Now you don’t have to pay for your own education, everyone else will instead. Not by choice, but by force. The NL Gov. has declared they will no longer lend people money for education, but rather give them non-repayable grants, meaning it costs nothing for students to take courses. At least on the provincial level.
Studnets are already only paying a tiny percentage of the actual cost of their degree and everyone else is on the hook for the rest. This is even before loans. I don’t have the exact figures on me, but it’s something like students in NL pay about 20% of the cost of university overall. That apparently wasn’t good enough. The loans students used to take out to cover this 20% will now be paid by the government, or at least a large chunk of it.
This is fundamentally a terrible policy for a number of reasons.
1) It removes the incentive to complete a degree in a timely manner. Not having to pay for one’s education perversely incentives studnets to take forever to complete a degree. Already there are tons of 7th and 8th year students. Many do a few years, don’t completely anything then leave. We are all on the hook to pay for them.
2) People who are hard at work, whether it’s as a minimum wage worker or a high-skilled person, everyone is paying for these kids. When I made minimum wage, huge parts of my check were confiscated by the provincial government. That means minimum wage workers are paying for people to do poetry courses.
3) This is a transfer or money from poor to rich. The vast majority of students come from rich families. The lower classes of society generally do not attend university. This is not because of the price, but rather because of culture. It’s not part of their culture. Statistics bear this out. So they work hard to pay for rich kids to attend university. Who thinks that’s fair?
4) If the university has a tuition freeze, plus the tiny part of tuition students actually pay is now reduced even further, this will simply incentivize the university to expand and increase costs. The government is essentially saying, no matter what your expenses are University, we will subsidize it so that students only have to pay a low fee to attend. This creates a perverse incentive to increase spending. Some question my assertion here, but it’s indisputable. Look at all the expansion that has already happened in recent history at MUN. Now they are building a brand new building for science. Ask any department if they have enough equipment, technology, teaching tools, etc, and they will undoubtedly say no. there are always demands and desires in every department. Giving the university a blank check will only make these dreams come true and cost us all.
There is no such thing as free education! Plus, the people benefitting from the education should pay for it. IF someone does engineering, then graduates and gets a lucrative career under this scheme, shouldn’t I get some return on my investment? If I paid for his education, what do I get from it? I think we should get part of their salary. But we don’t. We pay for their education and they benefit.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/provincial-student-loans-now-replaced-with-grants-in-n-l-1.3177298
