an example, the news is bleak and should concern Manitobans who are students, alumni, or parents of current or future students.

The highest point of government operating grants for the University of Winnipeg in the last 13 years was in 2016, at the end of the last NDP government, when the government operating grant accounted for just over 63 per vent of the budget.

By 2024, however, this has changed dramatically to a smidgen over 53 per cent, with student tuition now making up 41 per cent of the budget versus only 32 per cent in 2016. This is a huge shift of the burden of post-secondary funding onto the backs of students and their families in less than a decade.

While such a focus on individual support might be expected from a Progressive Conservative government (and indeed, the PCs are to blame in part for years of austerity), it’s unfortunate that in the first year of their term, the NDP has not chosen to reinvest substantially in universities as a public good and in students and their families. The first NDP budget reduced the government operating grant’s share of the University of Winnipeg budget and at the same time failed to address ongoing funding issues in any other way.

There are essentially two ways to fund universities in Canada: government grants and tuition dollars. Over the past 30 years in Canada, universities have used international student tuition to balance the books since international students pay three- or four-times domestic tuition depending on the program and institution.

Indeed, governments encouraged this approach even as they slashed operating grants and transfer payments across the country. Now, of course, the federal government has changed its tune in response to political attacks from the right (and international students find themselves as targets unfairly), but neither level of government has addressed the funding gap that international tuition has filled for decades.

In Manitoba, the current government wants to have its cake and eat it too. It has kept grants at or below inflation and reduced possible increases to domestic tuition.

They haven’t, however, addressed the looming funding crisis that international student enrolment drops will bring without concurrent public investments in universities. We don’t, unfortunately, have to guess at where this contradictory policy leads.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford cut and then froze tuition, but he refused to increase grants. Now, with international student caps implemented, universities across Ontario, even old and well-endowed institutions, are facing crises. What we’ve seen in Ontario is dramatic: massive cuts that will result in graduate education becoming less accessible to students; cuts to entire programs and departments across the province that will deprive students of choosing their program of study.

The solutions to funding problems are actually quite simple, and, given the miniscule fraction of the Manitoba provincial budget given over to universities, they’re also affordable. Maybe more importantly to politicians, funding for universities has broad public support.

Indeed, most Canadians think universities should be publicly funded and affordable.

Universities like the University of Winnipeg could make up the funding gap from international enrolment drops and begin to have a more sustainable budget for a fraction of the money the government has spent on the provincial gas tax cut.

We need governments at all levels — but especially the provincial government who controls operating grants and regulates tuition — to step up: to turn back to funding the public goods that make our society prosper, to turn the page on conservative austerity, and look to universities as one of the most important institutions that provide compounded social, cultural, and fiscal benefits to the city, province, and country.

Peter J. Miller is president of the University of Winnipeg Faculty Association.