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Who Profits?
This Globe and Mail article documents the increasing percentage of the cost of Canadian university students’ education that is being paid by their tuition fees. The tone of the article is that it’s a shame, really, and governments should be paying much more - if not all - of the cost to students.
However, there is another way to look at high tuition fees, as these two articles (here and here) from our archives attest. The bottom line is that when students are paying only a small proportion of the cost of their education, universities devalue them as customers, isolating university administrations from the consequences of their decisions about such things as course offerings, qualify of education, professorial availability, and responsiveness to students’ needs.
Quoting from the article “Students Without Borders”: “The result has been precisely what Adam Smith observed 200 years ago about the difference between Oxford and the University of Glasgow. At the University of Glasgow (where Smith taught), the well-being of the professors depended upon their being able to satisfy the expectations of their students (because the students paid their professors directly). These students were well-served. At Oxbridge, where the professors lived essentially from the endowment of the university rather than from the money freely given by the students in exchange for quality services, the professors were awkward, indifferent, and distant.”
In the one PDF file, called Profitable Universities:
“Frustration with the inadequate performance of higher-education institutions is centuries old. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote: “In general, the richest and best endowed universities have been the slowest in adopting … improvements.” Having attended the particularly heavily-endowed Oxford University, he spoke from bitter experience.
Smith makes almost exactly the same complaint as the 1985 Macdonald Commission, namely that innovative ideas and initiatives tend to come from outside the university sector”
It would be an interesting study, to compared the well endowed Canadian universities such as Toronto, to the smaller universities, on innovation, ideas, initiatives and research. Below is one link, on one small university, on the latest in neuroscience. The implications in 15 years from now, will be life changing if everything pans out.
http://www.canada.com/technology/Canadian+successfully+grows+brain+cells/3341097/story.html