[I've got a special guest on the blog today. Please welcome the author of More Money Than Brains:Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right. Great title, isn't it? If you're interested in winning a copy, CBC Books is running a contest on Twitter all week. All you have to do is tweet a 140-character (or less) book review using the hashtag #cbc140.]
Photo credit: greatislander from Flickr
By Laura Penny
I am East Coast by birth and by choice. I grew up in Sydney, moved to Halifax for my BA at King’s and then returned after grad school in London, Ontari-ari-ari-o and Buffalo, New York. One of the reasons why I returned to Halifax is that it has beaucoup de universities. Moreover, the majority of them are sensibly located in the downtown core, where they help keep the embattled ecosystem of the city centre alive-ish.
Western, and my SUNY campus, were much further from what remained of their respective downtowns, and this is one of the factors that aided and abetted their decline. Buffalo was a particularly sad husk of its former self, its downtown so doornail-dead you could almost see tumbleweeds in front of the ex-banks and zombie storefronts.
Halifax’s downtown is, admittedly, not in great shape, but it would be far, far worse without the kids, the drunk kids, the donair-scarfing kids, redistributing their parentbucks, student loan cheddar and part-time wages. The universities are an important part of the local economy, but they also help keep the city walkable, livable and relatively civilized, for all the South Enders might bitch about the noise and occasional puke splotches on their pricey lawns.
The province has never treated the universities like they oughta. Instead of looking at them as an asset, as one of the few consistently successful industries in the province, we seem to regard them as a cash suck, a way to transfer tax dollars from hardworking everyday Nova Scotians to uppity professors who wouldn’t know a day’s work if it bit them on the arse.
This attitude—which what More Money Than Brains is about, btw—is only exacerbated by hard times. The province is waaay broke. The province is oldifying at an alarming rate. An NDP government has less leeway to be spendy than any other party, as the populace is quick to cry kommie-nist and invoke the dread spectre of Bob Rae.
The NDP will, as many of you know, release the results of Dr. Tim O’ Neill’s inquiry into the state of our universities this June. And I am sore afeared, suspecting cuts at least and amalgamation, an idea too dumb to die, at worst.
Our universities do have one real, structural problem. And as soon as flesh people once again rule our fair land, the provincial government needs to rectify it. It is a tax problem. We don’t have too many universities. We have too few taxpayers. We don’t ding the droves of Torontonian or Left-Coast students for being interprovincial in the same way that we overcharge international students…and I don’t think we should.
In short: the feds need to make sure the dollars are going where the students are. We need to make sure they keep coming here, invite more and encourage more of them to stay.
So my belated, delusionally optimistic advice to Tim O’ Neill is this: INVEST. Hose yer precious nerd gardens with cash. Turning this sleepy city by the sea into one of North America’s premier post-secondary destinations—totally doable for less than all the breaks for fly-by-night call centres—is an investment that will pay off for decades to come, with bonuses that go beyond the purely economic.
Just think, maybe someday some environmental studies geek at Dal’s new College of Sustainability will come up with an effective way to clean up all that impending ugly in the tar sands. And then we can charge those Albertan bastards an arm and a leg for it! What could be more spitefully delicious for Bluenosers young and old, for the greens and the merely green-with-envy?
Education is always the poor, red-headed stepchild of the budget, forever less than health care, the absolute priority for the olds that vote. And the fact that Nova Scotia governments routinely schedule elections as soon as those pesky come-from-away kids skedaddle for the summer says much more than my crabby, over-educated ass can about how much the government really values education and those who choose to pursue it here.
Author of the Canadian bestseller Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the year), Laura Penny has a PhD in Comparative Literature, a MA in Theory and Criticism and a BA in Contemporary Studies and English. She has worked as a bookstore clerk, a student activist, a union organizer, a university instructor and her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Saturday Night, and Toronto Life. She lives in Halifax where she teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University.
Kimberly Walsh is a social media and online community manager. You can follow her on Twitter @AliasGrace.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with a lot of what you say, Laura, but all sides are complicit in driving up the price of tuition. I don’t think the administrators and Board of Governors (and Senates) are blameless in this situation.
Growing up in Nova Scotia I thought tuition was deliberately set so that you could live at home, work four months at minimum wage and afford to go to university!
In the 60s and 70s you had administrators hold the line on tuition and tell the government “well, fine, don’t give us the money, I am going to have to shut down the law school” or whatever. Those Presidents, those BoGs fought hard to keep tuition low. Something broke in the 1990s, when we were undergrads, and no one had the balls to fight for us. Remember how tuition doubled while we were in school? Good times, good times. To this day I laugh at the Dal Alumni folks when they call asking for money! Not a chance!
Now universities continue to grow, expand, build more and more residences and halls ‘o learning, spending money to increase capacity when the demographics are really crystal clear: there are going to be fewer and fewer students over the next twenty years, at least!
I agree wholeheartedly – invest a small amounts in universities and you can have truly internationally leading institutions. From research to fine art, the foundations are there, but to build it they need cash.
