Is McGill in Quebec?
Legault's tuition-fee policies raise a fundamental question
Today’s post starts with detail and ends with some big questions.
Like most university administrators, Fabrice Labeau works to project an air of calm professionalism when talking with a reporter. But Labeau has been working on McGill University’s response to the Quebec government’s ever-shifting tuition policies. So by Tuesday, when I caught up with him, he was sounding just a little on edge.
“We looked at what we thought would satisfy the government,” Labeau told me during an interview via Zoom. Answering that question was a challenge, because it’s not at all clear the government knows what will satisfy it.
As I wrote two months ago when Premier François Legault’s higher-education minister announced that Canadian students from outside Quebec would see their undergraduate tuition fees double, the government’s justifications were mutually contradictory. Legault wanted the out-of-province students, who overwhelmingly attend Quebec’s three English-language universities, to pay more of the costs of their education, so the money saved could be diverted to the rest of the province’s universities. But he also wanted there to be fewer out-of-province students. And he didn’t like how they leave after they get their degree. But he wished they wouldn’t come in the first place.
(I interviewed Graham Carr, the principal of neighbouring Concordia University, about this mess in November for my podcast. It still makes useful background listening.)
Labeau is McGill’s Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning). He and his colleagues discerned two broad concerns, which they sought to address in turn. First, that the English-language universities distract from Quebec’s goals of protecting the French language. So in early November the universities met Legault to propose that they bring 40% of their students up to an intermediate level of French proficiency. In return, they hoped Legault would cancel the huge tuition hikes.
Legault’s minister, Pascale Déry, tweeted that it was a good meeting and that the tuition policy wouldn’t change. Incidentally, imagine trying to run an institution with 39,000 students and a billion-dollar budget and counting yourself lucky if you can glean news about the government’s plans for next year from a ministerial tweet.
So the English-language universities (McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s) tried to address the other apparent concern: that the out-of-province students were getting a spectacular deal when they came to Quebec. Here, Déry would reliably, every time, cherry-pick her examples: at a flat $9,000 tuition fee for all academic disciplines, it’s true that a McGill law degree is a steal compared to UofT ($33,000) or even Dalhousie ($14,000). But of course most students aren’t in law schools, and the overwhelming majority of McGill undergrads already pay more to go there than they would in the rest of the country.
In early December, the English-language universities made a new proposal: three-tiered tuition, set at the status-quo $9,000 for the large majority of students who enrol in arts, education and science; $14,000 for engineering; $20,000 for medicine, pharmacy and law. The universities were actually suggesting Quebec charge more than it planned, for the students whose career income prospects would be highest.
Déry and Legault simply ignored this proposal.
One week ago, Quebec announced its updated plan. Tuitions for all those students from Alberta and New Brunswick and so on would increase to $12,000 instead of $17,000. Bishop’s, in the gorgeous Eastern Townships countryside 90 minutes’ drive from Montreal, would be exempted from the tuition hike as long as its out-of-province student population doesn’t grow.
But all three universities will be required to bring 80% of their students up to intermediate French, double the 40% the universities suggested. And if they can’t show they’ve done that, tuition fees will go right back up to the originally planned $17,000.
Since this seems to be Quebec’s final decision, the English-language universities stopped measuring their words. McGill’s new principal, Deep Saini, said the new policies were “far worse than those announced on Oct. 13 — worse for Quebec, worse for its universities, worse for Quebec businesses who need talent, and worse for McGill.” This was “a targeted attack on institutions that have been part of Quebec and that have contributed to Quebec for hundreds of years,” an “incoherent” policy based on “impressions and emotions, rather than evidence-based decision-making.”
So I called Labeau to ask about the details of the new policy’s effect, and to get some idea of McGill’s response.