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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.”