Time to shrink the university

"More will mean worse," the novelist and blowhard Kingsley Amis said of the expansion of universities in the 1960s. Never was that man more right.

Amis was saying that you can have a shot at providing a magnificent education for the few, but when you try to do it for everyone, you're going to have to water down the wine.

I wish he'd been talking about tuition fees when he said more will mean worse. Tuition should be abolished, if only as a way of keeping enrolment down.

But this Amis person was a smelly alcoholic misogynist and professional Angry Old Man, any English graduate will tell you. 

True. But even detestable people have good ideas occasionally and Amis would be sloshing in his grave at how modern education began its calamitous slide.

Even he couldn't have predicted how the notion of degrees for everyone would be ruinous, especially for those it was most aimed at benefiting — the beleaguered young person trying to make his way in the world.

I only raise this contentious subject because something called the Educational Policy Institute (it's from Virginia but has branch plants in Canada and Australia) has just recommended raising university tuition fees 25 per cent.

They say it's a way of coping with the economic crisis, but I call it by its real name: student abuse.

A bill of goods

I won't dwell on the institute itself beyond saying that its website is so clogged with academic jargon as to be incomprehensible. In fairness, I suppose that anyone involved even marginally in the academic world ends up talking this way, but it doesn't raise my confidence that we are beating illiteracy.

Here's the situation. More young people are seeking a university degree while universities have managed their endowments and finances so badly that they find themselves suddenly short of money.

At the same time the world of the highly paid, tenured professor who doesn't actually teach classes has been revealed to all, in particular by the recent strike at York University in Toronto. The whole economic model of the Canadian university is now on the rocks.

At this point, I will speak up for students. They have been sold a bill of goods.

First, students are told that they must have a four-year B.A. to be taken seriously in the job market.

Perhaps. But I do note that in 2003, my home province, Ontario, killed Grade 13, which was free and sent the alleged freeloaders off to universities, which conveniently charge tuition. It's a bunch of tax money sloshing around of course. But it hit those families who now had to pay for that extra year of university really hard.

It's the same as Ottawa cutting the GST from 7 per cent to 5 while the provincial governments download social costs onto the cities and your municipal taxes go up. What you gain on the roundabouts you lose on the swings.

There is actually no such thing as a tax cut in Canada. Three levels of government work full-time at shoving taxation onto another level so someone will get the blame.

It's hard to find a three-year university degree program now, which means that you have to pay that extra $4,000-plus in tuition for that probably unnecessary fourth year at a time in your life when you have no idea what you want to do, much less be.

When you include living expenses and the fact that neither of your parents married a Weston, you take out student loans and end up in serious hock for something that might not even be right for you.

Oasis of entitlements

No provincial government wants to block young people's ambitions. But they do when they hike fees. This is called financial reality. Middle-class families fork out and working-class families build up debt.   The New York Times reports that university students increasingly feel a sense of entitlement. (Could it be the fees?)

If students show up at class and do the assignments, they feel that they deserve at least a B, the Times says. So education becomes not an oasis in which to train a curious mind but an economic exchange.

The Times further reports that in this hard-edged era, students shun the liberal arts. The result: employers now get shamelessly misspelled applications from recent graduates.

Heather's plan

Here's my plan for reshuffling the whole deck of cards that makes up the education mess: abolish tuition so that universities are free.

What would happen? Universities, not tempted to profit by taking as many paying customers as possible, would accept only those students with a realistic chance of success.

Grade inflation would become pointless and dumbing down would end.

A university degree would be a gleaming thing, as opposed to a basic that now has to be topped off with some kind of postgraduate degree to catch anyone's attention.

Class sizes would shrink. Without the tuition cash, all six-figure professors would have to teach classes rather than edit obscure journals read by 12 people who meet yearly in Belgium to discuss which of the Wittgenstein siblings actually slept together.

This would narrow the university degree once again instead of the peony-like expansion that is flinging students into huge debt.

Let's face it, journalism is not a degree subject by itself. Neither is kinesiology or photography or marketing. All these things require one or all of the following: a specific talent, a willingness to train, a genius for when to click on a moment or grasp a national readiness to buy.

Journalism requires a talent to annoy, to be alone in a room of pleasant people and be hated in order to get a better story. It takes a college year or two to learn. (Okay, maybe rat-like cunning is innate.)

These are crafts, not professions, and their graduates will earn money and respect.

Canada could use more crafty people. It could also use more university-educated people who continue to read after they graduate. We need people who are civilized, who think for themselves and are open to everything.

When I look at higher education, it seems that everyone — from professors to teaching assistants to students — is unhappy with his or her lot. May I suggest that the field is overcrowded. It needs to be thinned out.