This Quebec university tuition thing

Welcome, out-of-province students! Don't come! Pay more money!

Concordia University in Montreal.

I managed to get on the phone with Graham Carr earlier this week. He’s the president of Concordia University, so he’s been busy.

“We've been spending a lot of time trying to run numbers, develop scenarios, assess what the likely impact of this could be for us,” he said.

“This,” in the above sentence, was a new change to Quebec university tuition-fee policy that includes roughly doubling tuition for Canadian students from outside Quebec. It’s complex and has not always been well reported, and we’re going to get into the weeds a bit on the details. But you know who has a lot of Canadian students from outside Quebec? Concordia University, one of Montreal’s two English-language universities with McGill.

“There's a budgetary aspect to it,” Carr said. “There's a sort of cultural-identity aspect to this, as well, which is probably going to take longer to assess. And obviously, there's been a certain amount, and I think a growing amount, of media attention. So I've been responding to that…. And then there's a government relations part of this as well.”

Here’s what’s changing. In autumn of 2024, new undergraduate students in any Quebec university whose families reside outside Quebec will have to pay about $17,000 tuition, an increase from $9,000 today.

The change doesn’t apply only to Concordia, McGill and Bishop’s, but to every university in Quebec. It doesn’t apply to students who are already enrolled this year; my family has a young friend of the family from Ottawa who’s studying at McGill, and he’ll finish his degree at the same lower fee scale. And it doesn’t apply to graduate students in research-oriented disciplines like biology and chemistry.

But most students from outside Quebec who are studying in Quebec universities are studying at McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s. The new policy will either discourage them from studying in Quebec, or it will send their money to universities where they didn’t choose to study.

Since it announced the policy last Friday, premier François Legault’s government has said both: that the tuition change will discourage out-of-province students, while making more of their money available to mostly-francophone institutions where, again, they didn’t choose to study.

Concordia’s Graham Carr is left to box with these rhetorical ghosts.

“The minister and other spokesmen and advocates for this policy have been saying for some time now that students coming from the rest of Canada to Quebec get a great deal because they pay less than they would be paying at home,” Carr said. “And then they study here, and then they leave.

“The problem with that [claim] is, it's possibly the case that they pay less in a limited number of fields, like law and medicine. But the overwhelming majority of Rest-of-Canada students are in sciences, social sciences, and in fine arts in our case. And it is demonstrable — it's even demonstrable in Quebec government documents — that the fees they pay to come to Quebec are higher than the national average and higher than what they would normally pay in their home province.”

Even before the new policy, out-of-province students pay higher tuition in Quebec than students from Quebec. And the university where they study doesn’t keep the extra money; it’s distributed among all universities in the province.

“In the case of a student from the rest of Canada, that student pays on average $9,000. Of that $9,000, on the current funding formula, we keep $3,000. Six thousand is remitted to the government of Quebec for redistribution in the French réseau. And you know what? That policy has been in effect for a while, nobody's complaining about that policy. We continue to get a government grant to support those Rest-of-Canada students. And the fact that we are able to recruit in those markets where Quebec doesn't, nevertheless brings a benefit to other universities.

“What's being proposed, though, is to double that tuition, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 or $18,000, to increase the amount of money which would be redistributed in the francophone network. But the reality is that there will be less money to redistribute, because there’ll be fewer students coming! The price point becomes excessive. You're way off-line with the national market. And great as Concordia is, or great as McGill or Bishop’s is, there are other good options in Canada, that would be more economical at that point.”

“So I think the second assumption that the government has gotten wrong here is that somehow this will generate additional income that can be shared with the francophone universities. And our assessment is that it's actually going to generate less than what they're currently getting.”

There’s a second change to tuition policy that will probably have even more effect on the English-language universities’ revenues, but that has received less coverage because it has to do with international students, rather than Canadian students from outside Quebec. This component of the new policy would also redistribute more money from international students’ higher tuition payments throughout the province’s university network. In effect, universities that can’t attract international students would get a bonus payment from universities that can.

Guess who has the highest international-student cohort? If you guessed McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s, you win. As usual, Alex Usher explains the intricacies of the policy change as well as anyone can. His best guess is that the international-student change alone will cost Concordia somewhere north of $100 million, perhaps 12% of the university’s total income. This would be a devastating gut punch.

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I want to say here, quite clearly, that the objective of protecting the French language in Quebec is one I take seriously. I think it’s a better world because there’s a large society in North America that thinks, works and lives mostly in French. This requires, and to my mind justifies, policies that aren’t always compatible with economic efficiency or with what would happen if governments did nothing to protect French.

(The internet is a massive new challenge to anyone trying to preserve French. In a recent week, according to this Le Devoir story, the most-listened-to songs in French on music streaming services in Quebec topped out at 113th and 157th place. Language rules are far more strict on the radio, but who listens to the radio?)

