​Why Canada Should Have Free University Tuition, and How it Could

University tuition in Canada, much like the global temperature, has been for the last several years steadily setting record highs only to break them the next year. Between the early 1990s and the 2012-13 school year, the national average for tuition nearly tripled: the 1990-91 average of $1,464 was equal to $2,243 in 2013 dollars, when the average had increased to $6,610.

With tuition rising, students—those who aren't discouraged by the high price of education—are turning more and more to student loans to finance their educations. The average debt load of a Canadian university graduate is now $27,000. Yet, as everyone under 40 knows, a university education is no longer the gateway to a well-paying job that it once was. It's become more like a high school diploma: a base-line entry point into the job market.

David Macdonald, senior economist with the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says that last part might actually be a good thing.

"If you look at the trends in education over a long period of time," he says, "what you see is that, for instance, it used to be that high school had tuition attached to it, and people had to pay to go to high school. At a certain point, once the percentage of people going to high school hit a certain level, it became a service that was just paid for through government coffers as opposed to being paid for through individual tuition."

That's right: the fact that more people are going to university means that it should, and probably eventually will, be funded by the government. In other words, tuition will be free.

Macdonald says that's the way post-secondary education funding is heading globally, though Canada is slower in following that pattern. We have the sixth-highest average undergrad tuition of all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, and that's not even counting the exorbitant fees most universities charge international students.

And free university is not only somewhat common worldwide—tuition-free countries include much of the European Union as well as Sri Lanka, Brazil, and others—it would be easy (economically speaking) to implement here. Recently instituted federal programs like income splitting and the universal child care benefit cost about what free tuition would, so it's really a matter of priorities and political will, according to Macdonald.

So what would implementing free tuition look like? For starters, it would be much more likely to come from the provincial level of government than federal, and not just because free tuition is essentially anathema to the Conservative Party. While it would be possible for the federal government to dramatically increase the amount of money it transfers to provincial governments, it's the provinces that fund education, and the provinces also decide how to spend their federal transfer money. Aside from that, there are dramatic differences in how much tuition costs in each province right now, and that would impact any national program that might, in some far-off leftist utopian future, be considered.

"If you were to create a national program, you'd have to account for the fact that Ontario starts at a much higher level than Quebec does, for instance," said Macdonald.

However, individual provincial governments could decide to increase their funding of universities and mandate that tuition be decreased. And those two would have to go hand in hand.

"Look," Macdonald said, "free tuition could not happen without a substantial increase in government transfers to universities, and we often miss this: that universities, depends on the province obviously, but universities, roughly half of their revenue is being funded by governments. Provincial governments. And then the other portion is split between tuition and other ways they can raise funds, other fees. But … tuition is going up because government transfers are going down."

One argument provinces have put forward as they've continued slashing university funding is that their hands are more or less tied by rising costs in other areas, such as health care, and that the federal government has cut its transfers to the provinces. If we value education as much as we value our health, it would seem to make sense that governments should fund both. For that reason, it's valuable to look at ways both provincial governments and the federal government could institute free tuition: there are multiple ways this could be implemented, meaning even if some provinces are as cash-strapped as they say, free tuition is by no means a lost cause.

There are a few examples for free-tuition advocates to look to. One is Germany, where tuition was slowly introduced (mostly in the western states) throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, there was massive opposition, and each state individually opted to eliminate fees, usually when a left-leaning party was elected. One notable exception is Bavaria, where the conservative party "gave into the mainstream" in the 2013-14 year.

Education in Germany is also funded by the states, so their experience is especially instructive for anyone in Canada looking to fight the rising tide of tuition fees. We can also look to Quebec and Newfoundland for homegrown examples of reducing or slowing the rise of tuition fees.

Newfoundland had one of the highest tuition rates in the country in the late '90s, when the government made a conscious decision to reverse that; while the government hasn't eliminated tuition, it allowed fees to decrease by increasing funding to its (one) university.

In Quebec, as most Canadians well know, there is an active protest culture that fights attempts to increase tuition. This is coupled with high transfers from the provincial government to universities, which allows some of the country's best universities to continue operating while charging some of the lowest tuition.

Elsewhere in Canada, political parties are inclined to favour seniors (who turn out to elections in droves) and middle- to upper-class adults (who pay higher taxes), because their dissatisfaction has tangible results for the ruling party du jour. Quebec's protesting students have that same effect on the government there, but in the rest of Canada, students haven't yet found a way to make politicians care about them.

With all of this evidence about the financial feasibility of free tuition and the obvious benefits to students, who wouldn't be saddled with debt, Macdonald says there's clearly only one reason free tuition isn't in the works today.

"It's not an economic issue: it's purely a political issue as to whether or not this is what we want."

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