Tuition Freeze up on the mic

Saskatchewan's NDP government will hold the line on taxes and increase spending by $400-million to shorten surgical waiting lists and freeze university tuition in the coming year. Full Article

Holy Shit! I totally did not see that coming. And I even voted for Gavin!

I guess it's a good thing, not having to pay more money next year. There was a lot of talk in the recent USSU campaigns about whether a tuition freeze was a good idea and whether it was the best way to address the issue of skyrocketing tuition. Initially I jumped on board, even going so far as to Photoshop up some supporting propaganda. I remember hearing arguments against the freeze, but they were mostly just like "it's not the best solution" without offering any other one. It reminded me of like, ok you know when you go with your friends to rent a movie, and there's that one friend that shoots down everything you pick, without picking anything themselves? Like you grab Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College and you're like "how about this one?", and that one friend is all "Man, Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College is not the solution. We need to look for other ways to solve our entertainment crisis." And so you go "Well we're here, at the store, and we need to watch a movie tonight. Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College is the best idea so far, so why shouldn't we get it?", and then your friend goes into this rant about how "we should actually be looking at redesigning the living room to make it more accessible" and "what about when the movie ends, what will we do then?" and you totally tune them out and think back to the delicious sub you had for lunch and man are they still talking and why do we even hang out with this person?!

In retrospect, I think my early enthusiasm for the tuition freeze had more to do with my omnipresent desire to Fight The Man than a reasoned, logical stance on the issue. With more time and thought, however, I've since decided that while I support many of the values upheld by a freeze (e.g. government should keep public higher education a priority), I think the real problem lies in what I call the University of Saskatchewan's "Identity Crisis".

See, I often hear that although the University is a public institution, it's also a business (a "pubinstness", if you will). What does this mean for students? I believe it produces a phenomenon known as the "worst of both worlds" syndrome. Let's break it down!

Public Institution	Business
Automatically gets money from the government	Must earn money from customers
Doesn't have to worry about stuff like profit, competition or product demand	Constant fear of getting smacked down by the Invisible Hand of Capitalism
Prices, salaries regulated by the government	Can set whatever prices and salaries it wants to
Has responsibility to serve public good (e.g. health, safety, education)	Only responsibility is to get lots of money
Etc, etc, etc...

Ok so that's fine, you pick one column or the other and live with the pros and cons. But! The U of S has somehow managed to scam a 'custom deal', where it's like they went down the list and picked the best of each column. I imagine this results in conversations like the following:

"We're a public institution, we need to serve the public with projects like the Synchrotron!"
"But sir, how can we afford projects like that?"
"We're a business, we can just crank up our prices!"
"But sir, that will reduce our customer base and decrease our income."
"We're a public institution, so who cares? We get money from the government!
"But sir, now the government is decreasing its funding, and we're losing money."
"We're a business, so we'll have to cut costs. Goodbye liberal arts!

As you can see, although it must be great for them to avoid the downsides to both running a business and operating a public institution simultaneously, we students pretty much get the shaft. I know that the U of S likes to proclaim itself a "world-class institution" and all, but that kind of world-class talk is hard to swallow when I have to walk around buckets catching roof leaks on my way to a classroom with big shitty holes in the ceiling (Physics 165, for those keeping score at home). I know I'm in Arts & Science and we pay the least in tuition, but come on, new roof tiles like that only cost ten dollars (I should know; I had to buy three of them after the original Very Last Rez Party).

It's nice to finally catch up to the rest of the country on the freeze issue though. We're what, the eighth province to regulate tuition now? Jeez even Newfoundland and Labrador beat us to it and last time I checked, they weren't exactly swimming in money. To recap, Thumbs-Up to us not paying more money, Thumbs-Down to it only lasting one year and to the U of S continuing to run its sloppy, sloppy show, budget-wise.

Ryan, you seem pretty passionate about post-secondary education for a guy who doesn't do assignments and never goes to class. Besides, don't you believe that the North American system of public education is a vast monstrosity whose sole purpose is to brainwash and lobotomize children in order to support our consumer culture with compliant employees, a guaranteed and dependent population and a predictable business environment encompassed by a rigid, caste-like social hierarchy of haves and have-nots?

In a word, yes. But that's a subject for another post.