It would be great if the policies and their champions could offer even a shred of coherence. Is the goal to discourage anglophone students or to take their money as they arrive? To François Legault, the magic of the tuition change is that it will achieve both effects, as well as no effect at all. “It’s nothing against anglophones,” he said on Tuesday, and then, confusingly, “It is for the survival of French.”

The problem with anglophone students is that they leave, he said: “Taxpayers cannot continue subsidizing the education of students from outside Quebec who have no intention of staying,” The Gazette story I linked here paraphrases him.

The other problem with anglophone students is that they don’t leave, he added. “And yes, when I look at the number of anglophone students in Quebec, it threatens the survival of French.”

Outsiders studying in Quebec, you see, are damning if they do, damning if they don’t, to coin a phrase. If they leave, they’ve absconded with the money of proper Quebecers. If they stay, they’re threatening the survival of French. Not that Legault has anything against these people who threaten French, which he’s sworn to protect. In fact, the minister responsible for the policy told the CBC’s Matt Gallaway she expects the out-of-province students to keep coming.

This is a game of Three-Justification Monte. If you come you’re a menace because one day you’ll leave, unless you don’t, so the government has to take more of your money, which won’t discourage you from coming, although thank God you’re going to stop coming, but you’re welcome to come! You blight.

This is utterly incoherent. Which means Legault is managing his higher-education policy about as well as he’s managing transit policy around Quebec City. Which is another long story I’ll have to entertain you with someday. It features weeping cabinet ministers who aren’t even anglophone!

The transit megaproject in Quebec City and the tuition policy in, mostly, Montreal are not connected merely by a rhetorical flight of fancy on my part. They have two other things in common: Legault has not begun to make even a minimal case that his various policies are justified or would have the desired effect, if indeed he can manage to pick a single desired effect. I enjoy covering Legault because he thinks about important issues and wants to implement consequential policies to achieve his ends. But lately he’s basically winging it all the time.

Running a modern university network is hard. Quebec is hardly the only province that has not covered itself in glory lately in its management of its universities. And I have a lot of sympathy for the fact that, precisely because successive Quebec governments have sought to protect French in a sea of English, they can’t do what institutions around the world do to attract international students: educate them in English. Here’s the home page for the Institut d’Etudes politiques de Paris. I promise you it didn’t look like this when I studied there 30 years ago.

It read my browser preferences and gave me the English version of the website, but I can tell you that Sciences Po, as the school is commonly called, makes it possible and even easy to get a valuable education in English. That sure wasn’t the case when I was a kid. And it’s why Sciences Po attracts far more international students than it used to.

What’s possible in France — opening up a great big English-education shop — is ruled out in most of Quebec. Which means those universities are less attractive to international students, and Canadian students from outside Quebec.

So the best cure for their funding problems is to keep the English-education shops running and shake them down. This is distasteful work, so one must pretend one is doing the opposite. In the news release announcing the new tuition policy last week, Legault’s ministers Pascale Déry and François Roberge wrote:

• Between 2019 and 2022, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s collected about $282 million in extra revenue from international-student fees out of $407 million for the entire Quebec university system.

• In comparison, the 10 francophone establishments of the Université du Québec network shared only $46.9 million of this revenue in the same period.

Read that quickly, and it sounds like the English-language universities are massively over-financed. Except the money the ministers mention here doesn’t come from Quebec government coffers, it comes “from international-student fees.” So the Université de Québec campuses absolutely need McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s to keep collecting extra fees from international students. And now from Nova Scotians and Manitobans. It just needs to ensure those universities don’t keep most of that money.

This is the solution that occurred to the guy whose goose was laying golden eggs. It turned out badly for the goose, and then badly for the guy. How long can Montreal thrive if two of its four universities have suction cups strapped to their teats by a government that can’t even explain to itself why it’s doing that? I hope to ask the question sometime to Éric Girard, who happens to be Legault’s finance minister.

Girard gave a widely-noted speech a couple of weeks ago at which he said Legault is obsessed with closing the gap in economic performance between Quebec and Ontario. He got an economist friend to crunch the numbers, and what he found was that small-town and rural Quebec isn’t showing worse economic performance than small-town and rural Ontario. The difference is in the metropolises. Quoting from the Gazette story I just linked:

“The problem is that the express train between (Toronto’s) Union Station and Pearson Airport will be ready 10 years before the Réseau Express Métropolitain goes to Trudeau airport,” Girard said. “The problem is that in the global ranking of universities, the University of Toronto is now ranked ahead of McGill. It wasn’t like that before. And of course, the foundation for Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children raises more money than the Ste-Justine Hospital foundation. So eliminating the wealth gap with Ontario is a huge challenge. We need our companies to make a difference.”

Added Girard: “Things are going well in Montreal, but we can do better.”

Does Legault’s finance minister think the gap between Montreal and Toronto will close faster if more of those threatening university students wind up in Toronto and fewer in Montreal? I’m sure we could have an interesting chat about that. Girard studied at McGill, after all; his English is as good as my French.