Anyway, maybe government and the BoGs will face facts, we don’t need new buildings, we need lower tuition, for both reasons you outline, but so people don’t spend the first 15 years of their working life paying off a student loan, instead of starting lives, having kids, establishing a home.
I’m not bitter. heh.
Hi all,
Universities in Nova Scotia are somewhat like the auto plants are (were?) to Ontario. Only here in Nova Scotia we’re cranking out supposedly educated young people ready to take on the world. But as of late I haven’t seen any revolutions! But we will need one soon within out post-secondary system in Nova Scotia.
What is the purpose of all these learning institutions in Nova Scotia? Are they just relics from our religious history that later grew into secular institutions that we can’t seem to change and they sail along like large expensive cruise ships in the night; or are there some significant things happening on-board, on their campuses, that have both short-term and long-term benefits, not only for students, but for Nova Scotian communities and citizens/taxpayers alike that support them?
Maybe its a communications problem, but there are lots of mixed messages happening, lots of spin and institutional (self) preservation crap going on. One does have to wonder about concrete value. For example, why does ‘education’ in the 21st century come with the burden of such large debt loads for university students, (while by the way, many academics moan about their drop in their institutional pension funds!)? Why do many young people drop out of their first year of post-secondary schooling? Many universities don’t like to talk about that very much, but first year dropout rates range on campuses range from 25%-30% and more. But they got that non-refundable tuition fee right? . Kind of makes me wonder about the large disconnect that also continues between public schools and post-secondary. That’s a whole other issue. And than there’s post-graduation. For most universities, when it comes to most graduating students it’s out of sight, out of mind (unless you’re a donating Alumnus). The universities don’t see it as their job to find students employment. Maybe it isn’t, but you’d think they’d like to track the employment results of their graduates. It’s not all about getting a job, but lets get real and look at that mounting debt. I say that as a student once, as well as a parent who’s had his share of co-signing the line of credit!
Where am I going with this? Many Nova Scotians are beginning to ask how much their prepared to fund, via their tax dollars, a system that is getting way too expensive for all involved except for those who like the status quo. Its complex and not easy to resolve. But one thing is clear, a million people that are rapidly aging and declining in numbers, trying to support eleven post-secondary institutions is not on. It’s just getting way too expensive for everyone!
I get it that education is more than a ‘dollar value; that universities (and community colleges) inject significant economic, social and cultural vitality into the communities and surrounding areas where they’re situated. But serious questions and new ideas need to be developed sooner rather than later about new operational models, as well as measureable contributions to all Nova Scotian communities to justify such costs (and educating students who are exported to other provinces doesn’t cut it!).
Lastly, where are all the intelligentsia when it comes to these challenges? Or do they like it just the way it is? If so, some may find their institutions are going to go the way of some auto plants in Ontario!
Best regards,
Leo
hey, Waye!
Nice to hear from you…and I totally agree that internal university politix is also responsible for NS having the priciest tuition in Canada. If I started talking about this in a more granular way, I might never stop/have to bite down hard on my angry stick.
I also agree with you on overcapacity. Lamentably–and I talk about this a bit in the book–moneyed donors are always happy to slap their names on a shiny new building. But nobody wants to pay for eons of deferred maitenance, or for new teaching staff. It’s kind of amazing how one can go from a moldy 1957 classroom to a state of the art, needlessly high-tech one on the same damn campus.
The one thing I disagree with you on is that there will be fewer students. Yes, there will be fewer NS students…but we’ve always drawn a significant portion of our students from away, because we offer a good and varied thing. Education is one of the few industries that grows–for grim reasons, admittedly–in recessionary times. I really think we oughta be casting our net way wider. For example, we should totally be poaching students from the New England lib arts colleges, since I think we offer a more affordable, more rigorous education than many of them. And we are also an easy sell to parents: I’ve met plenty of U.S./international students who were pretty delighted by how friendly and relatively bullet-free our burg is.
It would be great if the province/universities could actually work together on this instead of, you know, doing the usual NS things: squandering tax bucks on short-term make-work BS projects that evaporate when the gov. changes and protecting their respective academic fiefs.
This is one of the many reasons why I have a mortal horror of amalgamation, a process that would only kick the universities into major fief protection mode, at the expense of students. I’ve taught or taken classes at almost all of the unis here, and there are very significant differences between them, the kind of differences admins/beancounters don’t see, but students certainly do. Municipal amalgamations haven’t worked as promised…and from a labour/contracts perspective, ‘twould be a pricey, counterproductive nightmare.
Of course, amalgamation is still a long shot, worst-case scenario. But there will almost certainly be cuts, and not the sorta cuts I think are a good idea. For example, I’d love to see them bring back mandatory retirement, so we can replace six-figure deadwood with hungry, hard-working young profs. The job market has been shit for a long time, so it’s an opportune time to pick up talented people–the real lifeblood of any uni–at on-sale prices.
Hope all is well with you and Marnie and the wee ones…who are probably not so wee anymore!